Remembering to forget

If the construction of memory is a core theoretical issue in historical and cultural analyses, understanding how personal memories give way to forgetfulness and selective attention is a damn confusing area.

"We'll remember," we swear, but we happen to forget. Why is that? Just because our brain cells get renewed after certain periods of time, and we emerge as newer forgetful humans after that? I don't think the answer is that simple. But it's the question that worries me further. What accounts for my selective remembering and unremembering?

And then, and without recourse to the Jungian collective subconscious, which is of course extremely stupid, my memory is never about the past alone and, at least in its guise as commemoration, never private and solely individualised. There are contestations, skirmishes, memorials and commemorations about the present as well as about the past, and since commemoration tends to make past and present as stiff and as a freely-flowing linear continuity, competing moral-aesthetic orders of the present make up my choices of refering back. "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future," as Orwell put it in another context. But let me reframe the question once again: Do we chose to remember? Do we chose to forget? Even when we've emphatically claimed to do otherwise?