Wild wastes of forgetfulness

Too much dark, not enough light, often leads us inwards, into those dark regions of the mind where memory resides. Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday evening) echoed the mood of the month by taking us on a journey back into that hinterland of darkness where names begin to disappear, places can no longer be recognised, the fridge becomes the oven, and words become jumbled so that the Radio 3 announcer no longer makes sense.

What happens to us when the memory begins to go? Is it just a loss of self, of personality? After all, most of us have no memory at all of those first three years of life, when everything is astoundingly new and fresh and challenging? Should we instead embrace amnesia as a way of extending the boundaries of self, as a way of becoming?

Peter Blegvad’s Use It or Lose It (produced by Iain Chambers) took us on a radiophonic journey through the wild wastes of forgetfulness, while also suggesting what memory loss means for both the victim and those who stand by looking on. Through tracing the gradual slide into an absence of mind of an imaginary GP, Dr Charles Proctor (played by Blegvad himself), and interweaving Proctor’s experiences with a soundscape of distorted noises, snatches of dialogue, musical clips, as if twiddling the knob on an old-fashioned valve wireless, we, too, experienced those feelings of distortion, of not quite tuning in, of things sliding into one another and losing their real meaning, of panicky misunderstandings and ‘presque-vu’ — the sensation of being on the brink of a discovery. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue.’ ‘What is?’ ‘I don’t know…Something momentous.’