My discovery that I had invented a memory, that for years had believed something to be true that wasn’t, provided an insight into the nature of creativity, poetry in particular, and its relation to memory. A scene from a film I had watched in college became a recurring memory, especially vivid when I was writing poems.  I believed the scene to be from Pier Pasolini’s Medea (1969), which I remember seeing as an undergraduate at Berkeley years before at a film festival celebrating Greek actors and directors.

The scene as I remembered it: Medea has betrayed her father by giving Jason the Golden Fleece. She has fled to her old nurse’s hut to hide from a mob of townspeople (the alert reader will notice this does not follow the version of Euripides or Apollonius). Medea, played by Maria Callas in Pasolini’s film and in my memory, stands like a tall column of black gauze in a tin-roofed hut, holding her ears in distress as the sound of rocks pelting the roof builds to a crescendo. Steeling herself, she raises her head, tightens her jaw, goes to the door and arrogantly, defiantly, flings it open. The townspeople stand, arms folded, impassive, in a rocky, whittled-down landscape, and it is understood that they have, in fact, thrown no rocks, and the sounds she heard were a creation of her own guilty mind. This image of the mind’s ability to delude its own host with imaginary sounds is created by the film’s sound track, which “deludes” the audience by allowing it to overhear the sounds imagined in the character’s fearful and guilty mind. This artful scene seems to convey a powerful psychological insight as well as achieve an interesting aesthetic manipulation of the audience’s perspective.

Marble relief fragment with the head of Medea, Roman, 1st–2nd century CE, Metropolitan Museum Archive 

However, this scene does not exist in Pasolini’s film, which I discovered when I re-viewed it. This is a daring and difficult film; it begins with a (rather moth-eaten) centaur, Chiron, delivering a long lecture to infant Jason and proceeds to a human sacrifice carried out in mute ritual and heavy drumbeats. Medea betrays her father by stealing the Golden Fleece and protects herself from capture by killing her brother. As she races out of town in a horse-drawn cart with the fleece and Jason, she slows her father’s pursuit by throwing out pieces of her brother’s dismembered body along the way, which forces him to stop and collect each piece. Later, when Jason loses interest in her, she kills his new wife, father-in-law, and notoriously, her own children. At no point does she hide or cower, in a hut or anywhere else. I was perplexed by this failure of my memory but assumed I had remembered the wrong film.

It then occurred to me that my scene might be in Michael Cacoyannis’ Trojan Women (1971) or in his Zorba the Greek (1964), both of which were shown at the same festival. When I re-viewed Trojan Women, I discovered that Helen (played by Irine Pappas) is, in fact, stoned while taking a bath in a hut-like structure. The Greeks treat her differently than the other women after the fall of Troy, and they hate her for the privileges she receives as Menelaos’ wife. Her character, like Pasolini’s Medea, is overbearing and arrogant but is not the conscience-troubled woman in my memory. Also, Trojan Women is not in black and white, as my memory is, but in color. Zorba, however, is in black and white and has a character who resembles my “Medea” – the widow (also played by Pappas) whose first scene is inside a tavern that resembles the hut I remember. The village men, all so in love, or in lust, with her, the film proposes, that they hate her, have stolen her goat and taunt her when she comes to get it. Her kohl-lined eyes flash a mixture of fear and defiance. She retrieves the goat, with Alan Bates’ help, and survives precariously in this environment until she is stoned in a churchyard, in bright sun, and then murdered. It became obvious that my memory scene drew details and motifs from all three films, possibly others. The character I created is powerful and treacherous, yet self-doubting, and, when threatened, finally assertive. Further, she is always identified as “Medea” in my mind.

On reflection, I noticed also that my reading of the scene’s metaphoric content – that one can be as fooled by her own mind as an audience can be by a film soundtrack – is recapitulated in the fact of my having invented it without realizing it. In other words, my belief that it is a memory is the same as my “Medea’s” belief that people are throwing rocks when, in fact, they are not. Instead, they are passively disapproving, and her images of their hostile thoughts become rocks hitting the roof over her head. In my version of the scene, Medea feels guilty, and, in psychological terms, her mind projects this guilt into an imagined stoning. However, Pasolini’s character Medea is confident and overbearing and does not resemble my creation. So, I wondered, who is this “Medea” who is strong enough to betray her father, a king, yet feels guilty and flees to her nurse for consolation?

These three films would seem to constellate the elements, both visual and emotional, of my memory. Pappas in Zorba most resembled the memory character, dressed in black, with luminous white skin, as does the film’s grainy black and white, austere exteriors. Pasolini’s Medea is in vibrant, unusual color; Trojan Women is in muted, desert tones. I was forced to concede after viewing these films that my “memory,” vividly real as it still seems, was a memory distortion, possibly a dream I now remembered as actual. We can, after all, only speak of the memory of dreams, as Jorge Luis Borges observes in his lecture “Nightmares.”1  But when did I dream or make up this scene? How long had it been part of my memory? It feels like I am remembering it from when I saw the film years ago; it exists in mind as concretely as any memory of childhood. Did I forget an unacknowledged trigger? Was it like forgetting the inspiration of a poem?

I sought help to understand what might be going on from both psychologists and poets. The classic, and still authoritative, psychology study is Frederic Bartlett’s 1932 monograph, Remembering,2 which concludes that memories are imaginative reconstructions of past events affected as much by the rememberer’s attitude, expectation of what should have happened, and general knowledge as by what really did happen. Daniel Schacter’s more recent study, Searching for Memory,3 demonstrates that even when a person’s memory of some event seems to be mistaken, he or she may still be accurately remembering what was encoded into memory but that it may simply not be detailed enough to make, for example, an accurate witness identification. Schacter points out in this context that Freud changed his mind about the veracity of his patients’ memories of sexual trauma, concluding that they were confabulations and that our conscious recollections are always distorted by our wishes, desires, and unconscious conflicts – the core of psychoanalysis.

The ease with which our minds distort memory is demonstrated in a test presented by Schacter. Readers are invited to consider the following list:  candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste, tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart, cake, eat, pie.  Then, they are to cover the list  and try to remember if the following three words, taste, point, sweet,  appeared in the list and how confident they are they did or not.

Readers who remember “sweet” are among the 80 to 90 % of those taking this test who experience memory distortion based on inference. If the general population is this susceptible to memory distortion, how much more susceptible might poets be? Schacter cites research which “discovered that instructions to imagine a fictitious event increase the likelihood that people will come up with a false memory” and that “people who attain high test scores on scales that measure vividness of imagery, responsiveness to suggestions, and lapses in attention and memory are especially likely to create false memories.”4 Hmmm. Perhaps all fiction is a “false memory.” Poet Billy Collins, for example, has defined a poem as “the memory of something that never happened.”5

The interplay of memory and imagination in the poetic process is raised by Borges, in another lecture, “Poetry,” when he quotes literary critic A.C. Bradley’s comment that “one of the effects of poetry is that it gives us the impression not of discovering something new but of remembering something we have forgotten.” Summarizing this point, Borges observes that “when we read a good poem we imagine that we too have could have written it; that the poem already existed within us.”6  By this token, my false memory has the same quality of authenticity that a good poem does. In a sense, my memory of this invented scene is a poem my mind has presented to me. It is an aesthetic experience I serve myself for consideration, consolation, inspiration, whatever my psyche intends. Its truth is not the issue; its images are. As Coleridge observes, “A poem is that immediate object of pleasure, not truth.”7  This game can be played many ways, as Borges again reminds us. He is said to have remarked at a reading that the walk over to the hall through a tree-studded green was already reconstituting itself in his memory as more fictional than real. So we might conclude that as the fictional becomes real, the real becomes fictional, and truth becomes a feeling.

Discussing the poetic process in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke maintains that although the memories of many experiences are essential to poetry,

…still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first words of a verse arise in their midst and go forth from them.8

For Rilke, memory is the genius of poetry, nature – the blood, glance, gesture of the individual – speaking through the agency of the poet’s art. It seems natural here to look at poems that particularly illustrate the abiding play of memory and image. First, Yannis Ritsos’ poem “Miniature,” which begins,

The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
Begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
Like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
Made for a child’s fairy tale

Here, we are transported, as if we ourselves are jostled along in a carriage with lemon rind rims and diaphanous yellow spokes, to the fairy tale heart of quotidian experience. The poem presents a young officer sitting buried in an old armchair, not looking at the woman as he lights a cigarette, then

…The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It’s too late now. Let’s drink our tea.
It is possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?9

“Let’s drink our tea” invites the reader to a communal meditation on mortality. The moment is “gone;” whatever was to happen, didn’t, and, not having happened, it is as if dead and suggests this meditation. In the question, “Is it possible?” (and by virtue of an inevitable echo of Emily Dickinson) the carriage becomes a hearse and passes by, taking us with it in our surmise of its destination. But another carriage remains, the one we imagined at first, the one with lemon wheels, the fairy tale one, the made up one. This one we remember. “Parked for so many years” in memory, it is transformed into a “small song,” which, like mist, is “nothing” really, but totality of feeling, pathetic and incongruous, expressed in the image of a fairy tale carriage parked on a lonely, out-of-the-way side street.

Memory is an overt theme in “Two Dogs” by Charles Simic, which as well seems to illustrate Rilke’s description of the process of digested memory becoming the substance of a poem. Here, memory emerges from shadows.

An old dog, afraid of his own shadow
In some Southern town.
The story told me by a woman going blind,
One fine summer evening
As shadows were creeping
Out of the New Hampshire woods,
A long street with just a worried dog,
And a couple of dusty chickens,
And all that sun beating down
In that nameless Southern town.

The poem begins with the image of an old dog fleeing his own shadow in a story told by a woman who is “going blind,” which are two different but related attitudes toward darkness. The stanza alternates between the vague “some Southern town” and the clarity of “one fine summer evening” in the North and the “creeping shadows” emanating from the woods. The dog’s shadow, the woman’s blindness, and the woods constellate the dark elements of the memory, which are illuminated by “all that sun beating down.” The memory is told to the speaker in the presence of different shadows, in the north, a contrast to the bright south of memory, its worried dog, and dusty chickens. The static quality of transferred memory is conveyed through the minimal use of verbs while the repetition of shadows and the woman’s blindness convey the murky uncertainty of memory’s source.

The second stanza presents a memory triggered by the woman’s story, a remembrance from the poet’s own past growing up during World War II in Belgrade.

It made me remember the Germans marching
Past our house in 1944
The way everybody stood on the sidewalk
Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by…
A little white dog ran into the street,
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.10

The lazy, lyrical quality of the first stanza, the psychological suggestiveness of its alternations of shadow and sun are absent in the second stanza. Here is war, definite past tenses, Germans, “death going by” a nod to Paul Celan and the terrors of being a child in the grip of the Third Reich. This memory is not transferred but remembered and it is vivid. The poem presents the second dog, unlike the cowering first dog, as a transformation of the vicious into the beautiful, through which the image becomes sublime. The dog flies through the air, a comic and cruel moment, which the poet’s memory embroiders, “distorts,” with the addition of wings and flight. This image is a kind of redemption: darkness falling and a white dog flying. It is exactly the kind of image memory would present a frightened child as consolation, or compensation for psychic trauma, and at the same time, rescue beauty from terror.

Did Simic really see what he describes? Does it matter?  Robert Lowell often revised by inserting “not” or other negatives, in his poems, which reversed the meaning but improved the line.11 This practice suggests that the “truth” of poetry inheres in aesthetic considerations: how it received, rather than how it is generated. It is the sincerity of the intensity of the memory, together with the skill in realizing it, that makes art interesting, not the veracity of its details. This recalls the Method Acting of Stanislavsky and his American followers, and the use of sense memory to enrich an actor’s emotional reality in performance, when, for example, he may be remembering the death of a pet dog to convey grief for a dead friend on stage. In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman suggests that our memories can be imaginings or the thoughts of our intellects. Further, according to Hillman, memory “not only records, it also confabulates, that is, makes up imaginary happenings, wholly psychic events. Memory is a form imagination can borrow in order to make its personified images feel utterly real.”12  In its inventiveness, distortions and falseness, memory presents and validates “psychic truth.”  In other words, we truly are, as Prospero says, such stuff as dreams are made on.13   

Truth in the realms of poetry and psychoanalysis is, it would seem, a matter of negotiation and good will. The poet, one might say, remembers what he has to. The scene I invented, an amalgam of three films, highlights the less known part of Medea’s story, her betrayal of her father, not the killing of her children. (The personal reasons for this I can only guess at.) The content of the scene itself, “Medea’s” hallucination of sounds as manifestation of the hostility of the townspeople, also seems to have artistic resonance as an expression of the process of writing poetry, turning thoughts/ideas into sounds. My invented memory presents me, as a dream might, with a variety of cues and suggestions regarding my writing. The scene ends with “Medea’s” defiant confrontation of the townspeople and the deflating realization when she does so that no real rocks have been thrown, that the “danger” has been a projection of her own mind. In giving form to their perceived hostility, she attaches an image to her thoughts, an achievement which expresses the continual challenge of both living and writing.

Marie Howe’s poem “The Dream” recounts a dream the speaker has had in which she receives a telephone call from her dead friend, Jane. We understand from biographical material that the friend is the poet Jane Kenyon, who had died recently.

Jane’s voice on the phone is grave and soft and strong.
Her hair’s gone. I cut it off, she said. She’s Joan of Arc now.

Dogs bark at people they don’t know.
All those barking dogs in my dreams! And now

They know me and don’t bark. A cat screams from the yard.

Retelling this dream triggers a memory, for which there is no apparent transition from the previous line:

I’d live with you, but I wouldn’t marry you, is what
My father said, offhandedly, from the couch.
He’s dead now. And the sentence burns in my heart.

The line seems to come from nowhere – but ”nowhere” is, of course, somewhere we are not aware of, and so the poem manages to reproduce in us the unconscious process of a thought coming from nowhere, as apparently this one does to the speaker, its trigger a mystery.

The leap from what Jane says to what the speaker’s father said is dramatic and suggestive. The remembered voices of two powerful figures in the speaker’s life present two opposing conditions: the abusive and still tormenting relationship with her father versus the friendship and, presumably, art of poetry that rescued her.

Jane’s voice belongs to another world:
The world I entered when I decided to leave my father.

If Jane’s voice belongs to the world of art and poetry, the world of being a writer, it also belongs to death, dream, memory, the world of the psyche, where what’s made up and what’s “true” are the same in their ability to console us and give meaning to our lives, as Hillman suggests. The lines are moving, the word “decided” especially so in its suggestion of the effort of will and resolution necessary to break off an abusive relationship, especially with one’s father.

The poem moves from recounting the dream, to the memory, to the climactic decision. There is a metaphoric coda, resembling a fairy tale or fable conclusion.

Sometimes the island wavers and shimmers underfoot,
But the bridge appears when you walk across it – that’s
How it works, right? There’s no end to this.14

Sometimes apparently solid things, like islands, threaten to dissolve,” waver and shimmer” and leave you in the drink, but by proceeding one foot at a time, trusting, all remains solid. In her question, we hear the necessary skepticism at the heart of a “leap of faith,” without which faith itself is meaningless. And she’s right, “There’s no end to this.” As the Heraclitean formulation goes, “You will not find the limits of soul even if you travel every road, such is the depth of its meaning.”15  The efforts of memory and imagination create soul, the mysterious source of creativity, the interior depth in which we struggle to find and to understand ourselves.

It seems, then, that as we invent poems, they invent us. Imagination is key in this process. Coleridge makes a distinction between primary and secondary imagination, the first creating “in the finite mind the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am,” a creation ex nihilo, so to speak, which the second “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,” by recombining existing sensations. He distinguishes these two categories from a third, “fancy,” which is a “mode of memory emancipated from time and space.”16 For Coleridge, the poet and poetry cannot be made distinct. The poet brings the “whole soul of man into activity” in the process of creating and in the product of that process, the poem. The scene I invented was a “poem,” a fiction created by “secondary” imagination in its recombining of various elements of the three films which it then presented to me as a false memory, like Coleridge’s “fancy,” detached from time and space. The reality I bestowed on this made-up scene as “memory” ensured that I paid attention to it, that it became a matter of soul.

Finally, I realized that it is under the guidance of memory, the act of remembering, that the imagination licenses itself to create. For Wordsworth, a poem “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”17 and as such, must always be a creative act, a restructuring of images connecting thoughts and feelings visited by mind itself – that indescribable presence wielding imagination as a powerful tool in the project of understanding itself and the world. Just as we cannot step into the Heraclitean river twice, we cannot re-inhabit the past as it was but only as an act of creative reconstruction – an act of poetry. Our memories are the poems we write ourselves, in which we order our most potent images.

Jo Sarzotti is an award-winning poet who formerly chaired the Liberal Arts Department at The Juilliard School. Her writing, including her prize-winning book Mother Desert, is known for being short, powerful, and deeply connected to the natural world. She often draws inspiration from her life in New York and her love of horseback riding to explore how our memories shape our daily lives.

The cover image features a detail from Le Alchimiste, a monumental work by the renowned German artist Anselm Kiefer. Currently on display at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, this cycle of large-scale canvases explores the intersection of alchemy, female memory, and transformation. Using his signature materials—including ash, clay, and lead—Kiefer’s work finds a haunting resonance in the historic Sala delle Cariatidi, a hall scarred by World War II bombings. This dialogue between the artist's textured imagery and the room’s own history of destruction and rebirth perfectly mirrors the "poetics of imagination" and the shifting layers of memory explored in this essay.

NOTES