Even when following Ong in this alleged ability of Austrailian natives to recollect 40,000 years (and spiking it with tales from Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" about what is remembered and what not), I think that "individual stuff, or family stuff isn't kept. What seems to be kept is the long contours of the community and its relation to the land, or, if it is at all personalized, it's like the tradition of the griots in West Africa (esp. the Malinke Empire), re-telling and remembering the line of heirs of the kingdom. They won't include auntie Bertha in these praise songs. But perhaps there are even more differences as griots seem to remember personalised history whereas Australian natives are said to remember the story of the land (and by doing so keeping it in existence, i.e., humans are essential for the continuation of the world). Family secrets (dirty or not) don't seem to have a place in this.

To keep the personal (or family) history alive seems to fall to someone in this family, esp. when he moves up to the position of oldest living member. I guess the reason that the oldest has to keep such memories is to provide the younger family members with a sense of future. Or more exactly: The more one remembers the larger the other(s) feel a future to have. Without such remembrance the successors experience the "clean-slateness" of endless possibilities. To me it feels a bit like the grave of the father of my siblings. Some of us visit once a year to do some care and cleaning, but usually I don't visit the grave, and it is exactly because I know I could if I wanted to. I guess when I and my siblings will be gone, then a need for this grave will no longer exist. But now, with memories still alive, knowing he has a "there" in this sphere is not a consolation but completion of who I (and each of my siblings) am. Were there no grave, I'd feel hampered and restrained. In this case, the outsourcing of memories is done to keep feeling more complex and alive, without having to deal with the size of the memory palace every day on my own.

In another way that resembles relationships of couples, e.g., the actually rather strange thing that one has stuff of oneself stored in the closet of the spouse. Handing over things for the other "to take care of" is almost never about the thing itself but about the act of caring that becomes possible and existent through this act. But ultimately it seems to come down to the role of secrets and things being forgotten. Like Olivia Dresher pointed to in the post I quoted: As long as things are remembered, they are not facts yet. To which I'd add: When thy are forgotten and have become facts, then they no longer exist. Or rather: only exist in the netherworld that doesn't concern us. I wonder if that, in a sense, isn't pretty much what we think the human soul consists of. The other half of re-embering.

cc @band