A new “bullet fingerprinting” technique holds the promise to reveal fingerprints left behind on metal surfaces – bullets in particular – without inflicting damage on valuable pieces of evidence.  Unlike previous techniques, nothing is done to alter the bullet.  No powders or chemicals are required – only heat and humidity.  The heat and humidity act on traces of sweat left behind from ridges on fingertips, “developing” fingerprint lines like a Polaroid in the surface of the metal. 

I wish there was an equivalent for memory – a way to develop the “fingerprints” in my brain and see, right there in black and white on the ridges of my hippocampus, the specific trace a moment left behind on my life – without destroying any gray matter. The closest I ever came to this was wearing a portable EEG to monitor my brainwaves. The hope was to catch a seizure and record it.  Unlike the EEG’s my neurologist performed in his lab, nobody flashed lights in my eyes in an attempt to induce seizure; rather, my brain was left to its own devices, its waves recorded, patterns noted.  I wish I had demanded back then to keep a printout.  I could have tried to correspond the crests and troughs with specific moments. Right here: This is the day everyone from the ward took a field trip outside to plant a tree. Or maybe not.  Maybe the very act of remembering would have changed my interpretation of a wave or trough.  Maybe seeing a memory as a trough would have tainted how I felt about it – something I thought of as positive suddenly seeming suspect.  I will never know.  

In its own way, the act of writing destroys evidence.  The process of uncovering memories, emotions, and images is similar to that of an archaeologist uncovering a new dig site.  One difference, though, is that the archaeologist systematically marks the site with a grid and brushes dirt away slowly, one layer at a time, noting the specific micro-context for every artifact.  I attempt to do this sometimes with my notebooks, pasting in “napkin notes,” news clippings, photographs, obituaries, letters, anatomy cards – anything to keep ideas in their contexts.  But given the non-linear nature of memory – and of writing – I cannot help but jumble up the strata and contaminate the evidence.  I need to destroy in order to create.