There's a small forest in Mexico to which thousands of Monarch butterflies migrate each fall. For many it's their place of death. If we could stand there, knee deep in dead petals of orange, words might spring to mind. Every one of them, a version of your name. Muscle memory,' as its sometimes called, involves the inscription of patterns and processes into the muscles and nerves that execute them.
Amnesiacs can still ride bikes.
One January morning I heard a flabbergasted Peter Gzowski interviewing a scooped-out sounding woman. Twenty years ago she had suffered a complete memory eradication at the hands of a CIA backed McGill psychiatrist. This woman had forgotten how to speak, who her lovers were, how to go to the bathroom. Adults told her repeatedly they were her children. She could not understand the veins on her thighs.