Getting into the vagaries of personal memory usually makes me want to beat my head against a wall because the more I read into the psychological and philosophical perspectives on memory, the murkier it gets. Right now, I tend to side with St. Augustine; in his view, all of our experience, past and future, only exist on the "knife's edge" of the present. Since the past can never exist except as a memory in the present, we can only access them in the present-- by reaching through our current perspective and experiences to grasp at the point in the past. The past becomes, in a sense, eternally colored by all the things which proceeded from that point and our current, present experience. When it comes to memory, you really can never go home again; just as our present eternally changes, so does our perception of the past along with it.
But what can this tell us about the extent of Henderson's culpability in Matt's murder? Probably nothing factual; but we might, however, tease something out about the narratives McKinney and Henderson have told themselves over the last ten years since their convictions. This single piece of rope, stretched through ten years of retrospect-- tied by whom, and in what manner-- can tell us a lot about the nature of our memories, and perhaps how McKinney and Henderson try to understand their own histories as well.
