Memory only seems like narrative because that's the primary tool you're using describe it. Unlike narrative, however, memory doesn't necessarily exhibit a beginning, middle and end.

Memory exists in the hippocampus and dispersed across the pfc. It's a network, not a line. There is no beginning, middle or end in a network, just nodes with more less amounts of connection between them.

For a good example of memory that doesn't present as narrative, consider traumatic memory. Traumatic memory persists (by persists I mean the defining symptom is flashbacks) because it cannot be incorporated into the existing explanatory framework (the story of why things are the way they are) of an individual.

Now, the fact that traumatic memory presents as surface reality, as meaningless, would seem to reinforce the idea that memory requires narrative to have meaning, but traumatic memory is not the only type of memory that refuses to be incorporated into narrative.

People can also experience memories that don't present as narrative, but these memories involve an intense multiplication of meaning (as opposed to the other extreme, the closure of meaning). People sometimes refer to such experience as awe, sublime or transcendental.

In either case, the memories belong to the realm of the unspeakable. Their meaning cannot be articulated (brought into narrative), either because the meaning is too terrible to be absorbed by the psyche, or too great. In both cases, the zero day quality of the memories tends to become like a genius loci of a great many words (because they are never enough).

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As for the idea that "if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies," my point is that the conditions they give are false, not that the meaning they have given is false. That is, the totality of phenomena involved in the production of meaning are not restricted to the mind.

(so, to look again at pain, pain indicates something about reality; its existence in the mind in no way invalidates its truth—we do not need to attribute "puncture" to a needle popping through the skin in order for the sensation to mean "puncture")

Meaning is not merely imposed on reality like a map over the territory. It is (should be?) the exact opposite. The territory demands that the map accommodates its nature, or the map becomes nonsense. The author of the essay and the German guy he wrote about both recognize this, but they do so while earlier insisting that the map gives the territory meaning. Surely, the territory gives the map meaning.

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As for objective meaning, I don't deal with the objective and subjective dichotomy in the normal way (i.e. the way it was hammered into me in college). A subject is just a subcategory of object, namely an object with a model of itself for itself. Subjective meaning is objective meaning; it's just an incomplete part (subcategory) of it.

The incompleteness of subjectivity precludes absolute truth (this is where the falseness comes into truth, the incompleteness of truth). Objective truth, essential truth, to the subject, only arrives in bits, or it overwhelms. I see through a mirror darkly.