Editor’s Note: It’s Halloween. Marlow lines up the lines of memory this morning. As a fellow traveler in his cohort on this globe in this time, one of his observations struck home. “Remembering all this stuff after so many years tells me I was truly alive before I died. Lucky SOB.” Like Marlow, I had no idea the riotous roar of life can be lived again. As echo, perhaps, but a welcome reminder that we lived. And remember…
– Vic
Author’s Note: With all the crazy going on in our nation’s Capital provoking long ago buried memories to surface, here are some thoughts on memory and a few memories.
– Marlow
True memory
Writing from memories is a tricky thing. It’s often quite jumbly in their mal-ordered appearances.
Some are of ghosts. They are from some other world. One is GrandPa, another is Großmutter, Pops, Tanta Lena, then Mom, Dad, passed on shipmates and friends; they can be any and every one and thing who has left who finally comes back. Into my empty still mind come their voices, echoing from one side of my head while memory speaks from the other. Sometimes, if I open my eyes wide, I see what I can of them before mine close forever.
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Some say memories are not to be trusted — that they always drift toward a positive or a warm ambiguity, toward grand questions, toward the summer’s first sunshine drenched taste of peach slices in their own juice, when what we really need is the purpose and clarity of photos, videos, or books provide. Do not fully trust these certainty memory types.
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A good memory — like a good song, or sketch, or photograph — ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over our eyes, fingers, tongues, and hearts. A good memory ought to be a young-love letter to the worlds of the past, the present and the future.
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On one of W’s and my first nights together in Paris, walking home from the left to the right bank past midnight, we sensed a shiver beneath the air during the pauses between strong winter zephyrs off the Seine. Atop the Île de la Cité’s northern river channel spider cracks of ice were forming. It looked as if this city of light was no more than a scale model built by a shadowy great hand whose index finger was then lightly pressing down upon the great river’s surface.
After we leaned into each other in the growing cold upon crossing over the bridge to the right bank, we left streetlamp-illuminated crystalline footprints behind us on the moist chilled cobblestones that only my memory now preserves.
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I marveled at a young age when I realized that what I was reading was written by folks who were long dead. I was living deeply inside worlds they created, and they were gone from this Earth. Yet in those black marks on those white pages before me, their imaginations and worlds lived on, their voices lived on. Amazing. Then came comic books. I was for many decades ruined but enthralled by their pictorial power and lost for some time the true and full power of worded memory.
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I don’t believe in reincarnation. I know, not feel, like we’re here for a very brief time. I believe we get this one trip, and if we’re really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on planet Earth.
Man’s biological imperative is to pass his genes to the next generation. Perhaps mankind’s moral imperative oughta be to try, before we become corpses, to memorialize for those who follow us the lessons from the gift of our long lives we learned about how they might survive and leave a better place, people, and things behind for their follow-ons.
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From my youth 1 was very interested in memory since it seemed to underlie all the tales I heard from my great grands, grands, and parents’ siblings. Then my Irish grandmother came down with what my Mom called dementia, which she explained made her Mom forgetful of everything even eating, when we arrived at Grandma O’Shea’s house in the early 60s for a summer vacation in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was the last time we kids saw her despite her living on in a locked down facility in a small Texas panhandle town for another decade. Memories of her and her long deceased immigrant Irish husband were the first ones for me that faded.
I have spent most of my subsequent life trying to recapture those.
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US Navy memory: Back in the 70s, I was onboard a US Navy aircraft carrier which plowed eastward at a high speed of advance through a large Category 3 Western Pacific typhoon towards this ultimate war machine’s date as a backdrop for a 4-star admiral’s change of command in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Those few angry grey days and no moon nights of violent tossing, catwalk bending, aircraft tie-down chain snapping, combat airplane rocking and rolling, green water crashing over the ship’s 55-foot-high bow, and antenna-snapping told me one thing — the world doesn’t care much, if anything at all, about whether we live or die.
27 years later having experienced the brief calm of the eye of Category 4 hurricane Wilma only to get battered on its trailing side by 130 MPH objects like coconuts penetrating concrete block structures I was in made me consider the ultimately superior strength of American steel hulled ships.
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The many memory fragment tales of my life defy chronology, often resisting their transcription — long past embarrassments seem ever present, while my expected and well-deserved future with shipmates and beloveds hurriedly recedes in my rearview mirrors.
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The easier, more entrenched, or more familiar my past experiences, the fainter my sensation of them becomes. Sorta like chocolate or a bad marriage, one’s hometown or hazily recalled sea stories.
It forces me to work endlessly to accurately recall and portray their complexities, uncover the miraculous underneath, and escape old age’s limitation of peering at my past as if from inside a coffee beans burlap sack.
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I never thought about being careful with how much or hard I lived. It was as if my life was a never-emptying pocketful of coins. It was limitless . . . despite now knowing that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out of coins, I will. Pretty damn cool, if you ask me, to be gifted with partaking of something like that, having buried my childhood, youth, and adulthood here, there, and everywhere else in between, it was all along waiting for me, my entire life, to come back and for me to dig it up.
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Remembering all this stuff after so many years tells me I was truly alive before I died. Lucky SOB.
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Someday, hopefully soon, the world as I had hoped for long ago during my preschool days, will trade in all of its bullets for chocolates.
PS — I remember my Mom was a choc-a-holic with hoarder tendencies.
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Powerful moments pass and are often gone, so their hold on us the living is temporary. We might lose some sleep or our appetite in the aftermath, but eventually we fall asleep and eventually we eat again even if we might hate ourselves for it. But a recalled memory’s demands are incontrovertible, and they silently creep up upon us and make us starve ourselves again all at once.
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Memories are like seeds that have hard husks to split before we enjoy their sweet insides.
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My most treasured memories have been soft like pieces of fine Asian silk one had squirreled away long ago at the bottom of an old bureau drawer that were pulled out by pure happenstance, only for me to revel feeling their softness slip between my fingers.
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Memories of our and others’ actions, thoughts, reasons, and feelings provide coherence. We’d be less than nothing without them.
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The more I do this remembering thing the more I think it’s possible to form meaningful memories of remembering, if I pay close enough attention to it.
The antithesis of true memory
What if this late-in-life-stage memory fixation is just me and my fellow old agers wanting to hear ourselves — in a word, hubris? Are we just recording what we said, felt, thought or did, regardless of value, say on magnetic tape? Everybody likes to hear themselves talk. Are we just raising our antennas too high, broadcasting what we pick up for way too many minutes, assuming the world offers safety and rationality, let alone caring about what we remember, when of course it does not?
What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?
Every hour, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole townfuls of histories are dragged into their graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like breadcrumbs.
So, is there some unseen balancing act here? Or is it just so many human beings, none of them seeing clearly?
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