La Memoire Collective

Every once in a while, a book will stir a very specific memory.

It's not a common occurrence, even if you read relentlessly, but when it happens, it's a delight.  What I mean when I say this is simple:  you're in the middle of a story and carried along with the flow of it, when all of a sudden the author describes something you know.  It could be a particular type of car, or a very specific place you know personally.  All of a sudden, your story and the story being told intersect with one another, and you say, "Hey, I know that place!"

Like last year, in the opening chapters of an ultimately pretty mediocre fantasy/horror novel, the protagonist went on a date, and took his soon-to-be paramour to one of my favorite special-occasion restaurants in the DC area.  "Hey," I said, "they're going to L'Auberge!"

I'm deep into a re-read of Thomas Merton's spiritual memoir THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, which I last read thirty years ago.  I was in my late twenties, and in the fierce first throes of exploring my calling to ministry, and I remember finding Merton's journey of spiritual discovery profoundly resonant and delightfully written.

I'm in my late fifties now, and I find myself resonating to Merton just as deeply, but differently.   He wrote the book when he was in his early thirties, meaning it rises from a soul of roughly the same vintage as I was when I first encountered him.   

Now, his writing still delights, but I'm essentially encountering it anew.  Of course I am.  More years have passed between my first reading and now than I'd lived when I first read the book.  My recollection of it is like my memory of a place I might have visited for a few days three decades ago.  Meaning, a scattering of sense impressions and visual images, and very few specific memories.

On one particular page, the memory of that first reading came rushing back, along with a wash of other memories.  It was from Merton's description of the death of his father, and the subsequent funeral:

Tom got an obituary printed in the Times, and he saw to it that the funeral went off more or less decently: but it was still another one of those cremations.  This time it was at Golders Green.  The only difference was that the minister said more prayers, and the chapel looked a little more like a chapel, and Tom had got them to hide the coffin under a very beautiful shroud of silk from the Orient somewhere, China or Bali or India.

But in the end they took the shroud off and rolled the coffin through one of those sliding doors and then, in the sinister secrecy of the big, intricate crematory, out of our sight, the body was burned, and we went away.

When I was a boy of twelve, I lived fifty yards from where Merton's father was cremated.  

If you stood at our front door, and looked slightly to the left from the little semi-detached we were renting in London, you'd see the grounds of the Golders Green Crematorium cattycorner across Meadway Gate.  It was an elegant brick building, subtle towers and arches standing stark behind a brick wall on Hoop Lane, with memorial gardens tastefully nestled behind the main structure.  I'd pass it whenever I walked to the Tube, or was coming back from taking the double decker bus from St. John's Wood on days I had after school band practice at the American School in London.  I'd see the memorial gardens when I took the walking path to the Hampstead Heath extension, and the place always seemed beautiful in a sad sort of way.

"Hey," I'd said once and said again, "I know that place."

I recalled, thirty years ago, marvelling that Merton had spent a meaningful moment in a place that I knew intimately.   As a young man, it stirred memories of when I was a boy.  As a middle-aged man?  It was a peculiar metamnemonic moment, a memory of my own act of remembering, mingled with the remembered story of another soul.

Human memory is not like stored data, but ever in flux, shared in such gloriously imprecise and idiosyncratic ways, layered and relayered with feeling and image and meaning.  

True to Our Native Land

This weekend, I attended a small memorial service at my church.

It wasn't for a member, but was instead a gathering of members of a local organization whose purpose is to remember the lynchings inflicted on Black folk in the Jim Crow South.  Poolesville, Maryland isn't in the South physically, but it sure was the South culturally back in the day.

The last lynching in Montgomery County was right out front of my church, as it happened, of a young man named George Peck.  That 1880 murder is memorialized by a marker that sits right out front of my congregation's community garden.  So to remember the anniversary of his killing and the history of racial violence in America, a little group gathered in the warmth of our sanctuary on a bitter and rainy January afternoon.

My task was nothing more than to support the gathered group, so after opening the space up, turning on heat and lights, and welcoming the organizers to our sacred space, I was done.  After that, all I had to do was just sit and listen and reflect.  

As friends from the community talked about the importance of remembering, and how vital it is that human beings not forget the past, I was struck by several things.

First, that so much of the language being used about the necessity of holding on to the past felt oddly...conservative.  I mean, this was a gathering of Card Carrying Progressives, without question, but so much of the language was about acknowledging those who had come before, about memory, about the truths that can only be grasped if we connect with our history.  As the civil rights movement was discussed, the folks gathered affirmed those who had come before, honoring their memory, their efforts, and their culture.

This is, again, a conservative thing, a holding on to what is good in the face of regime propaganda that wants us to forget anything bad ever happened ever.  It's an odd inversion.  

Second, the tenor and the focus of the conversation resonated off of our cultural struggles to maintain our attention and hold on to a cohesive sense of self.  We are being wired differently now, trained to exist only in the ephemeral moment, to think and act without reflection.  It isn't just that we forget the long deep tragic story of human history.  We forget things we ourselves have experienced, and the continuity of our essential personhood becomes hazed with a cloud of dopamine and cortisone.  

It's like being trapped forever as a sophomore in high school, as a "wise fool" who has intelligence but lacks the context necessary to apply it.  We flit from moment to moment, good little malleable consumers, both ungrounded and purposeless, here a little, there a little, but never understanding.

If a people are separated from their history, if they are torn from their sense of place and a relationship to past, present, and future, it sabotages their souls.

Father Timex

It's been just under two years since Dad passed away, and I'm still wearing his old Timex.

I took it off his cool lifeless wrist on the day that he died, and put it on my own.  It's told the time with reasonable accuracy ever since.  A simple mechanical watch serves many purposes.  Telling the time, of course, but other purposes that have value in our digital age.  It reduces the number of times per day I feel compelled to look at my magic devil box, which is a blessing.  It ticks audibly, as the mechanism physically marks away the seconds remaining in my own mortal coil.  This feels real and tangible, an analog actuality in a vaporware age.  It does one thing well, without distraction.  These are good things.  

That's not to say there aren't challenges with an old watch.

The watch will need a new battery soon, as the Timex IndiGlow (tm) feature for nighttime timekeeping has started to dim.  It's started slowing down a little bit, requiring readjustment through the little twisty knob on the side.  Again, a new battery is all that's needed. 

The primary fail-point, though, has been the band.  It's a simple leather thing, faded and worn.  The watch lug loops have given way multiple times, the leather yielding to entropy, the machine-stitching well past its functional lifespan.  I've been tempted, each time, to replace the band.  

I mean, it's a band.  Just a strip of cheap hide.  It's not expensive.

But like everything that matters, the watch isn't just about function.  It rested on my father's wrist for decades, and the band...being organic and slightly permeable...carries with it more of him than the metal watchbody itself.  It's stained and suffused with his sweat.  Some of his DNA, no doubt, is sequestered away in the folds and cracks of that old leather, as surely as it is in my own flesh.

Letting go of the band, or so my utterly illogical sentimentality dictates, is letting of a substantial portion of that intimate reminder of him.  So what to do, when that band fails?  

Given that my leatherworking skills are non-existent, I've taken the easy route, applying a classic Dad-fix to that memento of my own father: epoxy.  Just glue it back together.  It works, right up until it doesn't.

Last week, my most recent repair failed, and the watch fell from my wrist.  Undamaged, thankfully, but the whole leather lug-loop was gone.  There was nothing left to glue, nothing left to wrap around the bar of the lug.  This, I thought ruefully, might finally be the end of the band.  I let it set for a little bit, as I mulled my options.

A fierce sentimentality can be the mother of ingenuity, and time for reflection stirred a thought.  

The band was two stitched pieces of leather, and were I to carefully slice them apart and trim away one half, I could construct a new lug-loop.  Simply slice, apply epoxy, and boom.  It'd be back on my wrist.  Why not?  If it failed, I'd just sigh and get a new band.  If it succeeded, I'd still have that soft worn remembrance snug wrapped around my arm.

So I sliced it carefully, opening up the seams of the leather.  I whittled about the edges with the blade, and then...with vise and glue and time...remade what had failed.

This Father's Day, that old Timex still rests on my wrist.

The Twilight of the Doodle

Over the last week or so, I've been taking a few hours here and there to whittle away at the amassed detritus of decades stored in our home.  Down in the unfinished area of our basement, the shelves that line the walls in the workroom and the utility room are packed full of the residue of life.  An entire box was packed high with stacks of daily preschool paintings produced by my now-adult sons.   Elsewhere were boxes going all the way back to my own childhood.  A drawing of my family that I made in fifth grade.  A painting I made in preschool.  Letters from high school friends, back when we wrote letters to one another that could be kept.  Letters from family members long passed.  That sort of thing.

As I sorted through and discarded well-worn high school papers and faded college course notebooks, I marveled at a time when such things were all done by hand.  When was the last time I wrote an entire page of text, actually wrote it, hand and pen to paper?  Or wrote a letter in my marginally legible cursive?  It's been a bit.

Even more striking than my now mostly unfamiliar penmanship were the margins, because the margins of class-notes and tests and letters alike were awash in doodles.  At a moment of distraction in class, which for scatter-brained-me there were many, I would draw.  There were geometric patterns and abstract sworls of texture.  There were faces, and scenes, and little cartoons drawn to amuse both myself and nearby classmates.  

When the mind wandered, it doodled.  It was just something that one did, and it was hardly idiosyncratic to my own modestly artistic self.  It was a common thing, a nearly universal thing, just part of being a student or a note-taker or a diarist in the late 20th century.  Interspersed in our class notes and our meeting minutes would be the images and patterns.  In that, we were carrying on a tradition that goes back as far as pen and paper, back to times medieval, when marginalia were an integral part of our thinking processes.

And I wondered: does anyone doodle anymore?  I don't, not really.

The shift in media form from notebooks to laptops completely changed the whole dynamic of writing.  I mean, sure, there are touch screens and drawing programs, but honestly?  It's an entirely different world.  If we're distracted, there are casual gaming apps to fill our time, or a bottomless stream of reels to scroll through mindlessly.  Through the "miracle" of bottomless connectivity, most of our fallow moments have been monetized and gamified into functional oblivion, as whimsy and creativity have been supplanted.

Some out there, no doubt, might bring a pad with them for the specific purpose of doodling.  Others have chosen to return to pen and paper, intentionally rediscovering handwriting as a mnemonic device.  But most of us do not.

As with so many of the tradeoffs in this brave new world, it feels like a lessening, as we forget a thing whose value we didn't recognize.

Memories, Data, and Dreaming

Yesterday, I unearthed some memories. That happens a fair amount in my wet-ware memory, as words or sights or scents serve as trigger events for a cascade of recollections across my neural net. Sometimes that's cause for a delightful reverie. Sometimes that makes me wish for the services of the Haitian.


But this remembering was different.

In puttering around straightening things up in the basement, I found an old Palm organizer. By "discovered" I don't mean it had been lost, or that it was anything other than in plain sight. It had just been set aside, as its function had been supplanted by a sequence of increasingly schmantzy smartphones. Its rechargeable batteries were depleted. It was abandoned.

But when I picked it up with the intent to perhaps recycle it, I reflexively hit the power button. And it turned on.

I noodled through the old familiar menus for a moment, and in seeing the icons, recalled that there were videos on the thing. Not in the puny onboard memory, but in a 512MB SD card that was neatly slotted into the top. As I recalled that, the charge punked into nothing, and the organizer shut down.

I popped the card out, and went downstairs to our iMac. I chunked it into the card reader that's integrated into our printer, and went a-hunting through the file menus. QuickTime managed to handle the arcane file format, and what I found were memories.

They were pixelated and crude, the output of a sub-megapixel camera, but real. Two little boys, playing in a snow fort. A fifth birthday party for the now-almost-ten youngest son. A shot of big brother walking little brother to the bus stop on his first day of kindergarten. "If you're feeling shy, or scared, don't worry," said big brother. "I'll be there."

As I meditated on these electronic recollections this morning, I wondered about the impact that this new way of remembering has on us as human creatures. Across the span of human existence, our ability to recall things across time has gone through significant change. First, there were stories, told and remembered and retold. Then, language took on symbolic form, and those stories were written...and history began.

Now, our remembering is more than just writing. It is aural and visual. We hold onto a moment, to its sounds and the play of light across a face. Voices and song and laughter still echo from a hundred years ago. Or from the faces of little children who are no longer little children.

This is still a profoundly new thing. We forget how briefly it's been around, how the last 100 years is just a tiny flicker of who we are as a species.

I wonder if that remembering will make us wiser, as the accumulated visions and images give us a stronger sense of who we were, who we were created to be, and what purpose underlies our existence.

I wonder if the accumulation of that remembering will drive us mad, as a great weight of images and thoughts pile up in our collective subconscious, building and building into a vast inchoate mass until they overwhelm us and we can no longer discern the real. Cultures, after all, do not sleep. They do not dream. So they do not sort, and do not learn.

Some combination of the both, I shouldn't wonder.