Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. ♦
~ ~ ~
Maybe the best way to remember anything accurately is to write it down and forget it, and then, only at the last moment of your life, to recall it — like listening to a broken tape by hand-feeding it one last time through the tape player.
During the age of the cassette tape, it seemed that everyone was talking about doing that. It was always some high romantic tale, the only live recording of a secret show or the last letter from a long-lost friend.
I never did it. Maybe everyone was lying. No matter. It’s still a decent metaphor. ♦
~ ~ ~
Could I claim a memory even if I couldn’t access it via language? Or was I writing as if it never had happened?
I didn’t mind that perception is partial or that recollection is worse, but I minded that I didn’t know why I remembered what I remembered — or why I thought I remembered what I remembered. ♦
~ ~ ~
I assumed that maximizing the breadth and depth of my autobiographical memory would be good for me, force me to write and live with greater care, but in the last thing one writer ever published, when he was almost ninety years old, he wrote a terrible warning.
He said he’d liked remembering almost as much as he’d liked living but that in his old age, if he indulged in certain nostalgias, he would get lost in his memories. He’d have to wander them all night until morning.
He responded to my fan letter when he was ninety. When he was ninety-one, he died.
I just wanted to retain the whole memory of my life, to control the itinerary of my visitations, and to forget what I wanted to forget.
Good luck with that, whispered the dead. ♦
~ ~ ~
The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will — diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows — weren’t the beginnings or the ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues.
For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn’t worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it.
Then the moment would pass, and I’d return to brooding about my lost memories. ♦
~ ~ ~
Lives stop, but life keeps going. Flesh begets flesh.
Great cathedrals were built by generations of stonemasons to whom the architect was a man who might once have greeted their grandfathers’ grandfathers. How agreeable, then, to believe in God.
To set stones on stones not for the architect but for eternity.
The Latin epitaph in one seventeenth-century cathedral translates: Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.
The words are carved in a disk of black marble set beneath the center of the dome. The disk was placed there by the architect’s son.
It’s easy to imagine the great man, but try to imagine the son who knows his father’s cathedral will be loved longer than the flesh of his flesh. ♦
~ ~ ~
The oldest known cave paintings are thirty thousand years old. Along with abstract markings and pictures of animals, they include images of human hands.
It seems that the painters pressed their hands against the walls, blew pigment from their mouths onto the walls, and then lifted their hands away.
Then they walked out of the cave, marked with red ochre from fingertip to wrist.
The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. ♦
~ ~ ~
Another friend inherited a collection of ceramic bowls that used to belong to her great-great-great-grandmother. I like the fact that they break, she said, so that I can glue them back together.
Before my husband went into surgery to have his shattered nose reconstructed, the anesthesiologist told us she’d give him a benzodiazepine intravenously.
It causes anterograde amnesia, so when my husband whispered I love you directly into my ear, I whispered back, You aren’t going to remember this. ♦
~ ~ ~
When I became pregnant I struck something mortally. Not just myself, symbolically; my son, actually.
The partly made flesh wriggling inside me was already mortal. ♦
~ ~ ~
During my pregnancy I couldn’t remember anything. Information seemed to enter my memory and dissolve.
The diary was of no help.
Emerging from the sickening exhaustion of the first few months, I began to see the work I might do next — this, an assemblage of already exploded bits that cohere anyway, a reminder that what seems a violent interruption seldom is. ♦
~ ~ ~
Goldfish are said to possess legendarily short memory spans, but in fact they can recall information — such as certain sounds — for up to five months, or so one report claims.
I’m told that even a newborn, in its first months outside its mother’s body, remembers the underwater sounds of the womb. ♦
~ ~ ~
I developed the amnesia that some people call pregnancy brain.
Heavily pregnant when I heard my friend’s father had died two years earlier, I sent condolences at once, hysterically sorry. My friend wrote back. I’d sent a letter two years earlier. I didn’t remember sending it.
Then another friend told me his apartment had been burgled. How lucky that the dog wasn’t hurt! I wrote back. He’d put the dog down months before. I hadn’t remembered that, either.
I scrambled to remember the dead in order — of course an eighteenth-century composer was dead, and all the people who died before I was born. My grandparents all were dead. Recent deaths of those I knew only by their work — a novelist, a monologist. I remembered which of my friends were dead. Another friend’s stepmother, in a coma for years, had died earlier that year. Good, I thought, I haven’t forgotten them all. ♦
~ ~ ~
When I was almost nine months pregnant, my mother-in-law began receiving hospice care.
My doctor wouldn’t permit me to cross the ocean to see her. My husband didn’t want to miss the birth of our son. And he didn’t want to miss the death of his mother, the woman who raised him.
I drank quarts of raspberry-leaf tea, trying to trigger early labor.
Six thousand five hundred miles away from each other, two unplannable moments prepared themselves.