Fragment #12: Memory
“This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation from the future as well as the past.” – TS Eliot, Four Quartets
Note: This fragment describes a trip to my hometown of Macon, Georgia. The details included are from two separate trips, but I’ve treated them as one for clarity’s sake.
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You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.
I return to Macon after a prolonged absence. I don’t have as many reasons to come back since my parents moved away. Now it’s only life’s celebrations and tragedies, weddings and funerals, beginnings and ends that call me home.
I have long struggled to make sense of my childhood, and as an adult, became convinced that I would do well to forget—to sever myself from the past. I stumbled down dark paths searching for an escape from my own mind, but the pursuit of amnesia was a doomed enterprise. I never could quite forget.
And so, at twenty-seven, in the prime of my late-young-middle-age, I take a new tack. I drive around Macon and visit my old haunts, like a geologist digging through fossils for some missing link among the vestigial bones. I loiter in front of my childhood home and stare dimly at the gabled brick façade, waiting for an epiphany, but the house looks oddly unfamiliar. I drive past the Sonic drive-thru, but the Sonic no longer serves slushies but car washes. How is one to make sense of the past when the past is uprooted and turned into a carwash? I return to my grade school and the playground where I remember standing atop a metal climbing gym as a king surveying his empire, but this too is gone, replaced by a field of bright green sod.
I feel the mild embarrassment that any king might when he discovers he’s a king without a country.
But then I drive downtown and park beside a hunk of redbrick and white spires and opaque stained glass. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. It looms at the top of a hill like a corniced peak; the flying buttresses, capped with stone crosses, and the brick steeples are downtrodden and worn; the green canted roof looks ugly with corrosion.
Looking up at the church of my youth, I feel the glacier of memories break open. I walk up the steep flight of stairs and open the wooden doors, and slip through the narrow vestibule.
What exactly do I seek inside?
An answer to a question that has long puzzled me.
What is the use of memory?
****
The question is not meant to be a practical one.
It’s useful enough to remember where we parked our car or that we agreed to meet so-and-so on Wednesday morning, but then again, today we have GPS trackers and Google calendars to remember for us. If this is the purpose of memory, we might as well start forgetting.
I mean, what is the purpose of memory in the ultimate sense? Why do humans have it? Is it intrinsically good?
Consider a mind ravaged by Alzheimer’s and it seems self-evident that memory is good and its loss, a horror. But then consider suicide and the answer is not so clear. Nearly every suicide is the offspring of a despairing memory—the memory of broken dreams, horrors and evils, unrequited loves—and is the fatal attempt to forget.
So what then?
Would it be better if we had the memory of a goldfish, a la Ted Lasso’s advice, and forgot everything? Is this the key to true and unending joy?
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It’s late morning when I walk into St. Joseph’s. Planks of sunlight filter through the stained glass. The floor is painted with dapples of bright color.
I look around, at the marble pillars and gilded cornices and fiery frescoes, and up at the cloister vault above the altar, and the power of language fails me. The glory of St. Joseph’s, as I now see it, is that I cannot describe what I see—that I lack the native words of a church architect or renaissance student and so must sit in silent wonder.
The next Mass does not begin for an hour or so, and a small crowd sits in the front pews while a priest in clerics speaks with them. I slip into a rear pew. It’s a group of parents, I gather, and the subject is how to raise their children in the faith.
How fitting, I muse.
I don’t think I’m alone in revolting against the religion I was forced to practice as a child and running from the church where I once knelt, but what am I to do now that I’ve returned? Is it better to bury my old resentments, and if so, what secret rites should I say to make sure they don’t come back to haunt me? Or might there be some good in remembering how I shook my fist at God and demanded he leave me alone?
It’s tricky, this remembering business. Perhaps we should heed the warning of Lot’s wife and never look back, forget all that lies behind and press forward for the prize. The problem is—I can’t forget, no matter how I try.
So the question remains.
What is the use of memory?
****
Eleven years ago, at sixteen, I knelt in this same pew—or one close by—on a Saturday evening and turned from God.
I’ll spare you the details, but I’ve never been able to forget that night. Where I went after church, the lies I told, the hangover of body and soul. I can’t remember the particulars of the Vigil Mass, who the priest was or the color of his vestments, if he raised the host and said Behold the Lamb of God with a theatrical flair or the weary monotone of a history professor, but I remember how I felt a dread and excitement carving out a hollow in my stomach as I pretended to pray, overcome with the sensation of a man peering over the edge of a cliff.
And so, I return to the site of my rebellion, the church and the pew, the terminus from which I hurtled out into the dark, and I wonder: what purpose is there in recalling the sins of my youth? Would it not be better to forget and let bygones be gone? Is there really any good in remembering the bad?
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These questions cut at the heart of Orthodox Fiction and whether it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Some readers might find these fragments gratuitous and unnecessary dramatizations of life. This is not my intention. I merely wish to testify to the role memory might play in our redemption.
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Love, according to Paul, keeps no record of wrongs, but what use is this to me if I cannot recall having done anything wrong? What good is forgiveness if I cannot remember my sins?
Then this is the use of memory: to know what has been erased.
Consider the servant whose master forgives his debt, then promptly goes to another peasant and tries to collect a much smaller debt. This servant has a tragic case of amnesia. He forgets the mercy he has received as soon he exits the throne room.
The penniless man cannot offer alms to the beggar and the homeless man cannot shelter the refugee. So too the man with no memory of love is unable to love anyone else.
We cannot give what we do not possess.
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The crowd of parents disperses and the priest retreats to the sacristy to get ready for Mass. A swell of well-dressed men and women and children fill the church. I move forward in the church so that I can have a clear view of the altar.
Mass begins.
I kneel down as the priest intones a liturgy I cannot forget, and the deacon swings a canister of incense, plumes of smoke drifting through troughs of golden light, and my heart fills with joy.
To remember the debt I once carried and the one who forgives. To give to others the love I have received. This is the use of memory.