I’ve often been told by purveyors of horrible clichés that memory is a powerful tool for good.
I don’t argue memory’s power, but I’d compare it more to a demon-possessed chainsaw that occasionally turns on by itself while it’s sitting in the garage and maims a few of your unsuspecting body parts (like that poor kid in “Out, Out—”) than something like a really nice cordless drill (seriously, those things do work).
Memory is what bears us back ceaselessly into the past like boats beating against the current (as someone who is a much better writer than me once put it) but also what makes us crazy, what shatters our glass minds with regret, what digs into the lush soil of our sleepings at night when dreams are terror incarnate. Memory is nothing if not the half-thought harbinger of things to come, a warning in the past who reminds us that even our “ten days from now” will someday be our “many years ago.”
I fear my memory. I fear its tendrils of smoke in the night when it resembles an angel of darkness standing in my doorway. I fear its apparition in dreams that encircle all of my thoughts with oceanic swells and grow up through them like a world tree, its maddening rooster cackle that sings of time’s inevitable catastrophe.
For memory is the stiff-necked refusal to believe; the stinking heartrent failure to forgive; the slaughtered-lamblike following to altars with glowing white candlefingers that set the heart ablaze in days when the clouds seemed always ready to split and bellow their disastrous disapproval; the doe eyes of unfought-for love that a storm of anger and argumentative egoism washed away across life’s canyon floor while helpless our lightning burrowed watching in the clouds.
I think I got lost in an epiphanic break of riverlike emotion and forgot that I was going to make a point.
Actually, that sort of is my point.
Memory is the key and our mind’s dam is the gate. Proust’s madeleine is an oft-cited example of this universal truth.
Sometimes we cannot help but be reminded.
Sometimes the dam is too weak to stop the break, and the wood and stones float with the tide of the mind down roaring rapids of reminiscence until the implications of the scene become clear, and we’re left to ponder on these things and keep them in our hearts. This (along with art and the search for life’s meaning, which are really the same thing) is what separates us from animals.
As far as I can gather from my admittedly faulty method of observing the squirrels on the Plaza of the Americas (although I’m sure some very thoughtful person is going to love going out of their way to correct me!), animals do not meditate upon their memories: They simply learn the appropriate reflex to specific stimuli and move on with their lives.
Humans are an inherently tragic race because our memories can eat at us so, drive our sanity over cliffs and rocky ridges, make us do things not because they make sense but because.
And perhaps this is why we make art.
Art is as much a search for truth and answers as religion ever was.
The memories that sometimes make us destroy ourselves sometimes release themselves from the prison of our minds in rushes of arpeggiated colors, runs of birdlike notes, slithering brushstrokes of rhyme and meter: because truth is beauty, and beauty is truth, and to know that is all we need on Earth.
We must create. We must create so that humanity’s memory can taste the same bitter cup that we taste in every day of the thunderlike growling of silent longing. And perhaps someday our creation will suffer the exaltation that we so innately crave for ourselves.
Anyway, what I was going to say is that there’s something my father told me in my younger and more vulnerable years that I used to turn over in my mind a lot, but I don’t remember what it is anymore.
Crap.
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
