After spending several days as a snotty, coughy, achy, feverish petri dish, I’m upright once again and ready to continue my grand tradition of blogcrastination. Blogcrastination is a beautiful, versatile, made-up little term. It refers both to blogging when I should be doing something else and to doing something else when I should be blogging. As you might have noticed, I’ve trended a bit more toward the latter lately, the snot factory notwithstanding.
Here’s my trouble: Being given to protracted bouts of curmudgeonly snark, I generally pull up the keyboard only when I’m irked about something. I can be piercing or catty or wittily critical all day long–and we’ll skip the psychoanalysis portion of today’s post, if you don’t mind. Suffice it to say that I hold that humor and martinis are both best served dry, dry, dry, and some folks don’t appreciate the flavor.
I’ve been reading a lot about yoga and meditation lately, and trying my hand at some of it. As I’ve mentioned, I’m boldly going where most rationally inclined, left-brain types never do, trying to pick up a little skill at energy work, and using it to get more deeply acquainted with myself. It’s heady stuff, and feels more true than anything I’ve ever encountered. My guts, my bones, my atoms know that I’m onto something, and I want to learn more.
So I have a conflict: how does an inveterate sarcastic become adept at a practice that’s ultimately rooted in the purest form of love and compassion? How does a judgmental snark become a yogi who really does see and honor that spark of the divine that’s in all of us? I want to have my cake and eat it too… and we all know how that turns out.
I wrote an appropriate, if ever-so-slightly tangential take on this dilemma some time ago over here. It bears repeating.
I haven’t the energy or the inclination to confirm tonight that this quotation is attributed appropriately, but Google tells me that Ezra Pound said, “I have never met a poet worth a damn that was not irascible.” It might amuse you to note that I discovered that gem while idly googling “irascible buddha.” Really, the words just aren’t coming so easily tonight, and I was looking for an easy way out. If the I.B. is a legitimate aspiration, I can throw in the towel right now. Alas, I don’t think it exists. But you have to admit it would make a damn fine band name. I could just take up the guitar with my cake…
Regardless, I’m not saying anything original here. This sort of conflict has been around about as long as abstract thought itself. It’s really just another way of saying that I want to be good and worthy but still get my kicks, too. I want to make the world a better place by having been here, and I want to give it a spanking and put it in time-out for having needed the improvement in the first place. I want to see god in the people around me, but most days I can’t stand to look at them. It’s ultimately hubris, I suppose–I think I can be wholly responsible for The State We’re In, both passively criticizing and actively changing everything around me.
Whatever the reason, it makes for a little blogging problem. I’m here simply to write, a directive that gives quite a bit of leeway. But I’m also conscious of the fact that I have readers, and they may not welcome a steady diet of acrimony and spite, no matter how amusingly worded. Then we get into the sticky territory of policing my own words, which leads right back into that old judge not debate, which gets me after my own tail until I just collapse on the floor. Circular thinking is the drug of choice for intellectual procrastinators–you do a lot of work, but get absolutely nowhere at all. It allows one to maintain the illusion of productivity. And, boy howdy, is productivity one of my golden calves.
Both hard science and woowoo tend to agree that all organisms strive for homeostasis, for balance. Balance implies two or more opposing forces reaching some sort of harmony, not the annihilation of one by the other–which suggests that I can have my dry martini commentary and my unicorns and rainbows. My irascible and my buddha. It’s a hopeful thought.
Rogue Memory
Remember that first Birds & Bees talk? The messy and vaguely embarrassing details about how babies are made, and the realization that adults you know–your mom, your dad, anybody with kids–had done those things at least once… It’s all a little shocking, a little fascinating, a little disconcerting. In short, it’s a big deal. It’s one of those milestones you carry with you.
My story is pretty uneventful. Mom gave the usual “when a man and woman love each other very much…” routine, with some G-rated visual aids and lots of dry, boring egg and sperm stuff. Not very unusual, except for one thing: it didn’t happen.
On my last visit home, I recounted my memory of this event. It was pretty vivid: I remembered the book, the floral-print arm chair, the room in my grandmother’s house, how I was sitting… all of which made it that much more disorienting when my mother told me it had never happened. I defer to her memory on this one–after all, I was rather young. But this isn’t the only time that a particularly vivid or cherished or noteworthy memory has been deemed false by someone who ought to share it. But without hard evidence, who’s to say which of us is right?
Memory’s a slippery, slippery thing. It’s not to be trusted, but it’s also frequently all we’ve got.
That conversation made me doubt afresh every memory I think I have about my childhood and adolescence, and there’s a certain bereavement that comes with that. I’ve lost something that may or may not have ever existed, and I’ve nothing for replacement.
But does it really matter if my memory is true or not? Our species has long put great stock in myth, and told it like it was truth. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact of a different sort, and is no less valuable for it.
Mine is a problem of simple semantics: All this time, I’ve said memory and meant historical truth, meant the facts of what came before. Fact has a place at the table, but the guest list is larger still. Memories exist in a kind of no man’s land between fact and fiction, and can’t be made to fit the rules of either. Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
My memories are a map of where I came from, but one that could never get you back to any place I’ve been. You’d be better served by a trail of breadcrumbs–more reliable, and you’d have a snack.
Perhaps this is why we love a good scar–it’s proof, a lasting imprint from our collision with some part of the world. We had substance. We were here. Beats Kilroy doodles.
Memories are of events that have helped shape the person you are, and the memory itself–the distillation of the event, the facts or feelings that stand out from it–continues that work as long as it sticks in your head. So when these movers and shapers can no longer be trusted, what’s a gal to do? Jettison the false-in-facts but true-in-feel in favor of a dry, rote account of what “really” happened? Wax philosophical about how reality is a fluid concept and not subject to the laws of small-minded beings? Wish you’d taken more pictures? Or maybe you just go with it: at the next family gathering, we’ll each have our stories to tell. Maybe some of the ragged edges will match up. Maybe we’ll find a new mythology in the spaces between.
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy
Tagged barbara kingsolver, memory