I remember
I remember exactly how it happened. Exactly. Just like this.
Dear friends,
A few years ago, I read Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, a vast essay, translated brilliantly from Russian into English by Sasha Dugdale. As the book’s title suggests, it concerns memory and — importantly — the memory of memory.
Maria Stepanova troubles memory, in anecdote and exploration, revealing where hers was at times reliable and other times faulty, before querying whether the reliable memories were really useful and whether the faulty ones were useless. She looks at the magnificent and the mundane, and writes: “The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonised: first the raiding parties, and then the slow modification process.”
I bristle at this a little, but I take it as a warning, too. The simile of “like a huge planet waiting to be colonised” stops me. My memory is not without its agenda; it has uses in mind for the past it wishes to find.
She also goes on to write: “Any anecdote is just a novel compressed down to a point, and it can equally well be re-inflated to elephantine proportions. The opposite must also exist, when your intended meaning is too large even to want to try to fit it into a form.”
What happened yesterday? Did the story I shared reveal exactly what occurred, or was the story modified for the purposes of communication or safety or evasion? Is memory only for events I deem important? Why do I remember that particular man on the bus home from the city all those years ago? 1993, it must have been. No, 1992. What is this memory’s purpose for me? How would I respond to any critique offered to me about my employment of memory?
Meister Eckhart — a German Dominican priest who died in around 1328 — was, in my opinion, as interested in questions of what we’d now call theoretical physics as he was about the question of God. Many of his sermons concern themselves with the idea of time, and he wonders if time has a purpose. His own conclusion is that yes, it does: to deepen love.
At least, that’s my memory of what I read in one of sermons, even though I don’t remember which one. I’m sure it’s right. Most definitely. Absolutely.
Both poems chosen for this week’s Poetry Unbound episodes explore memory. Suji Kwock Kim’s “Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border” considers how memory was taken from her, and how she — in something like a prayer — pleads to a grandfather she barely knows to help restore the memory of a father who was undone by the displacements of war. Ray Young Bear’s “Our Bird Aegis” looks at the unexplained in the story of a name and — using language, myth and imagination — makes a memory that will support the present.
These are two intelligent uses of memory, showing malleability as well as a profound relationship to what it is that memory is able to offer, namely a sense of the present. When memory is shattered, it is not just the past that’s affected. These poems, in lament and inventiveness, offer ways to live with what the past will not give. Memory, even in its absence, is put to use.
When a friend died, I kept waiting for him to turn up in my dreams in the subsequent weeks. I’ve always had dreams of the dead after they die. However, my friend didn’t turn up, despite my best efforts to cajole my unconscious into drawing him up for the dreamworld. So I drew him up myself, not waiting for sleep and wrote about him as if he had visited me. That has become a memory now — not the event, but the need for the event, and its strange sufficiency.
So, here’s the question: What’s a small memory you hold onto? Little or large, call it to mind, and consider what the function of this memory is for you.
As always, I’ll look forward to exploring your replies today and tomorrow. Thanks, friends, for reading and writing. Thanks, too, to all who came to the launch and reading this week, whether in person or online. It was lovely to meet you.
The Latest from Poetry Unbound
Episodes 11 & 12
You can also listen on Spotify, poetryunbound.org, or wherever podcasts are found.
Poetry in the World
Feb. 14 at 3pm, New York City, US
I will be recording the Person Place Thing podcast with Randy Cohen at Columbia University. Free but registration is required. Register here.
Feb. 15 at 6pm, New York City, US
I’m leading an in-person seminar called “Time in Conflict; Time in Poetry” about conflict in time and poetry. Register here.
Feb. 23 at 7pm, Chestertown, Maryland, US
I’m doing a reading from the forthcoming Kitchen Hymns; however, it is sold out.
Feb. 24 at 10am, Chestertown, Maryland, US
I’m holding a half-day workshop, and limited tickets are still available.
March 5, 7, 14 at 7pm Eastern Australia time, online
I’m giving three talks about poetry and spirituality, as part of the Australian Joint Spirituality Development series. Learn more and register here.
March 7 at 6pm ET, online
I’m leading a Zoom seminar called “Time in Conflict; Time in Poetry” about conflict in time and poetry. Register for it here.
March 15 at 7pm, London, England
I’m giving a talk for the paperback release of Poetry Unbound; 50 Poems to Open Your World. Registration here.
May 17 at 2pm, Camden, Maine, US
I’ll be talking about the word “you” in poetry at the Camden Public Library. Registration here.
May 24–26, Boone, North Carolina, US
I’m leading a a 48-hour Poetry Unbound retreat, where there will be poetry readings, responding to prompts, and sharing. Information and registration here.
June 27–July 7, Patmos, Greece
I’m one of the speakers at the 10-night “Journeying into Common Good” salon, together with Krista Tippett, Allison Russell, JT Nero, and Joe Henry. More details here.
Dear Pádraig, since you mentioned the writing about your friend, I wonder if you’d share an excerpt of it here? I had a similar experience as my mom died. I wanted to keep her present, so I wrote about her and shared it with others, but then my writing kind of subsumed the experience of the loss a bit. Here’s what I wrote:
To Be Still Is Also To Remain
True story:
I don’t know why Mom
Wintered her orchid in the back corner
Of our basement laundry room
But in the spring
When we went to retrieve it
The stem had woven itself
Into the tripod of our childhood telescope and
The flowers had bloomed
In the dark
So that to separate the two
Would have meant destroying the
Whole Enigma
Cancer can be like that
But so can any attachment
I don’t know what happened to the orchid
But what happens to me
When I already grafted her name to my heart
And we grew through each other
And now she’s gone
Here’s how we spent her last days:
Each morning
We would lift Mom from her dim bedroom
Where the rhododendron bush writhes
Around the window into the backyard
And carry her to the den
With a fireplace
Where she would close her eyes
And smile and agree with us
Later we would carry her outside into the sun
Visitors left flowers by her head
And flowers were painted on the cards
That came in the mail
A stinkbug I swear was my father
Kept vigil by the same chair we used in his last days
And after I tossed it out back
Somehow returned
Watching her from the wall, then the side table
Then it was on her collar and waved a leg at me
We carried her back to bed each night
While everyone stood and cleared a path
I’ll remember that
Every time I lifted her
Onto Dad’s chair or the commode or the wheelchair or the bed
She would hold me around my shoulders
And bury her face in my chest
Trembling on the leg that still stood
So often, especially toward the end
When I set her down she would forget to let go
There were many times when we
Got stuck like that and
I didn’t remind her.
I remember the slumber of a summer afternoon when the world enveloped in the summer heat was safe asleep except for the cicadas singing their mating song indifferent to the siesta hours of human time.
I remember a gravel road and three kids walking on it.
I remember an endless line of cypress trees on the backdrop.
I remember the sea just beyond those trees.
I was one of the kids, the youngest one, the last in line, trying to keep up with the others.
I remember the flip-flops I wore that day, but I can't remember how to be that child again. She's long gone, leaving me with a faint afterimage of a midsummer day—that too, long gone.
In my mind, the scene unfolds like a movie reel, but I know it's a semi-constructed thing. But this image of the three siblings on their quest to discover the world is engraved in me, and I always come back to it when in need of some magic in my life.