Time Travel
Memory is a strange thing. Yesterday I dedicated enough time to sort through the folders of legal, financial and administrative paperwork archived on occasion of the passing of my mom and more recently my sister. There seemed to be a lot of evidence for events that were sudden and still feel less than real, less familiar than pouring a bowl of cheerios or sitting at a Starbucks with a cup of hot coffee at this keyboard. The coming (birth) and departure of those close to us is intrusive, violent, indicative that whatever life itself is, — it cannot be domesticated, tamed to our categories of mind.
There is no language to convey the travail of birth for a woman, and the following effort to nurture and protect the new life. Likewise there are no words which one can marshal to convey the loss of a family member. If I could, would I rewind time, to try again to know my mother and my sister more perfectly? Of course. Upon reflection I think that I wasted much of the time that I had with them.
I am reading Sarah Manguso’s book, Ongoingness, the End of a Diary. Manguso is a skilled writer expressing much meaning with few words. Much of the book is reflection upon the change in her sense of self, and the nature of time, the arc of a human life, — in the light of motherhood at age 38.
Manguso serendipitously recalls what was perhaps her earliest memory of objects in her crib, before she had learned the rudiments of language. She says:
I believed I was trying to remind myself of how it felt to be wordless, completely of the physical world — that even before my body was an instrument for language it had been an instrument for memory. p. 66
To be “completely of the physical world,” is a state to be commended. Language is like the Trojan horse. No question of the gift, yet beware of the dangerous content. With language comes the hazard of distortion of reality, of seduction to the dark purposes of others, and perhaps worst of all, of self-deception.
I cannot be sure of this. I think that my first memory is of being seated in a metal stroller, on a warm day, while petting a rooster, unusually domesticated, to allow a human close enough to touch it’s feathers.
