This blog is closed
He also slew Memnon, son of the first morning light
We come into this world at the nadir of our strength, vulnerable to falls, neglect, death dealt by warm breezes. We can neither assess nor comprehend our surroundings. We discern threat from refuge no more expertly than a clam, a philodendron seeking comfortable temperatures without knowing why. We lack memories of our surviving past harms to reassure us.
We lack memory.
It is the beginning of it all, that natal ur-trauma. It is the moment in each person’s life when things first start to turn undeniably bad, and yet none of us remember it. There are people, admittedly, who claim to recall their own emergence from the previous world. They are generally selling something. A rude eviction into a cold and glaring world, awash in blood and shit and strangulating pain, the very fact of your arrival instilling agony in the person who loves you most, and every single one of us has forgotten it.
I have come to believe that that amnesia is the only reason we survive.
Memory is fire, and if you bank its coals tight you can tame it for a while, derive solace and instruction from a careful reading of the ash, but mind the sparks. You cannot catch them. They evade your hand, land on your shirt and set it to burning.
Memory is both shield and sword. Nine times in ten it makes pain worse, a thousand unhealed wounds opening up at the merest touch of the blade. Had Thetis chosen Lethe over Styx as her baptismal font, Achilles would have bandaged his foot and limped for a few weeks and lived.
Insult and injury conjoin. Remembered pain augments the pain of the moment, and the new pain tears at the sutures of the old, and soon you cannot determine which twinge, which ache belongs to which offense. Regard a desert valley abused for decades, cow-burnt, mown to the ground by starveling sheep, weed-sown with worthless Russian thistle. When the Army came in the 1950s they took this battered valley, Yucca Flat, and there they set off one nuclear weapon after another, a hundred atmospheric detonations to scour and poison the landscape.
Had the landscape of Yucca Flat not been previously injured, had it not borne the memory of injury as seeds waiting in its soil, Russian thistle might not have been the first thing to grow back at each Ground Zero. Had the bombs remained undetonated, the land might not have been cleared to make way for new Russian thistle. But both injuries happened in sequence, and the result: tumbleweeds spreading across the desert, radioactive with the memory of hellish fire.
Memory binds the chests of we who suffocate.
It is a shell, this memory, an exoskeleton, secreted flake by flake, offering us an illusory bit of refuge at the cost of freedom. We bear its burden. It is no armor, and pain swells us like sponges inside it. At last there is no more room to swell, the constriction becomes increasingly intolerable, until a loud crack rings out. The shell of memory is sundered, hangs on us in shards, and until new memories grow out of us and calcify there is a little room to move, a little room to breathe. The breeze can play a bit upon us, rake the hairs on the backs of our arms. Injury is more easily acquired without the shell, but the wounds air better.
I found myself alone one night ten years ago on the west slope of the Ozarks, cradled between two arms of the Canadian River, and the night like wet dark velvet covered me. No one I knew knew where I was, a single light a half-mile off casting a bright downward cone aswirl with moths, the sky an upward cone aswirl with stars. I felt roadside gravel sharp against my soles. I would have stayed there rapt — unmoving, stone wedged in heel — but for the memory of love and hunger, the memory that this comforting darkness would be brushed away impatiently, crumbs on dawn’s table.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Comments are closed
Categories:
Biography
