A Reflection by Michael Stone
“… & memory strives to augment his ruthfulness …” - William Blake, The Four Zoas: Night the Eighth
We resist knowledge of our own past. We justify and misremember it, mislead ourselves for ego’s sake.
We don’t remember the past the way the actual events occurred. Sometimes all that remains in memory is a bad feeling, let alone the facts or the experience itself. We impose our will on the past in loops of dissatisfaction — we can’t escape the stories we tell. They’re in our neural pathways, in our bodies. The only way out of a bad memory is to look straight at it, accepting all the negative emotions that accompany the images we’ve stored.
The more thoroughly we engage with unhealthy stories, the more healthy our views of them and the less we’re trapped in one-sidedness. As we interrogate our stories, we’re more free to understand ourselves with compassion.
Memory is a chore for me. With the exception of a few strong memories, the past retreats from daily life. I go through days feeling gaps, confused at my response to stimuli. My inner life bubbles from its underground sea in spurts through holes in the ground. People see the geysers and displays. Further down, the richness of the past is overwhelming.
Some moments I’m caught off guard, dissociating, headed into a vacuum. In these moments I’m devoid of certainty, apparently cut off from my own past.
Memory is a place I can go, a place I don’t want to go and a place I forget about. All of my relationships, all I care about in the world, exists in my memory. When I forget to give memory the respect it deserves, I become a shell of a person, mirroring others, subject to trends and rocked by the ceaseless assault of days.
Everything that can be said to make up my life has already happened. Exercising gratefulness for it pulls disparate pieces together in surprising ways. We can step back and see the through-lines of our lives, the things that go in and beyond us.
We already live in the past more often than not, wrapped up in feelings we’ve inherited from old events which began outside us and we observed, recording in memory. By remaining open to the past instead of resisting these feelings, we remain open to the present and the future, the rest of life.
Healthy memory lets nostalgia pass through the sifting mind back to the depths, and shame is just a part of us traveling on the current. It doesn’t last anywhere forever. The mind changes as time goes along, informed by the past, scarring over. It heals itself if it’s allowed to.
The more time we spend with bad memories, the more clearly we see them and the less bad they seem. Looking at them reveals us to ourselves. Entangled in the past, life doesn’t make sense unless we spend time organizing it. But we don’t get to choose when or where we organize our memory, just like we don’t get to choose our past — it’s already happened.
Memory is constant acceptance and revision. We become more life-indebted people when we take chances to record and revisit memories, and we end up more grateful for the limited time we have. Memory is a gift, not a curse. As I try to grow as a person, I’m unable to sidestep memory. Facing memory is ironically the only way to face the present, and without it we would have nothing to return to, no rest.
Memory is a buffer between us and death itself. It supports and upholds our network of relations, our past, our feelings, all that we call life and say is ours. Memory is life-affirmation at its finest. Who would we be without it?
Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.
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