Lucky or Ordinary? Burdened With All I’ve Known and Now Can No Longer Recall As I Wish
There's a fashion surge for ekphrastic poetry these days. Most simply, that means poetry based on specific works of art in another form than poetry. After reading other things having to do with the effects on one’s mind of images (in whatever form) that lodge there, the whole notion of saving memories seems to have taken root in my head. *
It occurs to me that while the 'human condition' is in no way monolithic, there might be some divisions of sensitivities to varied experience. In a word, maybe some people are born luckier than others in their abilities to respond to what they experience. After reading W. H. Merwin's, Old Man at Home Alone in the Morning, (an essay anyone of any age should read and enjoy) the following changes began to bother me.
Now I'm an old woman burdened with all I've known and now can no longer recall as I wish. So much from childhood is gone, but what isn't keeps bubbling up through the muck of forgetfulness when I least expect it to. Some of those bubbles make me wish I'd been aware of them when I was a mother. Oh, of course, I'm still a mother because one can't go backward, but now for me, that's a status without much meaning since nearly all of my grandchildren are older than I was when I became a mother.
Take for instance, the preoccupation with the names of things, that was so essential to my father, and that I've retained, yet can't recall whether I ever consciously tried to pass on. Even my dearest companion was somewhat afflicted with this (I hope minor) obsession. And why does it loom now so large as a matter of consequence to my bumbling consciousness? Even wrote about it for SWW (Renewing Respect for Language: The Subjunctive Is a Governor of the Consciousness That Uses It). Did I fail in a relatively simple matter of pointing out things to our children? Do any of them care half as much as we did?
In these pleasant, lonely rooms, my thoughts come out in sentences half the time, as if I were speaking aloud to a human listener. When they're allowed, or more accurately, when they're able to float free, they seem cloudy and dulled. I realize I’m not able to be back in the place and time that gave them rise, but am forever exiled from what made just being alive so precious.
I can recreate an occasional seminal moment if I've written about it at some time, (immediately giving rise to regret that keeping a journal was such sometime thing). A few of the best and worst remain vivid even without that help, but no amount of effort to fill in lost detail or to bring back anything concrete about some of the most important events makes anything fully clear again. Should I be glad of the lack?
After perhaps half my life had gone, I began to notice how only what included my husband seemed to have had anything much to do with whatever I became. Now, of course, I see the error in that, yet it's as if I was at best, half-formed before he entered my life.
The fact that I must look at photographs to be sure I recall his face, though his body comes clearly into my mind, distresses me. I can't remember exactly how his voice sounded, after sixty years of listening to it in every possible mood and tone. A month or so ago, another man kissed me on the lips as a gesture of a suggestion that I couldn't accept, and suddenly, I could remember the lips of my lost love as though I had felt them yesterday.
The experience has taught me that the past is with me like the skin on my body, never to be changed. And, like that skin, can't be peeled back to reveal anything without acute pain, even if one could figure out how to do it.
I'm exhilarated and humbled — and apprehensive. Without a doubt, I'm not unique in these contradictory feelings, yet I hope I might at least be especially blessed, like someone born with a 'silver spoon' in my mouth. I understand that there's no obvious way to find out whether that's the case, or if 99% are there with me.
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