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.
Thank you for this.
(excerpts) How Memnon, Son of the Dawn, for Troy’s Sake Fell in the Battle
When o’er precipitous crests of mountain-walls
Leapt up broad heaven the bright morning-star
Who rouseth to their toils from slumber sweet
The binders of the sheaf, then his last sleep
Unclasped the warrior-son of her who brings
Light to the world, the Child of Mists of Night.
Now swelled his mighty heart with eagerness
To battle with the foe forthright. And Dawn
With most reluctant feet began to climb
Heaven’s broad highway. Then did the Trojans gird
Their battle-harness on; then armed themselves
…Swiftly the whole plain filled. Onward they streamed
Like harvest-ravaging locusts…
Mid the Trojans rode the while
Memnon the hero, even such to see
As Ares furious-hearted. Onward swept
The eager host arrayed about their lord….
… He leapt, as leaps a lion mad of mood
Upon a boar, the beast that flincheth not
From fight with man or brute, whose charge is a flash
Of lightning; so was his swift leap….
A great lion seemed he there
Standing above a hart, as jackals they,
That, howso hungry, dare not come too nigh….
…Then from the sheath [Achilles] flashed his long keen sword,
And Memnon his; and swiftly in fiery fight
Closed they, and rained the never-ceasing blows
Upon the bucklers which with craft divine
Hephaestus’ self had fashioned. Once and again
Clashed they together, and their cloudy crests
Touched, mingling all their tossing storm of hair. …
As when a mist enshrouds the hills, what time
Roll up the rain-clouds, and the torrent-beds
Roar as they fill with rushing floods, and howls
Each gorge with fearful voices; shepherds quake
To see the waters’ downrush and the mist,
Screen dear to wolves and all the wild fierce things
Nursed in the wide arms of the forest; so
Around the fighters’ feet the choking dust
Hung, hiding the fair splendour of the sun
And darkening all the heaven. Sore distressed
With dust and deadly conflict were the folk.
… Still mid the corpses and the blood fought on
Those glorious sons of Gods, nor ever ceased
From wrath of fight. But Eris now inclined
The fatal scales of battle, which no more
Were equal-poised. Beneath the breast-bone then
Of godlike Memnon plunged Achilles’ sword;
Clear through his body all the dark-blue blade
Leapt: suddenly snapped the silver cord of life.
Down in a pool of blood he fell, and clashed
His massy armour, and earth rang again. …
Then groaned the Dawn, and palled herself in clouds,
And earth was darkened. At their mother’s hest
All the light Breathings of the Dawn took hands,
And slid down one 1ong stream of sighing wind
To Priam’s plain, and floated round the dead,
And softly, swiftly caught they up, and bare
Through silver mists the Dawn-queen’s son, with hearts
Sore aching for their brother’s fall, while moaned
Around them all the air. As on they passed,
Fell many blood-gouts from those pierced limbs
Down to the earth, and these were made a sign
To generations yet to be. The Gods
Gathered them up from many lands, and made
Thereof a far-resounding river, named
Of all that dwell beneath long Ida’s flanks
Paphlagoneion. As its waters flow
‘Twixt fertile acres, once a year they turn
To blood, when comes the woeful day whereon
Died Memnon. Thence a sick and choking reek
Steams: thou wouldst say that from a wound unhealed
Corrupting humours breathed an evil stench.
Ay, so the Gods ordained: but now flew on
Bearing Dawn’s mighty son the rushing winds
Skimming earth’s face and palled about with night.
Thank you, T’morph. Perfect.
It’s beautiful language, isn’t it?
So’s yours, here.
From Quintus by way of Way, I especially like:
As when a mist enshrouds the hills… dear to wolves and all the wild fierce things
Nursed in the wide arms of the forest; so
Around the fighters’ feet the choking dust
Hung, hiding the fair splendour of the sun
And darkening all the heaven. Sore distressed
With dust and deadly conflict were the folk.
And from yours:
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.