Remembering and Forgetting
Remember me with favor, my God
--Nehemiah
By Bobby Neal Winters
I
am a good listener. A hazard of being a good listener is that one
becomes prey for talkers. One of the many good talkers I’ve listened to
ultimately turned out to be quite insane but he did relay strings of
brilliance every once in awhile. He once remarked on how clever
squirrels were. They could figure out very complex puzzles. One might
wonder then why they weren’t running the planet? It was in his opinion
because they didn’t remember their solutions either as individual
squirrels or as squirrel-kind.
That’s
kind of a silly-sounding observation, but I am a listener and my payoff
for being a listener is to learn things from time to time, so I held
this in my memory to let time judge its value.
Man
is an animal that remembers both as an individual and as a species. As a
species, we have a number of means of doing this: books, statues,
buildings, works of art. If I wanted to work harder, I could go on.
Remembering
is also one of the functions of religion. The Bible is a narrative of
Man’s history from the point of view of the people who became known as
the Jews.
My
mother’s mother died when I was quite young. She had had cancer for
some time before she died. I have memories of crawling on the floor at
the foot of her chair. I also have memories of my mother telling of how
I would crawl at the foot of her chair and was so very careful not to
hurt her because she was in pain.
As
these memories approach an age of 50, I wonder how much I remember of
the event and how much I reconstruct. I also have a very dream-like
recollection of being lifted up to view her in the casket.
My
mother’s mother was my grandfather’s second wife. My Uncle Joe was a
child of the first wife who’d died during the Spanish influenza. He told
how he remembered being lifted up to see his mother in the casket.
This makes me doubt my memory. I wonder if I’ve only created a memory
to fit my uncle’s narrative.
These
early memories are all so fuzzy because I was so young and didn’t have
the language to capture them in a clearer way. Clarity requires making
distinctions and making distinctions requires vocabulary. As a child, I
hadn’t learned enough words to remember the things that were happening.
Go
back and read the first few chapters of Genesis. In Chapter 1 in
particular, look at how many times the verb “separate” is used. God is
distinguishing light from darkness, the sky from the earth, the water
from the earth, and so on.
God is creating by speaking the world into being.
In
Chapter 2, the story of the creation of Man is refined. He is made in
God’s image. Man, Adam, stands with God as the animals come by, and
names them, i.e. he assigns a different word for every animal. In going
through the animals, they didn’t find a suitable helper for Adam, so
God makes him one. He removes one of Adam’s ribs--he separates the rib
from Adam--and he creates a woman--Eve--from it.
Look
at what has just happened. Male and female have been recognized as
different and that difference had been remembered in a narrative. The
institution of marriage is remembered in that very same narrative.
The
physical differences between the male and the female of the human
species are not difficult to discern. One would like to believe that we
didn’t have difficulty discovering them and that we would have trouble
forgetting them. One would like to believe that.
A
thing much more difficult to discover is this: Where do babies come
from? Forty weeks pass between conception and birth. That is a very
long gap over which to connect cause and effect. However, the people of
Genesis had discovered that and enshrined it in the narrative: “Now
Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, ‘I
have acquired a man from the Lord’.”
It is with this narrative and others like it that the human race remembers where babies come from.
It is my belief that we are in danger of forgetting and that many have already forgotten.
In her book The Giver,
author Lois Lowry creates a world in which all of a society’s memory
has been thrust upon one individual. There is only one person to
remember all of life’s unpleasantness. Words are used in such a way as
to conceal their true meaning. For example, the verb “to release” means
“to kill” in this society. Sick old people are released; unwanted
children are released; people who make mistakes are released.
Pretty words for ugly things--one would think we were onto such tricks.
In the television program House,
Hugh Laurie portrays a physician who is interested interested in
puzzles rather than patients. In one episode there is a pregnant woman
whose child is interfering with her treatment. Dr. House refers to the
child as a parasite.
On
the surface this seems to make sense. The child draws nutrition from
the mother’s body much like a liver fluke or a tapeworm might. It is not
a large step to call a baby a parasite. That I will grant. However,
referring to a child in it’s mother’s womb as a parasite fails to make
some large distinctions. The largest of these is that the child has
not invaded the mother’s body as an alien.
Instead
the child was created within the mother’s body in cooperation with the
mother’s body. This is the way our species reproduces and without it
our species would shortly cease to exist. It is a part of who we are.
Remembering
is a process. We have to try to remember. As I said, I am a good
listener and people like to talk to me because talking--retelling the
stories--is a part of our remembering process. Earlier, I’d said that
remembering was one of the functions of religion. This is done by the
keeping of the scripture, but it’s also done by the public reading of
the scripture within the context of worship. Many Christian traditions
use a lectionary which takes them through the Bible on a regular cycle.
The entire Bible is read in public and often special memories are
reinforced by synchronizing them with the church calendar.
Forgetting
is also a process. It takes time to forget. Warm words like “baby” and
“child” are replaced by scientific sounding words like “fetus” and
“parasite.” Instead of viewing a child as a gift from God, it is viewed
as a burden and birth control becomes not just a right but an
entitlement.
In
looking at our history as related in scripture. Remembering where
babies come from, remembering what sex is about is one of the first
things our people did. Forgetting will probably be one of the last.
