By
Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
It
was the folkloric figure, Hondo Crouch of Luckenbach, Texas, who famously said,
“You can’t forget memories.”
I
have his quote on a T-shirt and it never fails to draw a smile from the people
who see it.
In
a more serious frame of mind, a friend asked, after reading my book of
memories, Little Miracles, “What do you do to keep your memory working
far back in time.”
I
am reminded that the oldest memories are the easiest ones to recall as we age.
It’s the moment by moment, fractious memory that seems to fall apart. So we
work, willy-nilly, at remembering; at what Marcel Proust, the greatest
rememberer of modern literature, called “La reserche du temps perdu.”
In
search of lost time …
During
a writing workshop writer Chris Riedel went back as far as possible to recall
going into his father’s barn where, for some reason, he saw a small cup of
kerosene, took it and downed it. He was possibly two years old and he dropped
dead on the floor of the barn. The way he told the story, as if researching as
he spoke, he awoke a little later in the hospital.
In
retelling this true story, I feel a bit guilty because I am always researching
lost time. Reaching into the not-too-distant past to bring up again Chris’s
riveting, true revelation.
And
there you have it: it’s all in the past, even when it’s in the present. After
the moment of occurrence, it’s all imagination and memory.
Proust
used a teacake, given to him as a child, to bring back a lost moment in time.
Jack Kerouac (nicknamed “Memory Babe” in high school) used drugs, people often
like to say, to get back into his early days. I believe that’s not true; he
used the original time machine, mind, to go back to his teen years.
To
answer our friend’s question, though … How do you strengthen your memory and
go back fifty years or more?
The
great sci-fi fantasy master, Roger Zelazny, once told me it helped him to read.
Seven books a week, he added.
My
father did a kind of “yoga recollection”. He put his open palms behind his
head, closed his eyes, and leaned back in time. One memory he returned to many
times was done in just this way, reaching back. Each time he reached new
details emerged.
The
story was about a man in a factory who saved the lives of two other men who
were cleaning a large vat of chemicals. When, suddenly, more lethal chemicals
spilled out of a broken supply pipe, one of the men jammed his hand, then his
whole arm, into the orifice.
So,
one man saved two others from being scalded to death, but the rescuer lost his
arm all the way up to his shoulder joint.
In
his recollection, my father always expressed the moral of the story. The man
who saved two others didn’t think, he acted. The rescue was
instant. My father concluded, “A purely unselfish act comes from a truly
unselfish person.”
But
as I was saying, the more I heard this story, the more I realized my father was
recapturing the past, one little detail at a time.
A
fifteen-year-old in a writing workshop I taught in Indiana told a classroom
full of young writers that she could remember being born. She described it in
perfect detail.
“How
do you do that?” a classmate asked.
“By
not forgetting,” she replied. “I just remember.”
 |
| Gerald Hausman |
I
remember the time when I was five and I was run over by a car at night. And I
also see myself jumping out of second story windows, landing softly, and
rolling to a standing position. These are dramatic actions. You do not forget
them easily. However, try and recall the exact color of a person’s face or
something fairly mild in the memory zone, like the color of eyes from fifty or
sixty years ago. You need a stimulus, a lightning strike!
Lying
in bed though, when I was thirteen, I tried to remember my first romantic kiss.
I went back to a fifth birthday party. There was the girl … what was her name?
In the darkness of my attic bedroom I saw her short pageboy hair and then
suddenly her name sprang forth. Judy.
Another
time I stared at my face in the mirror, trying to recall each scar. There was
one on my forehead where a friend, a student of mine, struck me with a martial
arts sokol pole. I stared and the memory came back. There is no bleeding
like a forehead wound.
I
reached back and touched another scar-tissue memory. My best friend, farting
around as we used to say, chunked me on the nose with a WWII sand shovel. The
scar gets very dark in the sun, but occasionally, in winter, it actually drips
a little blood, as if the nose remembers.
I
met with this old best friend, and he confessed the only memory he deeply
shared with me was swinging from wild grape vines in the deep, lost woods in
our backyards. The two of us swinging like monkeys.
I
actually did some swinging motions on a parallel bar and the memory came back
strongly. I saw the tree enveloped in vines and the two of us arcing back and
forth. I then envisioned a picture of his house, his porch, his parents, his
brothers. It all came back. One swing and I was back there, fifty years ago.
Some
get their memory working by taste, others by smell. A few by visionary
recollection. Some by imaginative meditation. Recalling time past –
literally, calling it back.
I
swear by the “muscle memory test”. The memory stuck in the mind, is always
there. On file, as it were. Waiting to be retrieved.
It’s
like the character in Erich Maria Remarque’s collection of stories called Eight
Stories. A man in WWI is buried by a bomb and he is in a front-line trench.
Timbers have fallen on him and he is pinned and cannot move. And there he stays
for many long hours until a rescue is accomplished, and the soldier’s life is
saved.
As
the story unfolds, we find that the recovered man has what we now call PTSD,
but to such an extent that he is frozen in time. Yet no one can say how frozen
his mind is because he’s unable to speak about his experience. He sits in a
state of isolation, held prisoner by dark forces.
His
wife, however, will not rest until he is brought back, as if from the dead, and
returned to his former self.
This
true story completes itself when the resolute woman brings her forlorn husband
back to the very dugout where the bomb fell and imprisoned him. She insists
that he climb down into the darkness of the death pit where all his comrades
were killed.
There
he wanders, picking up bits of metal and wood. In each of those simplistic
movements, he somehow finds himself, and for the first time, speaks his wife’s
name. “Anna,” he says aloud for the first time since the bombardment.
My
belief is that as writers we work the memory muscle every day.
Remarque
did so and wrote one of the most poignant 20th century war novels
ever written – All Quiet on the Western Front.
I
believe, now more than ever, that writing from memory is a gesture of love. To
write is to love again. Try going back to another time, one lost to your
conscious mind. Research yourself in the ghostly mirrored remembrance of
forgotten time.
A
different person awaits you.
Link:
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Gerald Hausman is an award-winning, bestselling author and storyteller.