Monday, June 20, 2005
(12:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Memory
Remembering is better than writing down. Once something is written down, it is lost as memory. In some situations, this can be an advantage -- for instance, I would much rather have a definite citation for a particular piece of information rather than a vague "I think I read somewhere" if I needed to write about that topic. But as I start a CD that meant a lot to me last year, I am reluctant to write. The vagueness is the point, the changeability. What was important to me then? What moods dominate? What and whom did I love? It's different, every time, with every different reminder.I don't know if I can write in a way that shows the good and the bad -- the often deep depression coupled with the profound joy, the longing for the experience of that precise time together with the assurance that it really is okay that that was that time and that this time is different. I have been reminded repeatedly of a relationship I had last summer, by lavender dish soap and a trip to Union Station. I like to remember it, and I like still having that person in my life in a different way -- but how to capture this feeling precisely? How to say, "I do not want to repeat that relationship" or "That relationship was often very stressful and emotionally draining for me," without sounding "bitter"?
Why so many accusations like that? Why do people assume that when I recall the negative, I have this hidden resentment? Is the morally appropriate approach to "negative" memories to forget them entirely? Is it unhealthy to think about negative things at all? I sometimes don't feel like I'm really being heard, or better, that I'm being typecast as a negative or a bitter person -- once that is established, people know how to deal with me. But that's not what's going on at all. By remembering, even the bad things, I want to affirm everything in my life as my life. I do not want to "deal with" "issues" insofar as "dealing with" things means getting rid of them or forgetting. Or solidifying them, usually in terms of credit or blame -- even if a provisional judgment can be made, I always want room to reconsider.
I want to absolve the past. I actually went to confession recently, after being somewhat estranged from the Catholic Church for the last year or more. The priest seemed to me to do exactly what I needed -- he heard my confession, including my confession of things that the church takes to be sins but which I have no plans of discontinuing, and he said that he hoped God would bring peace into my life, then said the prayers of absolution. It worked -- I was absolved. Things do seem more peaceful -- the endless self-analysis and self-blame and self-pity to which I am so prone was put on hold, at least for a time.
Remembering a past that has been absolved is different. It is a past that does not enclose the future or determine it; it is a past that has been allowed to be past, a past with regard to which I am free. Forgiveness is important. Confession is important as well, but confession that opens out to forgiveness -- the always incomplete confession that never becomes a mechanistic condition for forgiveness but that must always accompany it. There is no forgiveness without confession, and no forgiveness in which only one party forgives. In being absolved, I must absolve myself as well, set myself free for a genuine and undetermined future -- undetermined as much by a one-sided insistence that the past is irrelevant as by an equally one-sided insistence that it forecloses the future entirely.
There is no forgiving if it must be accompanied by forgetting. This is why Bonhoeffer says that even in the eschaton, there will be sin. Just as Christ's wounds, the culminating mark of the history that is Jesus Christ, remain after the resurrection -- God's act of forgiveness to the world, the foretaste of his coming forgiveness, which comes only with judgment -- so will all of our wounds, self-inflicted and otherwise. The persons who will be resurrected are the exact same persons who lived stupid, petty little lives. If they are not -- if the human race is ever replaced by an unwounded and unwoundable perfection -- then there is no redemption. The world to which, despite everything, God says yes, is this world, this world that we are continuing to create and (perhaps more often) to destroy.
If something like Christianity has anything to offer to the future of this world, it is surely forgiveness -- a forgiveness that is conditioned neither by a morbid inventory of the past nor by a forgiveness that denies the past has happened. Nothing will be destroyed, nothing will be lost -- and nevertheless, there is a future. The denial of the past is the denial of the future as such, which instead becomes an infinitessimal present, where absolute possibility becomes absolute impossibility.
