159 - Memory and Truth

Memory and Truth

MEMORY is vital to human life. The Scriptures make memory central to faith. "Remember!" is one of its great commands. Israel is constantly told to remember the day of their freedom from Egypt, to remember that they were once slaves, to remember how God had led them through the wilderness and into the land of Canaan. They are told to remember all that God has commanded them. They are told to remember the covenants and to remember how God has judged and has been merciful. Above all, they are to remember God-as God remembers them in steadfast love. And, often, they do remember. They remember in times of trouble and affliction. They remember as they seek understanding and a way to live. They remember in the midst of judgment, and they remember while in bondage. They remember in order to interpret what is going on in the world and what it means, and they remember in giving thanks and praise.

So, too, with the Christians. Peter remembers, when the cock crows, what Jesus had said. Those on the way to Emmaus remember-and burn within-when the stranger reminds them and interprets for them all the Scriptures "beginning with Moses and all the prophets." "Do this in remembrance of me," said Jesus.

I

The current state of American cultural and religious memory is, to say the least, unimpressive. Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr. recently published a book entitled Cultural Literacy (1987) in which he laments the fact that even the basic cultural information needed to read a popular news magazine intelligently is simply not known by a high percentage of our population. One empirical study Hirsch cites reveals that, of the one thousand 16- to 18-year-olds interviewed, half could not identify Churchill or Stalin, ten percent thought Peter Ustinov was a leader of the Russian Revolution, and 75% had no idea what Reconstruction was.

The figures would doubtless be still more discouraging if the same study were done on religious history and biblical knowledge. Newsweek, in its report on the book, gave a wrong answer of its own in a little "pop quiz" taken from Hirsch's appendix. The editors tell us that "Get thee

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behind me, Satan" is spoken by Jesus to "the Tempter" instead of to ... well, you know the right answer to that question. (Perhaps they had Matt. 4:10 in mind.) Such religious illiteracy is not among the unchurched alone. The church is beset by a devastating lack of religious memory as well-what James L. McCord once bewailed as our "theological amnesia." Many theologians have echoed this diagnosis. George Stroup is not alone when he argues, in The Promise of Narrative Theology, that "the silence of Scripture in the life of the church" and "the loss of theological tradition" are key factors in and symptoms of a "crisis in Christian identity."

II

If we agree that memory is humanly and spiritually vital, and worry as well that cultural and religious amnesia are widespread contemporary pathologies, Oliver Sacks' accounts of patients afflicted with Korsakov's syndrome, a neurological disorder marked by profound and permanent amnesia, become particularly striking.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987), Sacks tells of two people whose lack of memory throws their worlds into constant flux. Without memory, these two men have no way of knowing from moment to moment where they are, whom they are with, what they were doing just a moment or two ago, or, most poignantly, who they are. Without memory, they cannot even remember that they do not remember. "He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds," Sacks says of one of them. "He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him."

Writing like a narrative theologian, Sacks says that "to be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self." When memory goes, we go. We lose our very selves. Sacks quotes the filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, who says that "you have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing." Perhaps this is why cultural analysts and theologians are so worried about loss of memory, about cultural and theological amnesia. Perhaps this is why the Bible commands us to remember. Our memory is our life.

Of course, most of us are not stricken like these patients. Theirs is the extreme case. They have lost the very capacity to remember. We have not. We have the neurological capabilities to remember, to sustain a narrative over time. We suffer from nothing like what they suffer. Yet, perhaps we do suffer from something just enough like what they do that we can learn from their condition in extremis something about our own. Perhaps we, by failing to remember rather than by being unable to remember, also lack the narrative we need in order to know where we

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are, what we are doing, whom we are with, and, most poignantly, who we are-not so literally, of course, but perhaps no less truly. If we find ourselves, as individuals and as a society, a bit disoriented, not knowing quite what to do with our lives, a little unsure of how to make sense of things, not altogether convinced that things even can make sense in the long run, is it possible that a frail memory is part of the problem?

III

If that is the problem, the answer seems straight-forward. Remember! Study history! Learn the story! That, of course, is the answer that people like Hirsch recommend. We need to put the schools to work properly, so that coming generations will know the fundamental content of our shared culture. Religiously, we need to teach the cultural knowledge of the faith "when you are sitting in your house, and when your are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise" (Deut. 11:19). This is true, but the answer is not news to us. We have been told this before, and still we do not do it. Why? Perhaps Sacks' patients have a clue for us here as well.

One of the patients, a Mr. William Thompson, deals with his loss of memory in a rather spectacular way. As the abysses yawned, Mr. Thompson "would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds." At one moment, he would be a grocer in his own store; at another, "the Rev. Mr. Thompson." All within the course of a minute, the doctor standing before him at the hospital would be an unknown customer, then an old friend, then the butcher next door, and finally the mechanic at the Mobil station down the street. With the world constantly disappearing on him, meaning vanishing, he would construct a world himself, make meaning.

For Mr. Thompson, the worlds he manufactured were not "fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant-there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr. Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him." Sacks suggests that Mr. Thompson is involved in this desperate telling of tales because, "deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania."

Mr. Thompson cannot turn to memory for meaning. We can, but why don't we? Perhaps, it is because our moral and spiritual lack of orientation so frightens us that we, too, turn to the only inner resource we have left, our capacity to make things up. Some theologians these days are suggesting, in fact, that this is what we must do. Meaning, they say, resides in our imaginations. Faith, they say, is our capacity to "make meaning," to "construct our worlds." The content of our faith is the content of our images, the shape of the coherence that we ourselves generate. But this is a desperate answer.

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How does it feel to be making one's world all the time? What does Mr. Thompson's life feel like to him? "It is certain," says Sacks, "that he is not at ease-there is a tense, taut look on his face all the while, as of a man under ceaseless inner pressure; and occasionally, not too often, or masked if present, a look of open, naked, pathetic bewilderment." All of this is defended against by a kind of forced superficiality. His life is,

in effect, reduced to a surface, brilliant, shimmering, iridescent, ever-changing, but for all that a surface, a mass of illusions, a delirium, without depth. And with this, no feeling that he has lost ... the depth, that unfathomable, mysterious, myriad-levelled depth which somehow defines identity or reality.... Under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange loss of feeling-that feeling, or judgment, which distinguishes between the 'real' and ,unreal,' 'true' and 'untrue'... important and trivial, relevant or irrelevant.

Sacks wonders, as he watches him, if he has lost his soul.

IV

Sacks also wonders about the soul of another patient with Korsakov's. In his chapter on "The Lost Mariner," we meet Jimmie, a former sailor whose amnesia has erased everything from 1945 on. The present is lost for Jimmie like it is for Mr. Thompson. He, too, lacks the continuity that makes for a sense of self. He tells Sacks that, for the most part, he doesn't really feel alive. His face, as Sacks puts it, "wore a look of infinite sadness and resignation." But when Sacks asks the Sisters at the Home for the Aged, where both Jimmie and Mr. Thompson live, whether Jimmie has lost his soul, they are, in his case rather than Mr. Thompson's, outraged by the question. "Watch Jimmie in chapel," they say, "and judge for yourself."

I did, and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue, and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the spirit of the Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakov's then ... for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism-that of meaningless sequences and memory traces-but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break.

Here a person incapable of sustaining a narrative in memory somehow allows himself to be held by a meaning he could not make.

What allows Jimmie to do this? And what keeps Mr. Thompson from doing so? Sacks provides a profound answer. Jimmie somehow senses his loss. "Jimmie has moods, and a sort of brooding (or, at least, yearning) sadness" which Mr. Thompson does not. Mr. Thompson is so quick with his solution to his loss that he cannot even feel the loss, "his confabulations, his apparitions, his frantic search for meanings, being the ultimate

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barrier to any meaning." What does Mr. Thompson need? He needs to stop. He needs to be quiet. He needs to allow himself to receive the gift of meaning. He needs to quit, for awhile, doing it all himself. "If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant; if only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber; if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions-then (ah then!) reality might seep in: something quite genuine, something deep, something true, something felt, could enter his soul."

V

We can barely live without memory. Without a narrative that sustains us, the world-and we ourselves-are virtually phantom. But the issue is not just whether one has a narrative or not. The issue is whether we have one that is true and genuine, one that can sustain us in reality, one that, having been given it and having committed it to memory, frees us from desperately having to continue to make one up.

Mr. Thompson has no memory worth speaking of at all. He lacks the physical capacity for the memory that undergirds identity and coherence. We do have that capacity, so we think we can do better. Our memories are sustained, at least, over longer periods of time. But what if the memories we do sustain are riddled through with confabulation and illusion? What if what our memory contains is simply the residue of a driven fantasia of our own making, the accumulation of a frantic search for meaning which never stops, never waits to receive, to be given something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt? Then, it seems, we are not all that much better off than poor William Thompson. And perhaps we are even less well off than poor Jimmie.

We do have memories. Then what shall we remember? It makes a difference whether what we remember is of the truth. So, perhaps it is wise to remember the one who said: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free" and "I am the way, the truth, and the life." This one, who also says, "Do this in remembrance of me," is not merely jogging our memories. To remember this one is to bring to the present the creative and redemptive past. After all, we tend to forget, but God always remembers.

Craig Dykstra