The Object of Memory

“We take pride in living in and for the present moment, when all our predecessors have turned to dust and no successors have yet appeared. But if for some reason this vanity, of which we are usually unconscious, suddenly mounts from the feet to the head, it can cause a mild craziness, like that of those virgins who imagine they are pregnant with the globe of the earth itself.”  The Man without Qualities

This is the time of life I find myself in; I feel all of life’s possibilities vicariously, and am often paralyzed by the nature and significance of the decisions I’m confronted with. My grandfather once told me, “If I could go back to any age it would be twenty-one” and with those words he condemned me. As much as I try to suppress my own egotistical tendencies, it’s a slightly unnatural practice to not think of my own pursuit of happiness above all else.  His words remind me that these years are fleeting and that I should take advantage of them to their fullest potential. Virginia Woolf’s character Septimus Smith said, “For the truth is that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.” Although I find this to be a rather morose insight, I can’t help but see some accuracy behind her cynical words. 

Am I doing enough with my malleable youth? I’m ripe and in my prime. I’m an energy vortex; my body and mind want everything for itself. I’m an adult and yet entirely inexperienced, capable yet drowning, successful but regretful for the decisions I’ve yet to make.  As I plan for the future, the present slips away. I open my eyes and suddenly I’m twenty-one years old.

But how did I become the complete being I am today with my particular thought patterns? What is human consciousness and how do I make sense of it? Biological science gives me one set of answers about genetic variants and mechanical electrical charges. I know that perception, emotion and feeling are a result of electrical signals which is a consequence from the disequilibrium of ions. Meanwhile philosophy and literature grapple with these questions from a different approach that often comes into collision with the hard sciences. Why must these bodies of knowledge conflict and could they not be intermingled?
                                                         _________________

As I begin to fully recognize this as my one bizarre and precious chance at life, a kind of churning frenzy takes hold on my thoughts.  My heart pounds, I’m exhilarated, I’m totally alive, and hungry for more. But before I jump into the future, I should start from the beginning of the story, which commences without me. A story of all the human bodies, minds and souls which ultimately helped to create the particular body I inhabit and the life I’m currently experiencing.  It’s a story that begins with an object.

 As a sometimes only child from a couple of complicated families I lacked a stable immediate family unit growing up. I had loving, supportive parents but without consistent siblings to play with I found solace in the stories of older relatives, including my grandfather who once gave me a silver locket. On my fourteenth birthday I received the necklace, which quite possibly holds more significance than any other material object in my possession.

 Neurologist Antiono Damasio claims, “Even when we ‘merely’ think about an object, we tend to reconstruct memories not just of a shape or color but also of the perceptual engagement the object required and of the accompanying emotional reactions”.  When I hold or wear this necklace I think of how my grandfather was always old. I remember his small cottage lined with violet hydragenias where I would go after school. I remember how I never knew him without a neatly trimmed snow white goatee. As my father grew progressively frustrated with his dad’s forgetfulness, I found it endearing. We shared a reciprocal kind of respect and understanding, somehow fostered by the decades between our ages. As I was just beginning to assert my independence, my grandfather was struggling to hold on to his. As my dad anxiously presented me with my first car keys he was hiding my grandpas’. But my grandfather Tom retained his humor and dignity through the most trying adjustments.   

The locket was my grandmother’s before it was mine. When she died she was cremated and my grandfather kept her ashes in a rich dark wooden box on his mantel. For the eight years he lived alone he would light two candles, one on each side of the box and say a few things to her before he went to bed at night. When Tom died at the age of ninety-six he was cremated as well.

One dreamy summer day my father, stepmother and I placed their ashes in a green backpack and walked to the southernmost tip of Whidbey Island. We drank a bottle of wine and my dad and I told stories about the couple whose love created our lives. My grandfather used to walk along that beach every morning before his legs grew as fragile and light as glass. When he felt it was time, my father walked down to the water’s edge and emptied the ashes into the ocean- tiny fragments of bone and dust washed out into the sea to become a part of it. Cemeteries are the earth’s way of never letting go. By now my grandparent’s bodies are floating throughout the Sound. Their spirits are in these words, in my blood, and in the triggering smell of a forgotten memory.


                                                ________________________


Sitting at my desk I hold the silver jewelry in my hand. I wear it and value not for what it is worth but for what it symbolizes. My mother held this locket, as did my grandfather, grandmother and originally my great grandmother before her. This one object has passed through all of their hands. What did the 3 ounces around my great grandmother Effie’s neck feel like to her? When the silver rested on the center of her chest did it weigh as heavily as it does on mine? When I wear the locket I feel connected to these people, most of whom I never meet. Exactly what we share is beyond categorizing. Whatever it is, it feels valid and salient. The ineffability of the emotion doesn’t stop me from basking in its warm rays.

To someone unfamiliar with the locket, it would ostensibly appear to be a solid, circular piece of silver. However, when a discrete groove located on the upper right hand side of the locket is coaxed open, two round sepia tone images of a young woman in white are exposed, smiling coyly. The youth of my great grandmother is revealed, shimmering like forgotten treasure.  

Ever since Mendel found that both black eyed peas and blue eyed children are cause by something called genes, society has pinned everything on heredity. I never meet Effie and yet she is imperative to my particular structure, to my creation.  Looking into Effie’s young face it’s impossible to not grow inquisitive about her life. Maybe there is an insatiable curiosity for that which we can never know. Part of the fascination flourishes from vanity- her personal connection to my being. Without her who would I be? By understanding her qualities and passions would I feel more vindicated in my own? Through her life story will mine begin to take a more concrete shape?

When I look at these images of her, questions rise in my head like a flood. It is surreal to imagine Effie’s life which began approximately 100 years before mine. Effie was born May 30, 1886. My birth day is May 20, 1989. In the photographs she wears a high collar, a necklace and a hat. In one image she appears to be a little younger and more childlike than in the other picture.  Not classically defined as beautiful, she has an intriguing beauty you have to work for. Her features are handsome and she gazes from the locket with a sweet and conservative expression.  

I wonder what her motivations were, her aspirations, and if she fulfilled them all. I wonder what she liked to read, how she carried herself, and how much of her lives on in me.  These questions float and then settle in the recesses of my mind like the dust brushed off of a forgotten book jacket.

The heirloom is small, a little larger than a fifty cent piece. Its silver surface is embellished by a relief engraving of a couple driving an antique automobile equipped with a hand crank.  The car is driving through a rural unpaved road lined with a fence, a young tree, and a rolling mountain range. The car was probably the highest expression of modernity at the time the piece was crafted. Now, it transports me to a time I’ll never truly be familiar with and always imagine shrouded in a hyperbolic elegance, affectation and sophistication. 
                                                 _________________

Effie Kent married Herbert Swalwell in the early 1900s and they had two children. The youngest was my grandmother Jackie.  As a child I remember my grandmother’s room never faltered to carry the aroma of gingersnaps and laundry detergent.  The strange twist of ingredients was as poignant to me as a dip in the ocean a few miles outside her window.  If I forget everything else, that sugary smell will remain etched onto my memory like a pickax to marble. She was a tiny withering leaf continuously sinking in too many covers. I was afraid to embrace her in fear she might disintegrate in a thousand irretrievable pieces, forever lost between the mountainous sheets. I would talk to her about trivial, childish things. Unable to speak or walk she was a prisoner to her own body. The only way I knew she had heard was through her eyes. They were the only way I knew I wasn’t speaking to myself.  My dad explained she had always wanted a granddaughter.  Before the stroke she was going to teach me to paint. She only held me once before the accident and then spent nine years without verbalizing her emotions, nine years speaking to me through her gaze.

This object embodies my ancestry, and all those who came before me who I never met, and yet play an inherent part in the creation of who I am today.  When I think of my family tree I imagine an old growth with a thick trunk, and tens of thousands of branches reaching in every direction. I am located on one of the furthest, spindliest branches from the truck. I’m a thin, young, and tender sliver of wood scraping the sky. I’m aiming for an atmosphere the color of a robin’s egg and supported by an enormous network of bark and roots stretching and gripping deep into the moist earth.

 As a child my father knew his grandmother Effie very well. She was the first one to greet him and ask him about his day when he arrived home from school, just as my grandfather was for me. Once when she was in her seventies my Dad and his brother asked her, “What is the biggest event that happened in your lifetime?” She responded without hesitation, “When your grandpa and I were young newlyweds we used to travel to the countryside in the summer. I remember we would lie down enveloped in the tall grasses and look at the moon and stars above us. The most prominent event in my lifetime, without a doubt, was to hear that the same mysterious moon we would look at together had been walked upon by humans.”

Every time I think about the locket I recall its physical appearance as well as every emotion, person, and event associated with it. The pathway of neurons in my brain is physically changed by each new memory. My relationship with this object is revived each time I learn something new about my great grandmother. When I wear the locket now I become aware of its how its shape mimics the full moon. When I think about the locket I imagine her vividly, lying in tall grasses with the silver around her neck, the brightness of the element gleaming sharply out from the darkness of the night. When I wear the necklace, Effie lives, and when I look up at the same moon she gazed upon so many years ago, I wonder what the largest event in my life will be.

Merekat: Notes on a Blessing

      When Emnet Getahun turned eleven her family decided to go back to their birth country of Ethiopia after years of planning. She was the youngest daughter, and the only one born outside Africa.  At the terminal she sat facing a large window, watching planes arrive from across the globe as an orange sun set over a vast concrete runway. She was giddy and anxious to see the birthplace of her family.  Ethiopia was the setting of her parent’s stories she used to beg them to retell her every night. It was the backdrop of their political tragedies and their adolescent melodramas. She could not wait to associate the actual landscapes to her imagined visions. Waves of anticipation rushed though her arms and legs like electricity. When her plane gently lifted from the airstrip she felt a shiver, like trickling ice water, race down her spine.  Miles between her and the United States she watched her parent’s calm expressions framed by a window of white clouds. She daydreamed about the lush green mountains and thirteen months of sunshine in her ancestral homeland. 

            After a week of staying with her grandmother in the city, her family traveled to the countryside village of Welkete to visit more relatives. The first thing Emnet noticed when they arrived were numerous circular palm thatched huts. Dozens of villagers were standing outside their homes eager to see and greet her family. Three men stood in the center of the crowd, surrounding a sleek red coated cow. The tallest man with thick arms and a pointed blade stepped towards them and began to speak in lyrical Amharic. Because Emnet’s grasp on the language was limited, her mother explained that the village was slaughtering their best cow in honor of the family’s visit.

            Ten relatives made a circle around the cow and began to chant a ceremonial blessing. They thanked the cow for sacrificing her life and they said a family blessing, a Merekat, for Emnet, her sisters and her parents. As the man with the knife bent over to slit the red cow’s throat, it languidly turned its head and locked its wide marble eyes with Emnet’s. Her skin crawled. The large animal continued to stare at her as the fixed blade was buried deep in the flesh of its neck. At the first gush of blood Emnet began to feel nauseous. Her head was light and vacant, as if her brain were hovering a few feet above her shoulders.

            The heifer’s pupils rolled inside her skull to reveal the whites of her eyes. Blood spilled from her, staining the men’s faces and arms. The cow gave a low guttural moan, too closely resembling a human’s, and toppled limply to its side. Its long thin legs jumbled loosely like a marionette’s. Blood leaked from the creature’s cracked skull and opened neck, to form a halo in the dirt around its head. Dogs throughout the village smelt the fresh kill and swarmed around the carcass, licking up the warm blood.

            There was something beautifully horrific about watching the beast slowly bleed its life away. The scene was magnificently corrupt. Emnet wanted to turn her head but her eyes would not allow her. She stared, unblinking and transfixed until she felt she might explode. Every part of her body was straining in a different direction. Her stomach turned over and over to the rhythm of the blood pounding inside her veins. Her heart beat so forcefully against her chest she feared it might leap out through her slack mouth. Emnet felt fragile, weak and disconnected from the scene before her. Her remorse for the creature’s life began to crescendo until it reached a zenith of pressure inside her skull, and finally released through her eyes. Tears clouded her vision until she was free from the limp, twisted vision before her.

            The villagers began to strip the meat, as they always had, and as their ancestors had before them. More men gathered around the body and shared the work of skinning the hide. They laughed at the soft American girl whose emotional response they could not understand. She knew she was embarrassing herself and this realization exasperated her sobbing. She cried for the animal’s life and she cried for her own displacement.

            As her family laughed and joked with the villagers in Amharic. Her older sister Tehut tried to ease her sister’s sniffling, “Emnet, death is a process of life. How do you think we get meat? Animals don’t just waltz up to our plates and conveniently die of natural causes.”  No one could understand why Emnet had reacted so strongly to the death of the animal.

            For Emnet it wasn’t just the cow which had been slain, but her idealized vision of Africa. She was proud of her Ethiopian heritage but this ritual felt as foreign to her as the English language must have initially felt for her father. On the airplane back to the United States she thought about how romanticized her expectations of her parents’ homeland had been. In Ethiopia, she was as conspicuously American as a processed hamburger. A part of her naivety died alongside the red coated cow the day of the blessing. Although the recognition stung at first, she understood more clearly than ever how her identity was convoluted. She was in a cultural limbo. The awareness was as poignant as waking from a warm dream to discover her house on fire. The realization struck her as stridently as the blade into the flesh of a sacrifice.