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Memory & Poppy

Marcel Proust and Montaigne both claim to have bad memories, but In Search of Lost Time and the Essays are made mostly of memory, and nowhere does it seem to be at fault. But it’s hard to find the failure in a mind that isn’t your own, and so I try to believe them when they say it to me. I think I have a bad memory, too. Others don’t believe me. But when I look through my mind something is always missing or awry, like those dreams of searching for something but you don’t know what it is you’re looking for—and those dreams too of being sought by something, but you don’t know by what.

Memories of dreams. What could be stranger?

Underground in a chamber I’m lying down on a stone table and hooded figures stand around me. I can’t see their faces or their mouths but a voice speaks and says that I learned a word I should not know and now I have to die. A kind of sacrifice. Wake up at the point of the knife.

How much life we do not exactly live.

Only now do I understand the dream wasn’t about the precocity of mind seeking to learn what it should not know—in kabbalah there are questions one shouldn’t ask before the age of forty—but of the need to forget what I do.

If I could have forgotten that word my life would have been saved.

That word? I don’t know. I didn’t wake up knowing it.

And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom. . . . But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Memory pretends to be about our own life, having been made, supposedly, by our living it. But each memory has its own life. Like some wandering underworld, we gather into ourselves the shades, and of those souls whose ardent desire is only to exist again, we find ourselves subject to their demands for sacrifice. Just a crumb, just a bite, just a sip of wine; just the scent of a rose enduring past its prime; just light on an oak leaf; just a touch; just a glimpse of another’s skin . . . such desire we feel and seek to satisfy not for our own pleasure, but to bring life back to the horde within us who have no bodies but our own.

Such acts used to be known as sacrifices of aversion.

We think we’re hungry because we do not hear those voices within us begging their offering, threatening us with sickness or death if we do not comply. Mostly we’re deaf to their demands even as we obey them. Repast at morning, noon, and evening. Sustenance not simply of the body, but maintenance of the undergloom. Life that feeds the afterlife.

Throughout Homer the battle-weary heroes pray for the boon of sleep. Nightly oblivion comes to wash away the blood and dust the morning will wake them to again. Dreams of wives and children, dreams of home, offer sweet escape. Often, for lesser reasons, I feel the same. Grateful that the night will remove me from the day. But the night is its own experience, and instead of oblivion we find ourselves occupied by strange visions that, rather than removing us from memory, give us more to remember.

Does the bee dream of its toil or of its dance. Or are those the same dream. The worker bee.

For nine days’ time I was borne by savage winds over the fish-filled sea; but on the tenth we set foot on the land of the Lotus-eaters, who eat a flowery food. There we went on shore and drew water, and without further ado my comrades took their meal by the swift ships. But when we had tasted food and drink, I sent out some of my comrades to go and learn who the men were, who here ate bread upon the earth; two men I chose, sending with them a third as herald. They departed at once and mingled with the Lotus-eaters; nor did the Lotus-eaters think of killing my comrades, but gave them the lotus to eat. And whoever of them ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus no longer wished to bring back word or return home, but there they wished to remain among the Lotus-eaters, feeding on the lotus, and to forget their homecoming. I myself brought back these men, weeping, to the ships under compulsion, and dragged them beneath the benches and bound them fast in hollow ships; and I bade the rest of my trusty comrades to embark with speed on the swift ships, for fear that perchance anyone else should eat the lotus and forget his homecoming. So they went on board quickly and sat down upon the benches, and sitting well in order struck the gray sea with their oars.

Odysseus hard to admire, his mind so quickly outstrips his valor. His cruelty is his cunning. I think about those three men he sent into the field to meet the Lotus-eaters. I remember them at strange moments, as if some pollen has carried the memory in the air, and just by breathing in, I forget what I was doing, and wonder. What happened to them when they ate the lotus? Alfred Lord Tennyson has it—

There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Here are cool mosses deep,

And thro’ the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

—that the lotus lets a music fall upon those men. This is different than listening. The music falls upon them, a melody that lulls the nerves, that brings sleep down from the sky but leaves one still aware—aware, if that word can mean the release from every form of driven care, and whispers instead that all things are at home in themselves and in one another, and homecoming is a shallow wish that thinks toil earns the gift that everywhere already exists. This being at home. It’s just a music. Not a music that lives in you; a music you live within.

Like the thrush in her song. Like the bee in her dance.

Note how the “poppy hangs in sleep.” It’ is not for us to eat. It’s taken its own medicine. It’s succumbed to being.

Maybe the remedy to the problem of self is falling asleep. It must be a different sleep than that which occurs most every night, though each night is a glimpse into what such sleep must be. Mostly, we’re insomniac. Don’t know, as the poppy knows, how to sleep inside ourselves as the blossom sleeps in the bud. Don’t know how to take a dose of our medicine, because our medicine is us.

No wonder those men wept, dragged back to the boat to go home. The honey-sweet lotus freed them of their purpose, released them from their desire, and desire sees with eyes that find distances in every direction, distance hidden in distance, time hidden in time; desire shows us who suffer it a gap that must be crossed, an ocean of climbing waves we must ourselves climb only to find the next one towering even higher; and say somehow we hear a music come to us, we think at first it’s the music of our own beating hearts; but no, it’s not a music within but a music without; say we hear that music, say we breathe it in, and find our wives and children, our home and homeland, all dispersed like pollen in the air, blown into every open thing, the lotus-opened heart and the sleeping poppy.

Who wouldn’t weep to be brought back to the ships and tied up with rope and placed in the belly of a boat.

Image of false labor. Forget it. I mean: give yourself forgetting.

The only work is breathing in.

Genius guards us from forgetting what we’d die to neglect: breath, heartbeat, digestion. Genius tends the body so that we can begin to forget more deliberately all that can be forgotten.

Linguist Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a Middle Eastern tale:

Abu Nuwas asked Khalaf for permission to compose poetry, and Khalaf said: “I refuse to let you make a poem until you memorize a thousand pages of ancient poetry, including chants, odes, and occasional lines.” So Abu Nuwas disappeared; and after a good long while, he came back and said, “I’ve done it.”

“Recite them,” said Khalaf.

So, Abu Nuwas began, and got through the bulk of the verses over a period of several days. Then he asked again for permission to compose poetry. Said Khalaf, “I refuse, unless you forget all one thousand lines as completely as if you had never learned them.”

“That’s too difficult,” said Abu Nuwas. “I’ve memorized them quite thoroughly!”

So Abu Nuwas disappeared into a monastery and remained in solitude for a period of time until he forgot the lines. He went back to Khalaf and said, “I’ve forgotten them so thoroughly it’s as if I never memorized anything at all.”

Khalaf then said, “Now go compose!”

Betray, betray, Genius demands; betray, betray is the poem’s command.

Abu Nuwas’s poetic education is the only tale I know in which forgetting is the work that is done. It is harder work than memory is, forgetting. For many years I didn’t know what to think about the story. Even so, I shared it with many of my classes. I’d read it to them out loud, and no matter the amount of class time remaining, I’d send them out to begin forgetting it. In my heart I kept a secret wish. That the door to the classroom filled with a mist made of water from the river Lethe so that walking away from the desk was to forget all that had been heard.

Now maybe I glimpse it. Abu Nuwas memorizes the ancient poems, chants, odes, and occasional lines and recites them not to prove to Khalaf he has succeeded in accomplishing such an impossible task, though it must have felt so to him as he recited perfectly those thousands of pages over many days. You don’t become a poet by swallowing the library whole. He recites them to put back into the air those words pulled down and made by others into poems. A kind of repair. As if one could breathe back into the sky a cloud that had gone missing, but the cloud is transparent, and not made only of dust and water and air. Abu Nuwas gives back all the words Genius gave others, strange sacrifice to the minor god who keeps life for each of us intact. The only way the sacrifice is pure is if nothing of it remains, and so Khalaf orders Abu Nuwas to forget those lines he’d memorized quite thoroughly. That labor of forgetting repaid a debt inherited from others but nonetheless also his own, for to become a poet means to accept the debt of others as one’s own, and to labor to repay it so that the dead can go free from their bonds. The work isn’t writing poems so much as it’s forgetting them. And if you forget them well, those poems you love, then Genius has some pity on you, and in the absence of what once you knew places in you some words you didn’t know you knew, and so you write them down.

(Then a finger pushes a bead across the metal bar on the abacus. The bead is but a dried poppy head. The finger belongs to the accountant we cannot not know. And what is owed begins to accrue.)