The Art of Remembering

“The sort of words a man says is the sort he hears in return.”

― Homer, The Iliad

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Dear Kate,

It's hard for an artless man to remember anything properly.

What do you mean by "proper"? an artless man, of course, would object, before caring to know the subject on hand.  And a second objection would come fast and furious, both predictably: Why no gender-neutral language, why "man" and not "man or woman and everything else"?

You can see why it is hard for an artless man to remember anything properly, if at all, because he is too busy conceptualizing a proper rendering of memory, how things and people should fit into the pigeonholes of his easy moralism, not what actually has been and could never be undone by the sheer will of an ideologue.

An artless man's idea of remembering "properly" is to campaign for what should stay and what should go, not something necessarily has to do with the sight and sound and smell of history.  The burning of a forest or the burning of a church all the same to him, only fodder to feed his ideas of right and wrong, he himself never at the stake of either or any, pontificating from a distance afar, with a char-free conscience.

As such there is no genuine conversation with an artless man, only analysis, investigation, formulation, and, all of them, some sort of debate to win in a struggle for power.  He is always in the business to prescribe, but has no vocabulary to describe, because he is impatient for it.  You tell him a story and his eyes are rolling, one objects But...? and the other suggests Shouldn't...?

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"You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you'd run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!"

― Homer, The Iliad

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An artless man is a warring man, his engagement to disengage from the real battles and declare unfought victories.  He prescribes ideas of peace but cares not to describe his unpeaceable self, why, "speaking generally, men are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful of danger and covetous of gain," least his firsthand experience.  He doesn't have the heart to join the combat, let alone lasting it.

"We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice," a devil observes in C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.  "Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility."

There is no shame in a man who is right and "proper" without being tested, repentance and humility not necessary because his courage is unearned.  Justice warriors we all are, just for pointing out the obvious shortfalls of those who went bravely before us, ironically to build a world for everyone to flourish, for an immigrant like me to call this foreign land my very own, for too a young person on his phone talking down on the man who climbs up a tall slippery pole in the deep darkness of a bitter winter to restore his cellphone signal, so that by next morning the boy could bash the man all over again in the comfort of his overheated room. 

Look around Kate, those we can't wait to kill off, to erase from our memory, to write off from history, are the ones, in their often imperfect but just as often courageous ways, who make our today's flourishing possible.  Speak about their mistakes and redress past wrongs we must, but not without "real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility."  Describe for us the sight and sound and smell of humanity, engage in the battle that would run the risk of death.  Tell me a story with tears flowing down your face, not a cop-out with sloganeering and grandstanding.

That's how we remember, properly.

Yours, Alex