ThroughLines

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately: not surprising since I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2019 novel The Water Dancer which is all about memory and the power of story “to build a bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.” He urges that one must not turn away from suffering, but remember and face it, and tell its story. “We must turn our suffering into a bridge so that others might suffer less” counseled Elie Wiesel. Both men conceived of memory as a connective tissue: it is an energy, a story, a bridge from suffering to hope.

Memory is a ThroughLine in the same way that bearing witness is. It can tell us who we are, and it can define the quality of our lives.

I’m also thinking of the testimony before Congress this week from several police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol building from the violent invasion of insurrectionists on January 6th this year. Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald wrote about this testimony, this witnessing, saying: those who would deny what happened on Jan. 6th, and try to rewrite the history of that day “have been trying to murder memory . . . [and by this testimony] memory fought back.”

Memory can save us. Memory can lead us to safety.

Memory is the connective tissue that can bind together the fragments of experience. When terror or rage or deep sadness stand alone, without a memory to hold them, they can overwhelm reason and courage. When memory brings into light the experiences to which those feelings belong, and with it words, then the connective tissue begins to allow meaning to emerge. It feels like a miracle when it happens. It feels like freedom.

Our understanding of memory is incomplete and the experience of memory can seem mysterious. We’re not sure how it works, where it resides, or why it comes and goes, as it does. We know that memories are recorded in the body. But to understand the language of body memories takes patience, endurance, and sometimes an interpreter.

Memory is not all about suffering, of course. It can bring delight and laughter as well.

How do the house finches know to come back to this exact location to nest and fledge their chicks year after year? They have come to my courtyard for over 20 years now. How is the memory of this safe nesting place passed on from one generation to the next? Memory is mysterious, indeed.

Headline News this week: “Teenage Girl Bears Witness.” Darnella Frazier, at age 17, watched and recorded the protracted suffering of a man, George Floyd, as his life was slowly, purposefully extinguished by another man, a policeman. As he was dying George Floyd called for mercy; he called for his mother; he called for another breath of life.

At the trial, the girl testified about what she saw and how she has felt during the year since she witnessed the death. Every day she has “cried and cried,” she said; in her aloneness she has “apologized” over and over to the soul of George Floyd for “not doing more to save him.” Who will comfort Darnella Frazier?

To be a witness feels like it is never enough. Call out his name. Comfort the witnesses.

Elie Wiesel, a Jewish scholar, humanist and Nobel laureate, was deported at the age of 15 with his family in 1944 to German extermination camps, first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. Each of his family members was murdered within a year. He survived. As a witness to the suffering in those camps, his own suffering and others’, Wiesel devoted his life to writing, teaching and asserting that we, the larger community of humanity, must remember the Holocaust lest we doom ourselves to repeat it, lest we doom ourselves to become inhumane. We must remember.

Reporters proclaim that it took great courage for Darnella Frazier to stand as a witness to torture: to tell the truth of what she saw when George Floyd was killed. Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1986 for telling the truth about the genocide he witnessed, for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. But we are not always rewarded or celebrated for bearing witness. In fact, witnesses can find themselves in grave danger for speaking the truth of what they have seen, heard, experienced.

Yet, witnessing is what we do, despite the risks. As small children we speak what we see until trained not to. It is what we want to do if we choose to be present, aware, and attuned to life around us. Witnessing means choosing to care about others’ lives, their suffering and their joy. Wiesel has said: listening to a witness makes you a witness.”

Keeping quiet, turning away, is what we learn: it is how one tries to cope with the dangers of bearing witness, dangers that arise from within and well as from outside oneself. Darnella Frazier or Elie Wiesel could have chosen to look away, to “forget,” to deny, or to distort their memories in order to spare themselves the pain of their continuing conversations with the souls of the ones who were lost: George Floyd, Elie Wiesel’s mother, his father, his sister, and those millions exterminated in the camps. But one can never undo what has already been seen, touched, heard.

Moreover, a person who has witnessed such terrible events can become afraid that they will be overwhelmed by their own feelings generated by what they have experienced: feelings of pain, grief, rage, helplessness. Indeed, the witness shares the feelings of those whose lives they have witnessed, through empathy and compassion.

While there is a moment of public celebration that a brave young woman was able to tell the truth and be heard, there is also at this same time resistance to her voice, a broad effort to shut out the truth of the suffering and injustice we have witnessed. As I write, laws are being enacted across this country to silence the voices and actions of those who would “Call out his name,” and to punish those who would come into community to bear witness together. Fear of truth can congeal into an embrace of evil.

“To witness is an act of hope,” Elie Wiesel said. It is what we must do. To bear witness is to assert our compassion, our common humanity, with all the joys and sorrows, blessings and suffering that being human brings. Who will protect and comfort Darnella Frazier, she who has given us a gift of hope?

Usually, about now in the process of preparing and publishing a new post, I’m like a hound dog on the trail. I’ve gotten the scent of my topic and leap toward it, follow detours, reroute, and hurry back on track to the finish line. This time is different. I feel flummoxed, which is not a state I enjoy. I’m not fond of being uncertain, uncomfortable, bewildered. Yet that’s how things are right now. Maybe it’s not just me.

This is a time in-between. We are not at the beginning, nor at the end of the pandemic. We are starting to right ourselves in our body politic, but national and local political life is distinctly unsettled. You can hear the pot boiling, the steam wanting to burst out of the pressure cooker.

What is wanting to emerge? What does this unsettled time portend? What creature will we bring forward: a butterfly or . . . ?

The first time I saw the making of a monarch butterfly in full display on the wall of my home I was shocked. I had never had the opportunity to see up close the whole process of the caterpillar finding its place to attach, then weaving its cocoon, witness the quiet state that followed, see the colors and markings of the butterfly showing through the silky shell, and suddenly, gently the emergence of the butterfly, holding tight to her cocoon until her wings could dry. The process took many weeks to complete, and all the while I wanted to touch, to hasten, to protect from cold and rain and heat. Patience is not my strong suit. How often I thought I knew better what was needed.

For several years I had cocoons on many outside surfaces of my house. Dozens of monarchs placed eggs on the milkweed plants, caterpillars grew and scurried in slo-mo across the ground to find the best place to attach and hang. My puppy chased butterfly shadows for hours of endless delight. And then came years of decline. Last year I saw only three monarch butterflies on my ten acres. This year I have seen only one so far.

What process is underway? It’s hard to see right now what wants to emerge from this time of loss, turmoil and hardship. What will the next cycle bring? I feel apprehensive. I want to clench my fist around some small bit of hope or shard of reason; but I know better. I counsel myself to remain patient and respect the larger processes at work. What is emerging will be borne of all the elements: danger, fear, loss, sadness, hope, joy. My task is to stay present, to witness, and to tell the truth of what I see.

We are living in a time of trauma, personal and collective, political and ecological, in which issues of life and death loom large. We see the fragments of broken lives, broken moral codes, broken institutions, broken structures, scattered around us, but the larger picture to which they will belong is not at all clear. Some new shells are slowly being woven with fragile threads. We don’t yet know the shape that is forming within that will emerge into new life. When we look within ourselves we may find clues to enduring principles, and when we reach outward we may find the connective tissue that will help bind the pieces together to form a new being. But the full shape of our future self is yet to be seen and understood. It’s an uneasy time.

The poem “Birdwings” by Rumi, a Persian poet of the 13th century, in a translation by Coleman Barks, reminds me of what is needed.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

I’ve been trying to the love the crows. These sunny winter days they swarm and swoop across the newly planted fields next door, finding seed, exulting loudly in their good fortune. By the hundreds they lift and fall.

But it is their call that I cannot embrace. They are loud alone and in the crowd. There’s no modulation, just a full-throated press of sound that silences all around. Even a flutter of sparrows, performing their vocal calisthenics at sunrise, are reduced to muffled murmurs.

I have tried to love the crows, to excuse their brash manners and their tendency to harass, to discover a key to their language. But now it’s gone: my desire or effort to accept them is gone.

Yesterday, as the sun began to lift the frost from the grass, I enjoyed a quiet conversation from afar with a nesting barn owl in the box I had built above the oaks. Each morning recently I had observed her through binoculars as she moved into the warming sunlight that entered her small domain. I could see only a bit of her wing or rounded breast or the top of her head. I imagined her content to rest safely in her home.

After our peaceful communion, I went off to do some chores for an hour or so. When I returned to the field I was startled by the loud calling of a half dozen crows perched atop the owl box. I suspected some mischief; they had never been there before. I ran toward the box and yelled at them, telling them to move away. My voice sounded insignificant next to theirs. Soon they took off, bored with the game.

Because the owl box is over 15 feet tall on its perch, I couldn’t look in to check for the owl. I don’t even know if she has laid eggs there yet. Quickly my dogs came over to see what the fuss was all about, and they found the owl below her box in the debris of oak leaves and twigs. She was still warm.

To my mind, there’s no prettier face in creation than the barn owl. And the white ruff of her neck and breast with its fine and speckled fur is of unparalleled softness and delicacy. I held her, spoke soothingly to her, apologized to her for her dying too soon.

There was nothing on her feathers or face or talons that could tell me why and how she had died. Trying to make sense of this sudden death I called on reason and research, but there wasn’t anything to give me the answer I sought. What I imagine is that my young owl was hungry, she seemed so light when I held her, and that she left the nest to grab a quick rodent in the early morning light. Caught unguarded, she was mobbed by a group of crows, a common behavior of crows toward owls, I learned. I imagine she was tired and hungry and unable to retreat to her nest in time. She fell exhausted just below.

I feel such grief for the loss of this owl from my world, from our world. And I suspect my grief is a bit tangled up and mixed in with the larger grief of our days in this time. There is so much loss, both individual and communal, living on the surfaces of our lives. Extremes of primary feelings and gestures crackle like high voltage wires all around us. Safety feels elusive and illusive.

Today another Congress will swarm and gather and make outrageous, unmodulated sounds as it picks at small pieces of truth laid on the ground before it. Some will threaten to mob those who get in their way. With their moral compass left frozen in the winter mud, they will tear at the thin threads of our democracy. Will the bullies win the day? Will those who yell their lies loud enough to muffle calls for justice prevail and make good their threats to do harm? We wait and watch, already mourning too many losses.