Memory

            Memory is a funny thing, though. It’s like this fluid creature that latches on from time to time, morphing into a presence sometimes indescribable by words. It’s as though I’ve situated myself in this Korean world, from the inside looking out.

            Like the simple memory of that time could bring me back; as though the sights and smells were somehow immutable.

            What is love? Is it the tug of a child’s hand on your sleeve? The embrace of a lover after a long trip? The consoling of a close one after a tragedy? The gleaming eyes of optimism after the exchanging of vows? Or is it something more ethereal, almost tied to memory by a string? Maybe love and memory are layered together like two flat planes in 3D space, intersecting at critical junctures where the intersections are important moments in one’s life.

            That intersection happens and sometimes you’re aware of it as it does. This is what I want to think about seeing my 80-year-old grandma last July, in the long-term care facility of Daegu where she was on the fourth floor with 20 or so elderly Korean women in stages of growing old. I saw the white hairs on her head that resembled my late-grandfather’s. I saw the whites in her eyes that had turned a bit gray.

            When she felt my forearms and remarked on my strength, I felt the pang of sadness that threatened to produce weeping. The way that her long-term memory worked was almost tragic; while the current details of the present (why and how I had traveled to see her) escaped her, the past memory of me had been etched like a knitted pattern in the neural responses of her brain. So what was the mind, there? What was this obvious understanding of past patterns, constituting a human who lived mostly in the past?

            The past, then, lives in us. It survives; it persists; it subsumes and is subsumed by us. It survives and shapes consciousness like oxygen exhaled by plants and taken in by animals. The past then, is as much a collection of emotion as it is a sequence of logical steps to some kind of outcome.

            To ignore this history—of love, joy, and sadness—is to deny ourselves the benefit of truly living. Maybe it’s not simply about getting a good job and staying out of trouble. Maybe trouble is what we week, to make life an interesting ride as opposed to a fancy play-acting.