memory becomes reality

From Patricia Hempl, the author of the beautiful memoir A Romantic Education, this quotation from an essay, "Memory and Imagination."

"What is remembered is what becomes reality.  If we 'forget' Auschwitz, if we 'forget' My Lai, what then do we remember?  And what is the purpose of our remembering?  If we think of memory naively, as a simple story, logged like a documentary in the archive of the mind, we miss its beauty but also its function.  The beauty of memory rests in its talent for rendering detail, for paying homage to the senses, its capacity to love the particles of life, the richness and idiosyncrasy of  our experience.  The function of memory, on the other hand, is intensely personal and surprisingly political. 

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relation with the past."

Although Hampl is writing about memoir, much of what she writes might also inform the writing of history that is not reduced to counting, statistics in the past tense, or efforts at accurate reproduction of what was.  What we remember as members of groups and what we forget contributes much to what we can become.  Taking mythology as a strong, potentially positive force, it is necessary; but false memories that forget or deny what was painful or a failure allow us to carry those diseases and broken bones in our bodies without healing.  Even if we present ourselves as successful and whole, the wounds fester.

Now I'm thinking again of the final speech Prior makes at the end of Angels in America.  Certainly when the play was written his reference to "this disease" was to AIDS, but now we might extend the reference metaphorically to the failure to remember and confront the ways in which the nation and its people fail to meet our aspirations.  It kills some, but Prior prophecies that some will recover to carry out the Great Work.  So . . . . perhaps  . . . . the possiblity of utopia depends on a healthy recollection of the past.