If I Forget, Remind Me.

May 6th, 2008 Posted in Culture

Suppose you discover a film actor late in her career or even after her death. You view her work as it becomes available to you without regard to the order of time. So the images of the person you see under the disguise of role and costume are out of chronological order. Older and younger mixed together.

The subtext through all the fiction is the implied real biography of the actor herself but out of time. Disconcerting since the reports of the real are jumbled and you are introduced to it in an idiosyncratic time sequence of your own. The older can be before the younger, the intermediate after the older. In the symbols she can be her own grandmother, but in her reality she must follow her natural script.

Of course, you understand all this and you adjust. You can reconstruct the history of the real biological life, the subtext through the series of films, as her biography. You can narrate what happened when. But the subtext life is bio-cultural. The film sequence is a overlay on an overlay. A story over a story over a living.

But the symbol is not the life. The concrete moment is gone. And though it can be talked about and symbolized and recalled it is no longer there. All we have concretely are these not graspable moments which as symbols recede into a shared memory that is ever changing, expanding and contracting, as we collectively remember and forget. Our museums, dictionaries, encyclopedias, pictures and films, books, all the hard records, assist us so that even if we all forget we can still think we remember. But memory and text are selective. Actually most of the concrete is gone like smoke in a strong wind.

Years ago I met a young, then, businessman who hung out with poets and artists, something like Henry Miller befriended East Indian workers when he managed the boys and men who delivered Western Union telegrams in New York City. The nephew of one of them turns up in a Paris cat house in “The Tropic of Cancer.” This friend’s theory was that any accomplishment in art, or out, once done and recognized could, and maybe even should, be destroyed. The concrete symbol of the act of its own creation once in human memory is no longer needed. The act is the thing, the only thing. The objective manifestation is merely a relic anyway, the residue of the act. The act is the true concrete. Maybe, but it helps to have shelter in the winter. Don’t knock down the house.

Tempting: to do away with the mark, to only rely on the memory. But what if we all forget and drop into a social amnesia? What if our way of life, our style, our flair are cut off from their inceptions and developments? We do not know the past of who, what, where, when, and how of our present acts. We can’t distinguish the creative from the imitative. We don’t know who we are except that we are culturally illiterate, without history, without stories. We have lost the architect even though we still have his building.

What if we remember that we forget. Sometimes we are encouraged to forget and to forget we forgot. We are converted from one way to another and lose our own pasts. Parents fail to tell their children The chain is broken and a strand of cultural knowledge of who one is is gone. Insist on knowing this.

Consider the story of two Europeans traveling in South America who meet in a hotel lobby in Lima and after talking awhile discover they are cousins. They were strangers and now through memory they are kinsmen. Only through knowing can they make the connect. If they didn’t dance, I bet they felt like it.

The shared memory is culture. It floats on and within the biological fact. It is resilient and solid, sometimes it is onerous and oppressive, but it is fragile as well. It can disappear like a dream on sudden awakening. Hello, goodbye, I won’t be seeing you.

The subtext we discern in the unreeling movie, the concrete life of the actor, is her moment after moment experience. Her biology senses and is her life cycle. Under the cultural veneer is the living, for her and for all of us.

Now or then. Now and then. Now then. Now. Then.