Hamsters with Liquid Eyes

Abstract

Age may save us from a good many fears as we endure Masefield’s long defeat of doing nothing well, but it does not save us from nostalgia and the romanticizing of memory. Indeed, one of the reasons not to take photographs (and especially not to post them on the Internet), is because photographs take what was a complex of thought and feeling and seeing and turn it into something we might call “fact.” But memory, life, does not work that way, and memory has other obligations beyond the attempted impossibilities of re-creation. For example, one of the functions of memory after someone dies is to sort out the important details of the dead person’s completed story, structure it, and select the words necessary to convey it or to recall it in ways with which we are able to live. We keep some things—dad always had the time to talk with me—and let other things go—dad often knocked me down playing touch football with a kind of relish. We let the relish go, or we find a way to live with it privately and not make it a part of dad’s story. The important idea, here, is not the “fact,” but our ability to modify if ever so slightly the details and language in such a way that the story is not only tellable but also worthy of the telling.