`The Cement, the Bitumen, the Matrix'

While my brother and I were talking on Sunday, as we usually do, I realized May had become the month of memory. Vaguely, I associated memory with autumn in the North, sweet sadness triggered by the apple harvest, V’s of southbound Canada geese and the scent of burning leaves. But those are echoes of conventional sentiments, potent but suspect for being rooted in bad verse, good verse (Frost), Tin Pan Alley and Currier and Ives. Early May, not the vernal equinox, announced the end of winter, though black icebergs lingered in parking lots. The first day outdoors without a jacket felt like virtue rewarded.

Sunday was the 38th anniversary of the killings at Kent State University, 30 miles from where I grew up, as the crow flies. That year, on May 4, I was a month from high-school graduation. The deaths of people not much older than me seemed a rude entrée to impending adulthood. I would work that summer, read, save money, then go away to the big state university. I was the first person in my family to do so, and it would be the first time I, at 17, would live away from home. In my discrete calendar, May signals beginnings and conclusions. My father entered the world and departed it in May. Emerson began his 1857 lecture on “Memory” with these words:

“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are imbedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”

Without memory, human identity vanishes, “flowing in waves,” and we’re left with random sensations. For Emerson, memory is hopeful and precious:

“Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic sense of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there within you to record your life, and by recording to animate you to uplift it. It is a scripture written day by day from the birth of the man; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on, explaining each other, explaining the world to him and expanding their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of nature and life.”

Appropriately, Emerson was born in May, on the 25th in 1803. Starting around 1870, his fabled memory began eroding, perhaps as the result of Alzheimer’s disease. Pitifully, he described himself in those final years as “a man who had lost his wits.” The most articulate of men, he suffered from aphasia – the inability to produce or understand language. He died April 27, 1882. In “Shame” (“after Pessoa”), collected in The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate writes:

“My coworker says, The nice thing
about all this is you can’t miss
what you can’t remember.
Suppose you had Alzheimer’s.
You’d stare at the phone
And it would mean less than nothing.”