On Acts and Facts

Facts resemble acts in that something actually has been done. The sophistication of theatricality can prevent this understanding. We think we’re superior, having the truth. Is truth whatever people can be led to believe? Or whatever the big man says it is? Is it the result of an equation? Or something studied under a microscope? Once enacted, do facts remain the same?

On certain roads, I seem to travel through time. Even where trees and buildings have gone, replaced by blocks of other meaning, I feel their hidden presence. As on a ship, floating away, leaving behind acts of the past captured in these places. With them float my errors, strifes, and pleasures, and every word with its fact-making power, falling helplessly into the past. A fact can’t be altered, but what it means to you isn’t what it meant to me. Deaths and births reshape the casting: seeing life whole changes the emphasis. Consequences reveal themselves anew. Facts may be prisoners to mutable memory.  

We’re placed in a world of endless transmutations, swirling among desire and destruction. Be a little easier on yourself. God alone is eternal, and you are not in any way a god. 

On Rejection

Last night I dreamed I was new arrived again, and fell to weeping in my sleep. Those who welcomed me, rejected, accepted, attacked, tolerated or disapproved of me: I’ve forgiven you all. Some indeed have by now forgiven me.

     Why then do tears run down in sleep? Sleep, the alternative world, is peopled with the past, a treasure-store of memory:  prop-room, wardrobe, prompt-box, rehearsal space for life’s cautionary dramas.

     Proust says a cast of divinities inhabits memory: those people who have made us suffer. Recollection comes through the senses, an uneven paving-stone, for instance, and Venice appears. For me the question ‘How d’you like Australia?’— once a common expression — awakened memory to work again in sleep.

     All this was decades ago, many have died, and died heroic deaths, too. Yet in memory, in sleep, they live to perform their roles. As Proustian divinities, they’re only a metaphor: they point to the joy received when they embrace instead of doubting.

     Is life so personal? The rational mind would allow, explain, excuse, comprehend. In sleep, though, the mind recounts its private story. What I’ve learned is this: for the love of God, treat your immigrants well. The marks are indelible.

On Vanishing

Today I had a dismaying event; I accidentally deleted all the pictures on a digital camera. There were some good shots there, too. I wouldn’t think I’m the only person ever to do this, so I have to chalk it up to experience. But I can see those lost images in my mind’s eye.

            Fortunately, last night I was at a lecture on Rilke. Rilke, like Dante, saw that loss creates memory. Now my pictures vanished into complete nothingness, and nobody but me will ever see them. You can’t remember the present, because it’s still in progress. The past must then be loss, even if only lost time.

            There were other losses and vanishings. A child knocked on my door in tears to tell me her dog had died. A woman spontaneously said her young niece had just suddenly died. And it happened to be the anniversary of a tragic family death that travels with me as a faithful guest present or hidden: a vanishing.

            Deaths flow through the underground channels of our memories, where vanished things go. Consciously or no, they remain as companions. God also is present in the underground channels. Here in Lent, we prepare to meet the death that refused to vanish.