Looking Back
July 19, 2014
In the foreword to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor1 Harold Bloom quotes Strauss who wrote "of past sorrows Epicurus takes no heed. He recalls his past only in so far as it is pleasurable. It is the decisive characteristic of the Epicurean that he is incapable of suffering from his past."2 Strauss exclaims that "nothing could be more un-Jewish."
I've lately realized that I have a similarly un-Epicurean sense of memory, but unlike the Jewish tradition of remembrance, I don't remember the bad things (not that much bad has happened to me), but distort the good and remember it as worse than it was. I suppose this is one of the reasons I don't get the idea of reunions. A get-together with the sole intention to dig up uncomfortable memories. This attitude towards the past is systematic and has further implications than just denying invitations to gatherings. When I think about work I've created in the past, my mind remembers it as worthless, which then makes me feel bad for creating it in the first place, which keeps me from ever looking at it. At rare moments of being at ease, I take a glimpse at pieces I've written and every time I do, I'm impressed that it is actually good. I feel happy for a moment, put it away and an hour later my brain is back to remembering it as bad. My emotional memory, that is. Within days, or so it tends to go, my rational memory joins in, and the whole thing collapses back into feeling like worthless scribble. It takes me months or years to reread it and again be surprised at how much better it is than my memory allows me to accept.
So while I suffer from my past, I don't ritually confront it the way Judaism does through its holidays. To limit the suffering my past can cause I treat it like it never happened, yet, unlike Epicurus, I'm still affected by it. Strauss writes that the Rabbis used Epicurean as a term of abuse as their attitude toward memory was antithetical to Judaism. I kind of get their point. Avoidance doesn't actually stop the suffering — it just makes it vague and constant. At least if you confront the memory you have something to work with. When done right, that can be cathartic.
One person who perhaps took this further was Freud. In psychoanalysis, you don't try to ignore the pain from your past, neither do you glorify the pain. Instead you revisit the past to set yourself free from it. You start out suffering from it, no matter whether actually painful or just remembering it as such. Then with the help of your shrink you turn that memory into something that doesn't cause as much pain anymore. You are freed, or at least loosened, from your past and don't have to take as much "heed" from it. This works through going back to your memories and looking at them through the eyes of an adult with additional insight from your therapist and not as the unreflected child you were when your pain manifested. At least that's how my sessions went.
But you don't necessarily need a shrink. Another way I found to loosen the grip of my past is through what I think of as memory artifacts: instead of trying to remember the past, which can be unreliable, you actually look at something from it. The other day my dad showed me photo albums of different stages of me growing up. He was always a prolific photographer and captured many moments of family life. Looking through these albums was like seeing myself as an outsider. Even though I could remember the scenes in the photos, I just remembered many things completely different. Things that were going on around me when I was five were opaque then and now with a more reflective and capable mind seem obvious and unthreatening. Looking at photos from my teenage years, I remember how uncomfortable and awkward I felt back then. I always felt miserable and ugly and out of place and this feeling stuck around until the present day. However, looking at these pictures, at least one thing I believed about myself turns out to be wrong. I was much more handsome than I remember, my body wasn't weirdly skinny, but sporty and ripped. My face had much less spots than it felt like at the time. The photos can't tell me everything about why I felt the way I did. Teenage misery has plenty of causes a camera can't capture, and photos aren't perfectly objective either, posed and framed by whoever held the camera. But looking at all of this as a kind of outside observer, I can see how distorted at least part of my reality was back then. No wonder my memory of it is so painful. Getting rid of this distortion changes something. The same thing happens when I dig out an old story or essay and force myself to read it. It's right there on the page, better than I remember, and for a moment the distortion loses its hold.
Like therapy, just talking about it once doesn't change a thing. To alter your memory, you have to work on it over an extended period of time. The more often I force myself to go back to old work now, the better I feel about it. The more often I look at old pictures, the less distorted my past becomes. The repetition seems to gradually reshape my memory, emotionally and rationally. I don't think I'll ever get to the Jewish model of deliberate, ritualized confrontation with the past. But I'm not Epicurean about it anymore either. I'm somewhere in between, still not great at looking back, but getting better at it. So far, this retraining of my memory has been well worth the effort.