jabel

Listen to this post:

Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability.

This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.

The rules of the waking world do not apply in Memory. There we meet the dead and re-experience events no longer available to us in the waking world. The tick-tock time of the waking world has no hold in Memory. Decades can be traversed in an instant and, stranger still, subsequent events can alter earlier events.

Memory is built of stories. It has a strong relation to history—the story of the waking world—but the relation is less strong than the machine model assumes. Memory is liquid. Two experiencers of the same event, when they visit Memory, re-experience that event differently. This is often because of other events in each experiencer’s personal Otherworld. That is to say, events in Memory alter other events, of their own accord, against our protestations.

Memory is related to Dreaming. Both involve the waking world fading away. Both ignore tick-tock time. Memory has a stronger relation to history than Dreaming. Dreaming has a stronger relation to the imaginal than Memory. The Unconscious is related to both Memory and Dreaming, though more openly acknowledged in the latter.

Synchronicity is a link between the waking world and Memory. A being without Memory would never experience synchronicity. Synchonicity is when Memory breaches the waking world and imparts meaning to some event there.

Memory is a land we most often visit alone. Some parts of it we know extremely well; some parts we’ve never heard of. It is not, however, a personal land existing only within our own heads. Memory is both personal and shared. The shared places are how we understand our lives together. They are built from history and, in turn, shape history.

Memory is the land of the ancestors. As the elderly approach death, the ancestors call to them out of Memory. The dying spend more and more time there, in preparation. Sometimes the ability to transition between the waking world and Memory fails; this is what we call dementia.

Medical professionals tell me that the dying often see people who are not there. I say that death is the moment when the barrier between Memory and the waking world is unbearably thin. In that moment, spirits from the Otherworld of Memory cross over to bear the dying into their new existence.

Greg Cello:

Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection. The work is not glamorous, and it will not always feel triumphant, but it is the work by which a man becomes trustworthy to the people who know him best.

Over many years, that trust becomes the hidden structure beneath a child’s life. He comes to understand that love does not vanish when the house grows loud, when money is tight, when tempers fail, when bodies are tired, or when the people he loves become difficult to love. He learns that strength is not a man’s ability to remain untouched by other people’s needs, but his willingness to give himself steadily to what God has placed in his care: his wife, his children, his home, his work, his prayers, and the particular life that has been entrusted to him.

Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell.

We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not. I feel a bit useless to her here because, although I can speak that language, my words don’t carry a lot of weight since I’m not a Christian in any way she recognizes. So I’ve encouraged her to talk to one of her preacher friends and the hospice chaplain.

At the moment, the thing I most want to do is rage against the evils of religion. I want to put down that voice inside telling me to be patient and fair. I don’t want to be fair. The devil is real and I know a few of his names. I want to curse all of them, from the daintily-dressed, incense-scented priests to the sweaty, screaming backwoods preachers. All of those with cruel hearts instilling hell-belief in pious, trusting, fearful souls.

… But I wait, and the rage passes. Now I’m just sad and tired.

The prospect of death is the true test of any worldview. I’ll do what I can to comfort her, and call on others with more credibility to talk to her. But what if, in a moment of sincere openness, she asked me what I had to offer in the face of death?

Images, really. Instincts. That feeling when something opens in me and beauty closes my mouth and quiets my mind.

So fluffy, right? Some of you are rolling your eyes at me. Look, I’m willing to be wrong; some of you—sure as hell—were wrong in your lifetimes.

When I think of you, ancestors, I imagine some of you as still sleeping; perhaps you recently passed through the ordeal of death and need some rest. I imagine some of you as the restless dead, who may have died suddenly or unjustly and are not yet willing to accept what has happened. I imagine some of you in sorrow, regretting the words, actions, or choices of your life. I imagine some of you taking those sorrowful ones by the hand and cooing comfort as you lead them toward healing. I imagine some of you as the mighty dead: ancient, fully healed ancestors who exercise authority with a benevolent watchfulness.

I do not imagine any of you burning. The thought would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so gruesome.

Ancestors, I have not taught my daughter hell-belief. Rather, I have told her it is a cruel idea. I have told her that if anything lies at the heart of the universe, it is love. If I have my way, mom will be the last of our line to have her final days darkened by hell-belief.

Ancestors, go to her now. Meet her in memories and dreams. Draw her out of this darkness and calm her fears. May she hear your voices again as you call her onward.

From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Based on Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground: Traditional Songs and Recipes

• 2 tbsp flour
• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• ½ cup white sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup sorghum
• ½ cup cider vinegar
• 4 eggs
• 1 tbsp melted butter
• pinch salt
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• ½ tsp vanilla
• Cinnamon for sprinkling

Heat oven to 350 and grease a casserole dish. 9x13 makes a thin custard but it bakes uniformly and quickly; a smaller dish would give you a thicker custard but the baking might be trickier.

Mix all ingredients except cinnamon until smooth. Pour into dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until center is slightly wobbly. Sprinkle with cinnamon.

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not follow him down. He feared the daimons of the unconscious, demonized them, warning Jung that he must set up a bulwark “against the black tide of mud” of “occultism.” But Jung dared to make his own journey into the collective unconscious and found there something altogether different, something — as we will see — unimaginable. Other schools of psychology became increasingly materialistic and reductive, treating the daimons as if they were purely physiological. Soul was reduced to mind, and mind to brain. The daimons were not so much demonized as medicalized. “The gods have become diseases,” Jung was fond of lamenting.

Why do we rarely hear of sightings of the elder folk here in the United States? The next time you see one of those poor souls taken up by the latest online obsession or some young person so bound by anxiety they can’t leave the house or a successful entrepreneur eating uppers just to keep going one more day or an older man so consumed with anger his kids can’t stand to be around him—perhaps that’s a sighting. Whatever is repressed returns as symptom.

After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use.

To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi:

In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it.

In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes.’ Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon.

Lewis says the longlivers (let’s dispense with the Latin) are ambiguously understood to belong between air and Earth.

In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.

The longlivers, as the name implies, have longer lives than humans but are not immortal. They are “innocent” and have “bodies of elemental purity.”

Lewis then proceeds to place these uncategorizable beings into three categories, based on three extracts from Milton that illustrate three possible understandings of “fairies”:

1. Swart Faery. Horrors. Enemies of God. Elves, ettins, giants, nymphs. “Fayre fiendes that cause my hayres to stand upright.” This dark view of fairies, Lewis says, “gained ground, I think, in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century—an unusually hag-ridden period.”
2. Small creatures, though their degree of smallness is always vague. They seem to range (even within the same story!) from insect sized to the size of a short human. More importantly, though, these fairies are intent on dancing and mirth, having almost nothing to do with humans. These fairies are more afraid of humans than humans are of them.
3. High fairies. Unlike in the second understanding, these fairies often seek out humans—sometimes for amorous purposes. These are human-sized, beautiful, and possessing material splendor. They can also be elusive when they want to be. I’m reminded of Tolkien’s elves here.

Lewis then goes on to outline four theories about the nature of longlivers:

1. A third rational species distinct from angels and men. Long-lived but mortal. Sometimes associated with the four classical elements, i.e., elementals (undines, sylphs, gnomes, salamanders).
2. Demoted (not fallen) angels. They did not follow Lucifer in rebellion but were sympathetic to him. They were banished to the lower, airy regions to await final judgment.
3. A special class of the dead. There is some inconsistency here. Some of the dead are found to be consorting with fairies. Some became fairies. Some never died but were whisked off to Fairyland. If I may insert my own theorizing here: the connection with the dead makes sense when you consider the long association of the burial of the dead with the fruitfulness of the land. The land is fed and in turns feeds.
4. Fallen angels, i.e., devils. “This becomes almost the official view after the accession of James I. … This view, which is closely connected with the later Renaissance phobia about witches, goes far to explain the degradation of the Fairies from their medieval vitality into the kickshaws of Drayton or William Browne. A churchyard or a brimstone smell came to hang about any treatment of them that was not obviously playful. … One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.” Obviously, fairies as demons is the most dreadfully boring option of all.

I bring this up because it is a valuable wrestling with the phenomena in Christian and classical lands. I don’t have any interest in the royal court as a metaphor for the sacred; it was valuable in its time but I prefer an ecological model like animism. Nevertheless, these are good thoughts to think with.

I also want to linger on Lewis’ comment that it was superstition, not science, that expelled the fairies. The witch craze was a pseudo-science claiming to reveal and stamp out a scourge of goatish Sabbats. They had tests! Court trials! Books published on the latest findings! Yet in the end, it was all aircraft grade superstition. Sixteenth century conspiracy theory. Human fear, not facts, killed the fairies.

Likewise, we children of the Enlightenment, full of our own fanciful ideas, assume the mass of humanity throughout history is obviously wrong about the elder folk. We write off everyone, everywhere as naive or unscientific or demonically deceived and then wonder why we feel lonely and the world disenchanted.

“They intrude a welcome hint of wildness,” says Lewis—and this is what we need. Our worldviews are entirely too tame. No matter how loudly various blowhards defend “the truth,” it’s dogs fighting over scraps.

You want a more enchanted cosmos? It’s not hard. Find a place where the water bubbles up from the underworld and listen with the trees as they lean in.