Lecture: Remembering, Forgetting, Re-membering

This paper was presented at the GASi Summer School online bridging event, “Remembering”, July 2021.

The past is not a piece of jewelry,
Stored away in a crystal box
It is also not a
Snake preserved in a jar with alcohol-
The past is constantly swaying
Inside the present”
(Zelda, 1984)

This paper was supposed to be about remembering but instead it will deal with remembering and forgetting, the things that stay with us and those we forget or would prefer to forget.

We don’t always choose what to remember. Sometimes the memories come to our mind without an invitation. We also hold memories that involve other people. What do we do with them?

In this paper I would like to speak about part of the complexity of remembering. I will refer to memory and its deep roots, to forgetting and its role in one’s life. I will remind a term from the narrative theory called re-membering and will finish with a thought about the large group and the essence of workshops like the summer school.

I choose to present my thoughts on memory and forgetting through literature. Poems and fragments from stories. I will ask more questions than offer answers. Although I have chosen these texts for certain reasons, I am aware that other people will find other points in them. In its nature, literature welcomes the reader to bring his own personal world into it.

When collecting the literary texts, I noticed that many of them focus on death or loss. Not all texts on memory deal with death but the ones that seemed most relevant, dealt with loss. I wondered about this. Why did loss come up when I wanted to discuss memory? Two years have passed since we met in Croatia. In this time, death and loss have been very present in our lives, because of the Covid pandemic. The loss of life, the loss of freedom to travel, the loss of touch, the loss of the lives we were used to living and the plans we had, the loss of naivety. There is one additional matter however that is related to remembering.

Memories are something that existed and to an extent have been lost. Every memory or remembering is raising something that no longer exists. It has been engraved in us in some way and we raise what has been engraved. We do not remember the event the way it was, we recall it through our personal filters. Each one of us will remember an event differently, since each one of us experienced it differently and perhaps time made changes in it. There may be some who do not remember an event that was significant to someone else, despite being present.

Marcel Proust in his book “In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way”, describes a moment when a familiar taste becomes a memory. I thought it would be right to open with a moment of remembering, described as full of life.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

Proust describes the slow and frustrating process of trying to remember what reminded him of the taste of a cookie. In the end, he recalled his aunt who gave him this cookie and that is how the story ends.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me, immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.

(The translation from French to English was downloaded on 21.7.21 from the website http://art.arts.usf.edu/)

Proust describes how tasting a cookie dipped in a cup of tea, paves the way for a much older and deeper memory to emerge, a memory rich in sights and senses, smells and emotion. A memory that was lost and returned with the taste of the cookie. The taste of the cookie pulled out the memories connected to it from the writer’s inner world, just as pulling one grape brings the entire cluster with it.

Proust says that taste and smell are the most determined senses and they create a firm connection to occurrences in our past and even when it seems that the past has been forgotten, taste and smell can bring us back. When the memory reappears, so do the emotions that accompanied it. The memory he has as a result of tasting the cake, fills Proust with joy that has nothing to do with the day he had and the thoughts with which he came to his mother. Proust recalled the memory that filled him with joy.

This is not always the case however. Memories can raise all kinds of feelings. Sometimes we have memories that do not bring joy but rather distress, fear, sadness, guilt, shame, etc. Sometimes when we are dwelling in a memory, the memory fills us and takes over our entire being for a while. This process is very well known when a person is grieving or in trauma.

Yehuda Amichai (1998) describes memory and forgetting as the sea and the land.

The world is full of remembering and forgetting
Like the sea and the land, sometimes memory
Is the solid and existing land
And other times memory is the sea that covers everything
Like in the flood and forgetting is the land that saves us like Ararat

(Translated from Hebrew to English by Ram Chopra.)

In the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, the Mount of Ararat was the place the ark stopped at the end of the flood. Try to picture it. For many days, the ark had been shaking on the stormy waters beneath it. Inside the ark there was a big mess. Noah and his wife working day and night. I can only imagine what they were feeling. Exhausted, desperate at times, acting out of a lack of choice. They were surely hoping it would all end, uncertainty, detached from a sense of time and space. There must have been endless questions in their minds. When will this journey – forced on them – come to an end? Will they survive it? What will remain of everything they left behind? Will the world continue to be the way they remembered it? How will they bridge the gap between the world they knew and the new world after the flood?

Mt. Ararat was the turning point. This was the land that symbolized the beginning of resurrection, the end of floating. Here they were once again able to hope. Noah and his wife, their children and maybe even the caged animals, could now go from a state of survival to thinking about the future.

In Yehuda Amichai’s poem memories can be calming and safe but at times they can also rise up and swallow everything, just like in the flood. I assume we are all acquainted with the sensation of a memory rising up, bringing feelings of fear, anxiety, regret, or sadness. Some of those memories we would rather forget, with the feelings they entail. In this case, forgetting is the land that gives us a sense of safety.

Many traumatic memories appear in group therapy, a significant part of our work is based on this. Why do participants bring these memories to the group? Is it an attempt to share them, change them, play with them or maybe reconstruct them?

Giora Fischer’s (2010) touching poem describes this desire, to forget the loss of his son, killed in a military operation. He describes a fantasy that is always with him. His wish is to not remember the painful occurrence of the death of his son, for a new memory to take its place, the memory of his son alive.

A prayer by Giora Fischer

How I wish I was old already,
Confused.
Then if I ask:
Why didn’t he come to visit?
Don’t say:
But he passed
Long ago.
Say:
He was here yesterday
And he said he would come tomorrow.

(Translated from Hebrew to English by Ram Chopra.)

The father in the poem is asking those close to him to lie to him, not to remind him of what he has managed to forget. He asks to reduce the pain by planting different memories, those that never occurred. Memories can bring a desire to forget. Forgetting contains the wish that the occurrence never took place, that we never had to experience it.

It is unclear who Fischer is addressing in the poem, maybe his family, friends, or maybe no one specific. His request is not to be reminded of what he does not remember himself. He asks for them to create an alternative reality for him.

In small groups, or large groups, with family and society, we remember many occurrences that are related to others. Should we remind them of these? Do I want people to remind me of things I forgot about myself?

A few years ago, I met my counsellor in the youth group from my childhood. I have good memories of her, almost all positive. She was smart, generous, gentle, a figure that I identified with, a good leader. I was very happy to meet her after all these years. After we hugged each other, she told me she remembered me and told me a memory she had of me, a memory I certainly had not wanted to remember. It was an occurrence in a summer trip that I wasn’t proud of. Maybe she saw it differently than me, but knowing that that was what she remembered was very embarrassing to me. I would have been happy if she had remembered other things, the way I remembered her.

Sometimes forgetting can be a positive thing, whether it is us forgetting or others. Especially when people forget things we do not want them to remember about us.

But it is not always convenient. There are memories that disappear and disrupt the continuity of our memory, creating a hole we have no way of filling, unless someone else has the same memories and can fill them in for us.

Iris Boker wrote a poem in which a mother is addressing her daughter Zohara and asking her to create the continuity she is lacking.

Zahara, my daughter
Thread my needle
My memories have torn
I need them to be sewn.
Through the holes
I see
Memories of theirs
And I forget my own.

(Translated from Hebrew to English by Ram Chopra. The poem was downloaded on 21.7.21 from the website https://www.google.com/imgres?)

In the poem the mother is asking to return to her own memories, and she is unable to do so.  She asks her daughter to sew the holes in her memory. It is unclear what caused these holes and whose memories she sees. What attracted my attention about this poem was the mother’s request from her daughter, asking her to do it for her. The poem does not describe how the daughter will do this. What are the thread and the needle she wishes for her to use? Is the mother asking her daughter to remember for her, to continue the sequence from the past?

In the poem by Iris Boker the mother is asking to sew the memories she lost. In Giora Fischer’s poem he asks not to be told what he does not want to remember and to lie and create a different and better reality for him. Two opposite requests that holds the same wish. The wish from others to conserve memories, whether we ask them to remind us of them or to change them. The requests can be a burden to carry, but it is also what connects us together, the shared memory, shared history.

Remembering, sharing and changing memories is often what occurs in our groups, as conductors and as participants. Sometimes participants ask others, in a conscious or unconscious manner, to save memories for them, to tell them only what they can and want to hear, or maybe even expect others to forget. Sometimes we want to be reminded of memories we forgot, as they are, as people remember them, to hear the reality as they experienced it, without any changes. Can we recognize what is being asked for? Do we agree with any request?

I would like to shortly present a concept from narrative therapy called re-membering.

The term ‘re-membering’, was originally coined by Barbara Myerhoff (1982, 1986), an anthropologist. Myerhoff used the term re-membering to describe a ‘special type of recollection’.

Michael White (1997) introduced the term ‘re-membering’ into narrative therapy by developing the idea that people’s identities are shaped by what can be referred to as a ‘club of life’. In group analysis we could call it ‘the inner group’. This ‘club of life’ metaphor introduces the idea that for all of us there are people who have had particular parts to play in how we have come to experience ourselves. These members of our ‘club of life’ have often had different ranks or status within the ‘club’. For instance, we pay more attention or give more credibility to what one person thinks about us than another. The person or persons whose views matter most to us, who influence our identities the most significantly, can be seen as VIP members in the club. Those to whom we don’t give so much credibility can be seen to have low or less significant membership status. (Russell, S., Carey, M., 2002)

When working on “re-membering” we examine why these specific people take this position in our “club” and whether we can redefine their location in the club. Perhaps we can change the status of a VIP member to whom we attach memories that weaken us and improve the position of a member who strengthens us, but who we have not perceived to be important up to now for some reason.

I wonder if we can do the same with memories. Can we attempt to raise pleasant memories, while lowering the status of memories that trouble us?

In conclusion, I wish to present one final thought, dealing with the collected essence in the summer school, or any other workshops, using Dana Amir’s book, “Kaddish for darkness and light”. In her book, Amir describes the dogs her family had. All throughout her childhood, the family grew up with dogs and when they died, others came and replaced them. Amir describes, in her special manner, how the family remembered the dogs.

Nonetheless, something of them passed, just as it came. Their images blended into one another and after several years, we no longer remembered who came before who, which was which. Their existence was a joint existence, without divisions and space. For over 50 years, one continued the other and also erased its otherness and therefore, the memories regarding these dogs were mysterious.

When I chose this fragment, I thought of the large group and the blend of different images. Unlike the small group, in which the personal stories are central and images receive depth as themselves and in relation to the group, in the large group there is something that blurs the boundaries between people. It is sometimes hard to remember who said what, when, in what conference, what the context was.

Amir continues to describe the dogs and this got me thinking about the Summer School and the manner in which it created a unique characterizing essence, like the “voices after Auschwitz” dialog conferences, an essence that continues to live on its own and therefore may enable development from one workshop to another, even though the participants change.

Our grieving for them was different than any other grieving. It did not take on their faces or bodies but the specific quality of their presence. We missed them the way one misses the basic foundations of existence, the substance that holds the walls of the house together, the land growing the herbs. Therefore, it was possible to replace them with one another, despite being unique. They did not leave behind open pits but rather an abyss wished to be filled. (Translated from Hebrew to English by Ram Chopra)

Well, the Summer School workshops are not basic foundation of existence, but they can replace one another and their essence remains.  This essence, that is consolidated from workshop to workshop, and from year to year is gradually being built. We are not only controlled by memories, we also design them.

This short virtual workshop will also become part of the essence that is forming the summer schools. What will we remember of it?

Bibliography

Amihay, Y. (1998) Open Close Open. Schocken, Tel Aviv [Hebrew].

Amir, D. (2019) Kaddish for darkness and light. Afik, Tel Aviv [Hebrew].

Fisher, G. (2010) In The Aftermath. Am Oved, Tel Aviv [Hebrew].

Myerhoff, B. (1982) Life history among the elderly: Performance, visibility and remembering. In Ruby, J. (ed): A Crack in the Mirror. Reflective perspectives in anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Myerhoff, B. (1986) Life not death in Venice: Its second life. In Turner, V. & Bruner, E. (eds) The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Proust, M. (1992) la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann. Translation by Hilit Yeshurun, Hkibutz Hameuhad, Bney Brak [Hebrew].

Russell, S., Carey, M. (2002) Remembering: responding to commonly asked questions. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work (3), DCP. Adelaide.

White, M. (1997) Narratives of Therapists’ Lives. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Zelda (1984) Differed from Any Distance. Hkibutz Hameuhad, Bney Brak [Hebrew].

Leah Chaikin
leah.chaikin@gmail.com