Not Your Job

“Memory is a tough place. You were there” (Rankine, 64).

This is nothing new to you. You’ve seen this before. You’ve breathed this before. You’ve felt that. And that. And everything they think you haven’t. You have.

You wish it was different. You know that that is just your excuse. For what?

Inaction. Passivity. Willful ignorance.

Funny. That reminds you of “Willful Obstruction.” Obstruction of what? Beyond police officers, perhaps those around you are willfully obstructing justice. There are no innocent bystanders. Silence isn't simple. "Willful Obstruction." Isn't that a felony? How would you know?

You know.

What even is a felony? What applies to your brothers and sisters might mean nothing more than a warning to the girl in your math class.

You know this. Your TV knows it. Your eyes and ears and mouth and hands and toes know it. Your memory knows itself. Your memory's job is essentially to never forget. It’s a trap, a prison. The whole damn thing.

And no, for God’s sake, you don’t want to read about it and talk about it over and over with people who don’t actually care to acknowledge that your life is real and valid. Your life -- and your experiences. Of course, that’s what you meant. You sometimes forget that people don't always see the correlation. You’re sorry you didn’t clarify.

Reading and rereading your experiences is like the universe giving power to your memory. Don’t they know how hard you’ve worked to move forward from that, rather than backward? You know they do, and you know they also do not at the same time. You know they don’t understand that concept, and you know that you won’t ever be able to get them to understand it. Understand you.

You.

You’re here. You were there, but you're still there. You're here. You’re real. Tell yourself over and over. What happened was real. What’s happening is real. Don’t they know? No. And it isn’t your job to teach them.

Nostalgia

Memory is really the only thing we have. Everything becomes a memory. No wonder there’s constant allusions to it in artwork.

“Memory is a tough place. You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie. There are benefits to being without nostalgia. Certainly nostalgia and being without nostalgia relieve the past. Sitting here, there are no memories to remember, just the ball going back and forth. Shored up by this external net, the problem is not one of a lack of memories; the problem is simply a lack, a lack before, during, and after. The chin and your cheek fit into the palm of your hand. Feeling better? The ball isn’t being returned. Someone is approaching the umpire. Someone is upset now” (64).--Citizen

“Nostalgia--its delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device [a slide projector] isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel, it’s called The Carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.”--Mad Men

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow”--Beloved

Claudia Rankine, Don Draper, Paul D, and Sethe all find themselves reflecting on the past and offer different interpretations of memory in these quotations.

Rankine reflects on something beyond memory. Sitting here, there are no memories to remember. She feels herself living inside of a feeling. Not something remembered, but an unconscious collective of recollections. Something that leaves her feeling empty. The ball isn’t being returned. She is unable to find solace in memory.

But Don Draper, in one of my favorite Mad Men scenes, longs to return to his memories. During his pitch for an ad campaign for Kodak’s slide projector, he has the machine filled with photos of his family. He longs to return to a simpler time, before he alienated his family through his infidelity and inattentiveness. Nostalgia is an escape for Don.

And in Beloved Sethe’s life is similarly consumed by the past, minus the longing to return. Her time at Sweet Home literally starts to haunt her. At the end of the novel, Paul D helps her understand that her past must be overcome, not dwelled on. She can’t find any comfort there, but she can reach a level of acceptance by focusing on the future.

Memories

In Beloved an important part of the way the book is written is the timeline. Changes in perspective and changes in time propel the story and add depth to the characters because the reader gets to see the world and certain events as each of the characters sees it and the reader gets to see the histories of the characters.
For instance, Sethe and Paul D both remember their time in Sweet Home when they are together in the present, but their memories are mostly kept separate. The reader is better able to understand their relationship now because we know how they met and lived together in Sweet Home. We are better able to understand their motivations and their struggles. The reader learns that Sethe remembers being the only woman there besides her Mistress and she remembers looking for freedom in the choices she made. Paul D remembers waiting for her decide which of the men she would marry and longing for her every day.
However, memories and the past are also important to the text because they are a source of pain for Sethe. While Denver and Beloved relish the stories and eagerly try to reconstruct the past events, Sethe feels trapped by them. She wishes that her mind would stop being able to handle everything she remembered. She says that she has no room in her head to think about the future because the past is overwhelmingly present in her head.
Time as something that heals and connects you, something of a mystery to discover, and something that confines you and holds you back is a major topic in this book.

Beloved Holds the Key to Sethe's Future

124 is haunted. Sethe and Denver describe the house as having feelings and reactions much like those of a person. It is treated as an autonomous being that its inhabitants can do little to control. For the whole time Sethe has lived there, this haunting has been constant and omnipotent. But, with the arrival of the mysterious character who calls herself Beloved, 124’s antics seem to subside. Beloved’s presence and attitudes are almost as strange as those of 124’s -- but they do not exist in parallel, just as how one person cannot be in two places at once.

124 traps Sethe, by isolating and ostracizing her from the community, and constantly reminding her of the harsh memories of her past, without giving her a way to move past them. The novel opens with Morrison asserting, “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver was its only victims” (3). 124 is a constant reminder of the hardships Sethe faced at Sweet Home and during her escape, which are briefly alluded to in flashbacks. When Paul D sees the scars on Sethe’s back for the first time in the kitchen and Sethe remembers the pain of her stolen milk, 124 reinforces the memory as it began shaking jolting both the people and the furniture to the ground (21-22).

With Beloved’s arrival though, Denver finds new purpose in being her caregiver, and Sethe finds new solace in recounting once painful memories to answer Beloved’s questions. Morrison wrote, “Sethe was flattered by Beloved’s open, quiet devotion...the company of this sweet, if peculiar guest pleased her in the way a zealot pleases his teacher” (68). Moreover, 124 remains silent when Beloved enters. When Paul D first came, it shook and shook as he brought memories of Sethe’s past to the surface, but Beloved silences the apparently vengeful house.

I think Beloved’s entry into both 124 and Sethe’s life, or maybe more appropriately her re-entry, is a marked turning point in the novel. Sethe’s person was confined to the irrational will of 124 and her mind to the memories that stirred when 124 did. But, with Beloved’s entrance, 124 is calmed, and Sethe is able to be a more autonomous character. She now recalls her “rememory” at her own mercy, which I think in the long run will be the key to freeing her from the hold her past and 124 have on her.

A Man Who Lives A Day

While in jail, Meursault details everything he goes through. He talks about the things he misses, the things he doesn't miss, and the memories he has. After recalling that memories he has outside of jail, he says, "....the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten.  I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage" (79). Later Meursault remembers a news article that he read once, and now he replays it in his head several times a day. He also talks about he would go around his jail cell, memorize the things in there, and then memorize where everything is. Obviously, one day can involve so many different stimulus that if you recalled it all it would be endless. However, I think it takes a certain person to be able to find the excitement in the number of steps you took in the one day, the color of the trees you passed, or the temperature of that particular day.  In Meusault's case, he has nothing he cares about enough that plagues his mind.  I don't think a man who lives one day can live a hundred years in jail without boredom, that's a gross exaggeration. What do you think?