Is memory damnable?

            

Nero who? the moon wants to know

                You know the minute you see it, whether on a poster or in a movie or in an advertisement for a trip: the Colosseum.  Whether you think gladiators or emperors or Christians versus lions, any glimpse of the remaining portion of this grand edifice conveys Rome itself, ancient and monumental.  

            Erected just after the Apostles were martyred nearby and the Church was seeded in the blood of thousands of witnesses, the Flavian Amphitheater’s worldwide recognition is the accomplishment of its purpose.  Not merely a gift to the Roman public for their diversion, the arena’s first reason for existence is rooted in what it is not: it is NOT the golden palace of the emperor Nero, which stood in all its vulgar excess on that same spot.  

            After the catastrophe of Nero’s reign, the general Vespasian rose to the throne to restore order. He and his two sons after him, Titus, also a successful general, and Domitian, the problem child, are the three Flavian emperors who governed Rome at the end of the first century, and the Colosseum’s original name reflects that it was built as part of their program.

The golden house of Nero was conspicuous and reviled, so it was an easy target for the post-Nero program.  To redecorate it or repurpose it, or even replace it with another palace, more tasteful and with happier associations, was not enough.  Its theatrical elimination was the first step of the transformation of the site to a place of civic utility and civic pride.  Though no evidence of it remained on the grounds of the grand new building, everybody knew what (and who) had been eliminated.

It was in discovering the history of this great public work as part of my Christian archaeology class that I first encountered the concept of damnatio memoriae.  Rather than simply reject the projects and reverse the damages of the rejected tyrant, there was a “whole-government” effort to erase evidence of his existence and be seen to have erased it.  While monuments to him and statues were eliminated, his name was removed from lists and texts carved in stone in a manner that left a scrubbed blank space that revealed that who used to be acclaimed no longer was to be mentioned.  This project was carried out with characteristically Roman efficiency throughout the vast empire.  Nero was expunged except for just enough to remind the knowledgeable how vitiated he now was.

To omit reference or citation of a person from current events or historical accounts is one way to push that person out of mind as well as out of sight.  But to keep just enough evidence of the omission to call to mind its cause is to take the game to another level.  This game is not reserved to potentates or governments, but almost anybody can play.  

Any individual can excise another person’s name from conversation and correspondence.  Objects belonging to the excised individual can be carried to the dumpster or flung from the window with great ceremony or none.  Friends and family can be cowed into fear of accidentally mentioning the offending name when the outburst elicited is sufficiently terrifying.  And as simply as that, a real living person is not forced to be forgotten, but residually recalled as rotten.

The most effective damnatio memoriae is achieved not by eliminating the memory of the cursed one, but rather in bringing about something so good and glorious that it is celebrated for ages unto ages, and the rejected one is recalled and damned anew every time the achievement and its origins are celebrated. Better than negation is appending the negative to a great positive.  You never know in advance if you will succeed, but you will know it when you see it.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Demolition derby

         

Bluff Park Elementary School
The central part remains; all else is taken away.

           The intended recipient was my grandmother, but before she was married – it was her maiden name.  I recognized the town in Ohio, but not the street.  A distant cousin had sent me an old postcard some merchant had mailed to my grandmother almost a century ago.  So of course I went immediately to Google maps and found – nothing.  It is not there anymore.  It was worse even than an Elvis Presley song: there was no such number, no such home, not even the street.   

This, unfortunately, makes a clean sweep of my father’s parent’s places.  The houses on Belmont and Noble Streets where I visited them when I was a child yielded to the broad concrete sweep of the multilane Scenic Byway.  Most recently and most lamentably, the impossibly small one-bedroom house with the most marvelous address – 3 Maple Street – was razed to make way for a patch of grass that likely will be more versatile.  

Though my mother’s parents went far longer ago, their places remain.  The North Hills house where mom spent her childhood, and the more urban quadruplex where she spent her high school years with her dad after her mom died, still serve their same residential purposes in those same places.  I’ve seen them, though it has been more than a decade.

Not just indicators on maps, but the architecture that houses our histories is subject to alteration and elimination.  Most of my elementary school was bulldozed about a half dozen years ago; they left the “historic” core building, but the cafetorium and most of the classrooms are gone.  This stuff happens.

Because I spent more than ten percent of my life in Rome, where buildings remain for centuries and sometimes millennia, I find the fungibility of our buildings and places startling.   My mom now lives in an area only recently developed, an entire civilization where no edifice is more than thirty-five years old.  The awareness alternates between wondrous and creepy.

More often than you might think, I find people wandering about the campus here wide-eyed and wondering.  It hasn’t changed at all since I finished school here in ’57! (or ’49 or ’68) they will tell me with delight.  Three-quarters of a century isn’t that terribly long for either a church or a school to ‘hold the fort,’ so to speak, but it is an accomplishment that both interior and exterior remain the same in form as well as function.  Thank God for mid-century masonry.

Here in Four Corners, we Catholics have a strong and steady presence in both population and construction.  For years, I have asserted that Saint Bernadette School would stand long after Blair High School crumbles to dust, and while that may be an accurate assessment of the construction techniques and materials, does it speak to the inhabitation thereof?

In the “Ahaya” River valley where my dad and his folks are from, post-industrial decay and diminution have reduced the number and the condition of many of the buildings of every sort along with the population.  Without people, living, working, learning, building, worshipping, and socializing, the buildings dissolve.  That makes sense.  But might the converse also be true?  Is there any danger to the people if the buildings and places be reduced or eliminated?

Our buildings shape us and inform our being at least as much as we do theirs. To inhabit and maintain the structures most formative of our lives is a responsibility; to lose the architecture that gave us our form to the cult of disposability is a loss of some portion of our humanity.  To lose track of the places where these buildings once stood, and we in them, is to lose the thread of our own story.  

Battlefields and bridges, baptismal fonts and classrooms, houses and playgrounds and yes, even vacant lots are all places where our lives and their preludes came to be.  Find them!  Mark them on your maps, paper or electronic, and better yet, visit them.  Take the kids.  See what has changed as much as you have, and what is the same.  To lose your place to the memory hole is to lose part of your life and your very self. 

As for that postcard to my then-young grandmother that my cousin saved and sent me?  I don’t remember where I put it. 

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

History and heroics

             Speaking of memories, this week snowmageddon has come to mind and come up in conversation.  That winter of 2009-2010 brought a series of major storms starting before Christmas and stretching into February that left all of us reeling and more than a little beat up.  One evocative similarity is how, beginning with Fourth Advent, they all came on weekends except for the final storm, which started on the Feast of the Presentation, a Tuesday that year.  It is funny the things you remember.

In a rare example of forecast accuracy, last weekend’s storm came as promised and on schedule.  This prompted an enormous effort to get to Mass while it was still possible, and the turnout we had here Saturday evening was huge, almost like Christmas.  After the promised frozen fun began to fall overnight, morning Mass attendance was down too.  The 7:30 Mass had THREE hardy souls in the pews.   Then music director John Henderson and several servers made it through the perils, and the eighteen people who over-achieved to reach the 9:00 Mass enjoyed a full-bore Sunday experience.  That number in the pews doubled at the 11:00, when the next batch of undeterred servers even provided incense and John was joined by several choristers.   I do not know about those other folks, but the delight of offering a worthy sacrifice to the Lord on His day was as invigorating as the fresh air outside.  I was gratified by the effort by so many people put into sanctifying Sunday. 

That morning Mass experience left me so revved up I trekked out across the tundra and the Beltway to join some parishioners who hunkered by the fire and rejoiced in a hearty lunch together.  It had been several years since I had walked through nearly knee-deep snow.  It had only been since Corpus Christi in June since I walked in the middle of the street down Colesville Road, which was a better option than the sidewalk.

Best of all was Tuesday when finally, the plows reached Swink Manor where Father Swink had been convalescing and he was able to achieve exit velocity to return home to the Holy House of Soubirous.  He found a warm welcome from me and Fr. Wiktor, the latter having been doing yeoman’s work to fill his shoes on the Mass and confession schedule and being my sole interlocutor at the dinner table especially during these days of frozen isolation.  

I have yet to hear a peep of complaint about schools remaining closed, though my sample does skew toward my altar servers who seem to be enjoying their frozen freedom with gusto.  How long this will last, I cannot guess, and restlessness among the parents to see their charges returned to the rigors of routine is helpless in the face of the governing bureaucratic liability logic that makes the unquestionable, unreviewable decisions about such matters.  Maybe this will spur an uptick in private prayer in an appeal to a higher power. 

            Now we are confronted with the possibility of another winter wonder crashing our party this coming weekend.  I must admit, I would rather move on to the next thing, and if that cannot be spring yet, then maybe we could just try clear and cold.   But if the wet airmass from the Gulf collides with this arctic air over our heads and homes, clearly we will have more of the same.   It may not merit the -pocalypse or -mageddon suffixes, but it is turning into a winter to remember.

Monsignor Smith

Somewhere it is written

           

Letters and numbers disintegrate

                 The forgetting impulse that is both human and universal is made policy and practice in the memory hole described in Orwell’s 1984 and devised and deployed in our own time.  All of us, all men require some evidence, some touchstone to hold back the floods of forgetting that arise in the course of time and adversity.   To obscure or more effective yet to eliminate the evidence is to allow the forgetting to follow its course unhindered, washing away with it all that distinguishes and elevates. 

            Record must be kept to make memory possible, to pass from one mind to another what could but should not be forgotten.  This record must do more than just exist, it must be extolled, examined, and appreciated.  The work of history has two sides, the recording and the recalling.  In simple or local matters, the work of history has for ages before us been simple and local.   Families recall and relate the stories of their forbears, adding to that the remembering and retelling of what they themselves have done and been, the newest chapter in the recounting of a unitary reality, a whole history by no means ended.  On a grander scale, societies have developed entire treasuries of literature, music, and monument to celebrate what need be remembered for the social identity to flourish.

            To relinquish this responsibility to a repository of data and text is to make vulnerable the family and society to forces hostile to the identities they cherish.  In 1984, Orwell forecast this vulnerability.  The development of technology since he wrote it has exacerbated the vulnerability.  The proliferation of media has not made remembering easier, but rather forgetting.  It is a byword to acknowledge that any question of fact is resolved by consulting external media – smartphones – rather than memory or any other authority.  That media can be manipulated much more easily than the archive at the Ministry of Truth.

            Our own willingness to forget, to let somebody or something else do the recording and recalling for us, is to store our treasure in the house of thieves.  To reach for what we placed in their care and receive back something amended, edited, or even disfigured is to be victim of a crime without evidence.  There is no way to demonstrate what has been done; all that was borne away to the flames of the furnace on a current of warm air.  

            This explains one of my preoccupations over recent years, the dissolution of text.  Whereas once we could cry, Show me where that is written! and find acceptable, even compelling proof, now what is written has become so fluid both in form and in meaning that we find ourselves reaching for fog.  Where one word has not been swapped out for another, the meaning of that word has been eroded or transformed, sometimes by use and more often by abuse.  There may be an editor in a cubicle somewhere, but it is more likely that mouths and minds have magnified polemic to scrub away evidence of prior meaning and even understanding. 

            Our society has long relied on text to safeguard memory, history, and reality itself.  Now, even civil, financial, and personal documents of record are virtual, electronic, and ethereal, easy to edit or even eliminate.  

            Our most fundamental identity, as children of the loving God rescued by the sacrifice of His divine son, is preserved in a written account of that same God’s making known of His identity and ours.   This holy writing, the sacred scriptures, has long served as touchstone and authority.  But these texts too, long vulnerable to the necessary perils of translation and editing, are corroding into illegibility before the caustic waves that dissolve text and language.  

Look at the very communities founded in commitment to this text to the exclusion of any other authority; they no longer know what they mean, and no longer know what they believe.  

In the earliest days of our family and our society, the Church, the truest story was not yet written down, but was nonetheless shared, heart speaking to heart.  The eventual writing down was a repository of a reality that preexisted it, a revelation and experience.  It was an aid to recalling, but not a replacement.  To remember this is to reclaim both our own history and our responsibility for it, not to outsource our memory and with it our identity.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

What Winston did

Forced forgetting

 …in the side wall, (there was) a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating…for the disposal of waste paper.  Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building…. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.   When one knew that any document was due for destruction, …it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

          Winston Smith, the nebbishy protagonist of George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984, worked in the Ministry of Truth revising past texts to conform to current assertions of the governing party.  This great book, which gave us the two-way telescreen for surveillance, the Two-Minutes Hate, and Big Brother, describes almost in caricature the workings of an ideological totalitarian state.  When I first read the book, the year 1984 was still in the future, and one could think there was still time for the predictions to come true.  Just over forty years later, many of them have.  

            As if it were not enough always having on our persons our so-called smartphones, we bring Alexa and her sisters into our homes and expect to be listened to by them all.  Hey, Siri!  The Daily Outrage presents a villain to receive universal opprobrium, often delivering into the firestorm someone who until that day had been popular, or respected, or anonymous.  The identity of Big Brother is something of a mystery, but the effects of his supervision are acknowledged in the mundane, almost subconscious steps taken to avoid his disapproval.  

            Similarly, the memory hole has become a fixture – but where?  This great forgetting-contraption that devours reports, records, and reflections must be somewhere, must it not?   Someone must stoke the furnace, maintain the fans, and decide what goes into the slot? 

            Orwell’s model for his future society was Stalin’s Russia.   He had seen or possibly only heard of basic practices there, exemplified by but hardly limited to the airbrushing out of photographs of Trotsky, who had started a hero but become an enemy of the revolution.  That required changing the past to support the assertions of the present.  

            I re-read 1984 about eight years ago and was astonished at its prescience.  Orwell gets so much right about the technology of surveillance and oppression, and especially the manipulation of language.   Some other tools and techniques of suppression he misses; for those you must read Brave New World, a similar dystopian vision by his contemporary Aldous Huxley.  We can talk about those some other time.  But if you think you can guess what brought the memory hole to my mind this month, you are almost certainly wrong.

            Not where I started, but the awareness at which I have arrived is that the memory hole is a phenomenon that appears at most levels of human society, including the personal.  We are all inclined to leave out of our own histories the aspects and actions that do not conform to the image we want to project, and not only when we are applying for a job or courting a mate.  We are inclined literally to forget what we ourselves have done that does not belong to the image of ourselves that we prefer, or even need. 

            Maybe I am saying that there is a little memory hole in each of us.  Neither is this what got me started on the subject, however.   I think it is an insight into why the “memory hole project” can be and has been so successful in its several iterations in our own period of history to the great detriment of many, even all.  If we acknowledge its appeal and search to find how we ourselves have applied it, perhaps that will help us identify the tactic when it is used against us by someone else, whether on an intimate or a more expansive scale.  It may well be philosophically impossible to prove a negative, but we can be aware of the negating power of the memory hole.  Awareness of this present danger is the first step toward escaping it.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Open road

Open road is the impossible dream of the Beltway-bound, commuter-crowded and creeping along under the worst of all possible conditions.  But open road is what lies ahead as we turn that page and resume our forward motion now that the delightful pause of Christmas festivity yields to the normal progression of tasks and responsibilities.  We put the decorations away and get back to business.  Energies are spent and accounts depleted, so not everybody may be ready to run.   But still, the new year beckons!  Any road worth traveling has markers, so here are a few you will want to note.  

The Church has an Epiphany tradition of announcing the Moveable Feasts of the coming year.  We did not sing the chanted proclamation at Mass, but you still will want to mark your calendars.  Ash Wednesday will be 18 February, and Easter Sunday 5 April, which is solidly in the “normal” date range.   The Ascension of the Lord will be on Thursday, 14 May, but we will ignore that until the following Sunday, the 17^th. Pentecost Sunday will be 24 May (which will be Memorial Day weekend this year) and Corpus Christi with its procession two weeks later Sunday 7 June.   The last Sunday of this year will be Christ the King on 22 November, then after Thanksgiving on 26 November we will start the cycle all over again on 29 November with the First Sunday in Advent.

More local markers will include Wednesday, 26 February, one week into Lent, when Bishop Roy Campbell will come here confer Confirmation on our young people.  First Holy Communion will be on Saturday 2 May, the First Saturday of that busy month just as Our Lord indicated to the nuns.  

Not all the dates we need to know are liturgical.  Trying to find a date to get together with a friend, I first had to find out when falls Super Bowl Sunday this year (February 8, if you like me did not already know) because I know I have somewhere to be that evening.  The first of this year’s federal holidays are 19 January and 16 February, which give us three-day weekends and the Monday special Mass schedule.  These are also annual events whose dates change from year to year.

Laying out the map for what lies ahead, I would be remiss if I did not mention what is still large and bright in the rear-view mirror.  Let me thank everybody who worked so hard to make our celebrations over the past weeks so marvelous.  Our music in particular was wide in variety and consistent in excellence. Everybody loves Christmas music for good reason, and the musical talents and efforts of our parish did it more than justice.  

“The big push” to decorate the church on Christmas Eve was handled with near professional efficiency and better than professional results.  As our manger scenes come down this weekend with the Baptism of the Lord, it is good to remember how many hands it takes to build (and remove) those “stables!”   And as ever, our altar servers showed that they can do world-class work blindfolded, or at least in the dark of Midnight Mass.  Our sacristans and ushers took care of an awful lot of work between Masses that made each successive congregation feel like they were the first on scene to see the new-born King.  And even if the announcements at Mass gave you the impression that the rectory offices were nearly always closed, let me assure you that all the staff worked extra hard to prepare everything we needed and process everything you gave. 

So let me thank them for you, but if you have a chance, feel free to say a word yourselves.  These are all people we know and see often who make things so beautiful for all the people we would be glad to see a little more often.  The Nativity of our Lord brings plenty of God’s children “home,” if only for a visit.  It is reassuring to know we are in good company on the open road.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Innumerable

In the search for patterns, it is easy to default to dividing life by the years.  2025 was a tough one, for example.  Or, when I was younger, I was convinced the odds were better than the evens:  seventeen was more delightful age than eighteen.  But what can anyone, much less a teenager, predict from that?

This is the season when turning the calendar gets more attention than usual, definitely more than it merits, but a different pattern also emerged.  Rather than impose divisions on my time, it provided a glimpse of the continuity of the whole.

When I decorate my room, I put up a little artificial (gasp!) tree.  It is strung with multicolored (gasp!) lights that hearken to the big colored GE screw-in bulbs on the family tree when I was growing up.  On it are decorations I pull from a box my mom started for me about fifty years ago when I began accumulating my own ornaments as gifts. Odd ones my grandmother gave me (an owl the color and texture of a pencil eraser embedded with small mirrors), silly ones my aunt gave me (peg figures of chefs because even then I liked to cook), collectible ones my mom gave me (ceramic Snoopy on a sled), and the one my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Taylor gave me in 1974 (a hand-painted plaster of Paris snowman).  Over the intervening years, I have received straw ornaments from Germany from my sister; ceramic bells and little birds from Mom; and several others from buddies that are most tactfully displayed in my private space.  There are also innumerable train ornaments, including the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 that met at the Golden Spike in Promontory Utah.  It’s all capped with a corn-husk angel I picked up at Tumacacori Arizona on an excursion there from my sister’s place in Tucson with her and her husband and my mom and dad.  It’s new – only fourteen years old.

Decorating the tree does not take long, but it carries me through more than fifty years of people and relationships and Christmas.   

There’s another tree one floor directly below my little one, in the front office.  This one is real (thanks CYO!) and also has multicolored lights.  It has been up for weeks – since the day after Immaculate Conception – but is only half decorated even now.  This is the Parishioner Tree, and the ornaments are still arriving daily in the mail.  It is where we hang the family-picture Christmas cards we receive.  Not only our current population smiles at us in their photo finery; past parishioners still update our remembered images of them with this year’s greetings.  For example, a couple whom I prepared for marriage but left the area shortly afterward sent a picture with their five kids.  Past and present, together it’s a festive throng we can pause to enjoy any time we pass through the office.  New parishioners, it is not too late to bring your cards for the tree!  

This tree takes the whole month-long Christmas season to decorate and assembles in one place evidence of twenty years as Pastor of Saint Bernadette.  

The New Year celebrates the turning of a paper page and the click of a counter.   This structure imposed upon our time is as necessary and even helpful as it is artificial.  It divides and distinguishes days, months, and years.  Christmas, however, and the recurring elements of its celebration, be they food or flowers or songs, reveal the context and continuity within our individual lives and with the lives that have touched ours.  Central among them is the life of the child Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, who is not a memory but a presence and power Who unites who we are with who we were and who we will be, each of our days and months and years into the ongoing history of the salvation of the world.  

One of my newspapers carries a columnist whose humor I appreciate and whose latest book is entitled, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.  I concur with his prohibition because I know luck has nothing to do with it.  Grace, on the other hand, defines every day and binds the parts into the glorious whole.  What we mark at the New Year is the finitude and failures of time.  What we touch at Christmas delights us, for we hold in our hands the very elements of eternity.  

Monsignor Smith