Rescue me

           

Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the temple, 
but they had hardly forgotten Him.

               The saddest kid on any given day at school dismissal can be found in the same spot, the stretch of sidewalk behind the church where students gather who have searched the parking lot for mother or father or grandma or brother and found nobody there to take them home.  The teachers can assure them, they may vaguely understand the vicissitudes of local traffic, and they may even know well that lateness happens.  But there is in that one child, for as long as the wait endures, the quiver of fear of having been forgotten.  

            Her fears may vanish when the long-sought car rolls up with the late arrivals, or she may have to troop back to the office for those awkward phone calls.  Never yet has a student been abandoned at our school.  Nonetheless, the fear abides.  

            More than once after Sunday Mass I have been approached by a young person whose family departed the campus with one fewer kid than arrived with them.  Usually old enough to take it in good humor, there may even be time to share the story of the time that a brother or sister was left at a gas station or rest stop.   Families in which this has occurred tend to have enough children to stir up a “cloud of unknowing,” disorder sufficient to make it easy to fail to notice one is not returned to the car, or forget  which children are riding with which parent.  In such cases, even small kids are somehow aware that there has been something more like an administrative error, rather than to think they have forgotten.  Although they don’t have to be very old to realize that they now have an episode they can deploy as leverage, possibly for the rest of their lives.

            But that flicker of fear and sadness that naturally appears in the eyes of a student whose anticipated ride home is not where it is expected to be reflects a basic human dread of being forgotten.  It is one of the worst things that can happen to a person and causes great grief when it cannot be chalked up to operator confusion or administrative error.  Anybody and everybody has a natural fear of being forgotten.

            Things happen, mistakes are made, the obvious is overlooked, and memory fails us.  All can contribute to a brief and regrettable episode of forgetting someone.  More alarming, and more damaging, is the possibility of forgetting somebody on purpose, intentionally reducing a soul’s presence in memory, one’s own and that of others. 

            Totalitarian regimes of the last century and this one have mastered the art of eliminating people from the histories of their people and their nation.  Faces eliminated from photographs, names stricken from lists, articles removed from archives, and conversations forbidden make us think of dictators in faraway lands.  But some of these have become commonplace occurrences more locally.   The internet makes it easy to manipulate one’s own online history, as well as that of others.  For some reason the destruction of monuments has come into vogue.  Even cemetery markers are being stolen and smelted for the bronze.  

            Not everybody is a governmental or revolutionary figure who decide that it would be best if some person be forgotten.  Other organizations and associations, individuals and even families can take steps to push some disfavored member toward the memory hole.   

Wrack your brain for a moment.  Look up from your screens and close the “feeds” that you follow these days.  Try to recall your habit of thought ten or twenty years ago, or even longer.  Who was on your mind then, whose name was on your lips?  What person or personality can you recall distantly, as down a dark corridor, of whom you never hear or think anymore?  Is it someone who needs you to rescue him from the quivering sadness of the memory hole?

Monsignor Smith

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