Rememberance

Re-memberance, synonomous with re-collection, is a retained mental impression, a memory.  Its roots imply the reassembly of disparate parts, the re-creation of a whole.  It has a wistful connotation, the suggestion of a time when things were in one piece, un-broken.  It implies a process of dis-memberment and introduces the scientific concept of entropy, the tendency toward chaos, to our life experience.  From the time we are born, our lives begin to fragment. We go away to school, move away from our parents, pursue employment opportunities around the country (sometimes around the world), and our childhood friends disperse. Ultimately, we find ourselves in a location far from where we came, separated from much of our family, with little or no memory of the history which would enable us to belong to that place we now call home.  Wallace Stegner, the author often referred to as "The Dean of Western Writers," explores this process of dislocation in his novel Angle of Repose.  In the work, Lyman Ward, a wheelchair bound amputee who is alienated from his son and largely dis-membered from the rest of his living family, settles down in the house built by his grandparents and begins to re-assemble the facts about their frontier-era wanderings - in effect, re-membering thier lives. Mid-way though the process he wonders: 

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

And so, like Lyman Ward, we remember; we turn the clock back to a time before it all came apart, to a place who's memory is our history.  Wendell Berry, the writer who has a good sense of his place along the Kentucky River, argues that if you don't know where you are (ie., remember the history, experience with the senses, suffer the catastrophes), you don't know who you are.  As we chase opportunity in our quest for ownership, we jetison history and a sense of belonging.  Yet, our self-identity is framed by what we re-member about where we came from.  How well can we re-place ourselves at a time, in a location where we truly belong?  That is the challenge of re-memberance.