Memories, memoirs, meditation—2
Between 1968 and 1970, I lived in Chicago, where my then-husband was in law school. I hated Chicago, partly because the winters were so cold—I kept getting sick; partly because the South Side, where we lived, was then a dangerous place where women especially couldn’t walk around freely; and partly because the “Battle of Chicago” between antiwar protestors and the police during the Democratic Convention of 1968 left in its wake a miasma of hatred that you breathed in with the coal soot in the air.
Chicago Skyway with skyscrapers very faint in background
So when we finally left, and I gazed backward as we drove along the Skyway toward Indiana, I was astonished to feel a wave of nostalgia sweep over me at the sight of the city center skyscrapers receding behind us.
Just like when I visited my childhood house, only more surprising, since I had no long-standing history with Chicago: nostalgia from nowhere. But it made me see that attachment to the past can be a trap your feelings play on you, not a true, healthy connection.
Still, those feelings are there. We need to know them, if not necessarily believe in them. So perhaps the memoir is the way to do this.
Recently I tried my hand at memoir with an essay about an experience of community I had some years ago when I was quite sick. Writing about an experience is quite different from thinking—or meditating—about it, since writing forces you to formulate and organize your thoughts far more rigorously. So I figured out things I’d never have understood otherwise.
Perhaps there are two levels of experience: absolute and relative. On the absolute level there is no past, only present. But on the relative level, what happens in the past still matters. Perhaps the trick is to understand how to move between them.
Memories, memoirs, meditation—1
Recently I went to a reading and discussion by my friend Joyce Zonana. Joyce is an Egyptian Jew, born in Cairo and brought to this country by her parents in 1951, at the age of 18 months. Though she grew up in Brooklyn, her parents resisted assimilation and kept their home steeped in Middle Eastern culture. So she remained the odd one out among her Eastern European Jewish friends who insisted that anyone who didn’t understand Yiddish or eat gefilte fish couldn’t really be Jewish.
Last year she published a memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey, about her journey to find a place she felt was home.
At the reading Joyce shared the stage with another Egyptian Jew, Jean Naggar, whose family remained in Egypt until 1956, leaving for England when she was 18. Jean wrote her memoir, Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt, for her grandchildren, whose lives were quite different from her own “perfect” childhood in the “lost world” of Egypt before Nasser.
Though their experiences of childhood and immigration differed considerably, what struck me was that for both women the memory of life in Egypt remained a cynosure, a kind of holy world—all the more striking in Joyce’s case, since she has no actual memories of Egypt. The past is the foundation of the present, Jean insisted—it never disappears. They strove to keep alive their connection to the past, making pilgrimages to Egypt as adults. Their audience at the reading was full of other Egyptian Jews, all tightly tied to each other through this common heritage.
A few years ago, I too made a sort of pilgrimage, to the house on Long Island where I grew up, which I hadn’t seen since 1976, when my parents moved out. It’s in a relatively old suburb; by now the skimpy saplings planted by the developer are huge and full, and the ticky-tacky houses have been remodeled so no two are alike. The boring little subdivision I remembered now looked like a fantasy village painted on a plate. And I felt no sense of connection to it or to the house; it didn’t seem as though I’d actually lived there.
It’s been in my mind lately, though, because my brother has been scanning his collection of photos from our childhood in that house and emailing them to me. Some set off a twinge of nostalgia. Then I thought: what’s to be nostalgic about? I wasn’t happy then.
Memoirs are big sellers. But these recent experiences made me wonder: how involved should we be with the past?
In 1996 a New York Times reporter interviewed the Burmese peace activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, only recently released from house arrest and living in her parents’ home. She had sold her parents’ furniture to the military junta when she needed money for food. “Did you try to get these items back once you were freed?” the reporter asked. “They had belonged to your parents.”
“My father is dead. My mother is dead,” Suu Kyi answered. “Why should I cling to their furniture?” A very Buddhist response.
“The past is like a dream and the future is ‘the not yet come.’ The only thing of any interest to anyone is now.… there is no moment other than the present one,” says Ayya Khema, a wonderful dharma teacher, in her book Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path.
So why write a memoir? My thought is that one’s childhood, whether happy or not, banal or dramatic, retains a mythic quality—just like the origin stories of a culture—and that’s the source of our compulsion to revisit, explore, and interpret it. But how much of that is good for us?