Memoir and Time

I have begun to read Mary Pipher's Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, which was a graduation gift from my mother. She begins with both a prelude and an introduction that explore her life and struggle with writing the book, as well as other struggles, lightly but clearly, suggesting the depths of the manuscript ahead. She mentions some of her earliest memories and I was struck with my inability to divide my life, or at least my earliest memories, into simple or chronological episodes. Rather, my life takes on the strange characteristics of waves, spirals, and mutating ellipsoids.

My time, the experience I have of living and memory, does not follow straightforward linear parameters. I feel closer to many specific, vibrant, and distant events now than I do to graduation, which already feels incredibly distant while my time in India and in Brazil have been brought to the fore. Other episodes—I am staying with Miss Lydia Davitt and Miss Linnéa McCully—from freshman year when I met my current compatriots, or the time with my sister last summer when I visited Linnéa and others, spring to mind.

One may suppose that this is more the functioning of memory than it is of time, but such a claim puts time ahead of the game. I definitely allow time to have dimensional characteristics the way space does, but time is more and also less than that. Time is more often a tool we use to catalogue and articulate reality in the same sort of way I can describe the spatial dimensions of a tree to make it meaningful to you. If I worked at Duke University for the summer of 2007, that articulates a certain consensual reality that makes the dimensions of my life more obvious to those who have not lived it; which is similar to saying I worked with thirteen other counselors there or that the campus has so many square feet. These characterizations are used to describe and articulate meaning where it is not at first obvious.

Now, back to time. I considered the possibility of recalling, episode by episode, my young life to the best of my ability. (Don't worry, I wasn't planning on recording it here, just as a practice of my own recollective and cognitive physique.) When I postulated such a project, it occurred to me that my life does not run in that sort of manner, it does not follow a straight line; rather, it loops and spirals back upon itself in curlicues and switchbacks. This is in part because of the structure of my personality development, mutation, recreation, and rediscovery. That may require a bit more detail.

As a child, I was extraordinarily outgoing. My mother once recalled when some sort of incident in our neighborhood in Norman, Oklahoma resulted in police officers coming to our door. I woke (I was probably three or four) and answered the door and began to speak, probably quite sleepily, to the police officers until my mother came to the door. I was interested and communicative with strangers and friends. Later on, due to the social life of the school system and the reality of moving at a young age, I became reserved and quiet. I walked the halls of my middle school in Lincoln with my nose in books and I failed to understand that friends could be generously shared. I was remarked on befriending Andrew Brinkman, that he was already friends with Brendan McCauley, and therefore silently concluded that he would not be my friend. It was only later, in part because of my first girlfriend Whitney Majors and also because of the generally warm and safe environment of Arts & Humanities, that I explored a much richer social circle and redeveloped the atrophied skills of a wide circle of friends.

Just yesterday, Linnéa poked fun at me for my “Fortress of Solitude”—also known as the basement floor of the Folke Bernadette Library at Gustavus—where I spent a good deal of my time my freshman winter at school, and for spurts in future winters and early springs. All the same, I had clearly become something of a social butterfly as I learned to host movie nights in high school and to have ten or more people over to watch The L Word in my freshman dorm room. It became much easier to approach and appreciate new situations and new people when I uncovered that I was practicing old skills, exploring old interests and not starting from scratch. I have been exploring both consolidation and equilibrium between the multiplicity of roles and characters I have come to acknowledge in myself.

Perhaps it all feels more like a river, the more tributaries flowing in with their own waters and wildlife, their own soils and nutrients intermixed. Each one has a different sort of reality and at times the river is dominantly one or another, but most of the time the river is establishing something new with the resources upstream. That novelty is strict, but rather rich in the biota and qualities of the streams that precede it, but those tributaries are constantly changing and developing in their own ways. Rivers do not only move water, but they cut into the soil upstream and deposit it downstream, they explore and meander, they flood and change course. A river is change, changing by season and year after year, mutating to fit and adapt its landscape, its ecological responsibilities and needs, and is also the subject of others' use and modification. In the process of flowing into and of myself, perhaps I will discover the reality of a greater stream, flowing with many other tributaries from which I will glean their qualities and into which I may lose some of my own.

I flow backward and forward, moving in time in many directions at once. Space is a boundary, a description worth exploring, but it is a limitation as well. One must be careful to move, at times, beyond the thinking of space and dimension, to understand quality and quantity can only say so much. A river is synthesis, is overlap, is a quilt of the realities of itself and around and within.