One of the great impediments to
understanding bits of our lives properly is our overly-ready assumption that we
already do so. It’s easy to carry around with us, and exchange with others,
surface intellectual descriptions of key painful events that leave the marrow
of our emotions behind. We may say that we remember — for example — that we
‘didn’t get on too well’ with our father, that our mother was ‘slightly
neglectful’ or that going to boarding school was ‘a bit sad.’
It could — on this basis — sound as if we surely
have a solid enough grip on events. But these compressed stories are precisely
the sort of ready-made, affectless accounts that stand in the way of connecting
properly and viscerally with what happened to us and therefore of knowing
ourselves adequately; if we can put it in a paradoxical form, our memories are what allow us to forget. Our day
to day accounts may bear as much resemblance to the vivid truth of our lives as
a postcard from Naxos does to a month-long journey around the Aegean.
If this matters, it’s because only on
the basis of proper immersion in past fears, sadnesses, rages and losses can we
ever recover from certain disorders that develop when difficult events have
grown immobilised within us. To be liberated from the past, we need to mourn it
and for this to occur, we need to get in touch with what it actually felt like;
we need to sense, in a way we may not have done for decades, the pain of our
sister being preferred to us or of the devastation of being maltreated in the study
on a Saturday morning.
The difference between felt and
lifeless memories could be compared to the difference between a mediocre and a
great painting of spring. Both will show us an identifiable place and time of
year, but only the great painter will properly seize, from among millions of
possible elements, the few that really render the moment charming, interesting,
sad or tender. In one case, we know about spring, in the other, we finally feel
it.
This may seem like a narrow aesthetic
consideration, but it goes to the core of what we need to do to get over many
psychological complaints. We cannot continue to fly high over the past in our
jet plane while high-handedly refusing to re-experience the territory we are
crossing. We need to land our craft, get out and walk, inch by painful inch,
through the swampy reality of the past. We need to lie down, perhaps on a
couch, maybe with music, close our eyes, and endure things on foot. Only when
we have returned afresh to our suffering and known it in our bones will it ever
promise to leave us alone.
