Time Is What We Remember

23 of 40

They say that ‘time assuages,’– 
Time never did assuage; 
An actual suffering strengthens, 
As sinews do, with age. 

Time is a test of trouble, 
But not a remedy. 
If such it prove, it prove too 
There was no malady.

Emily Dickinson

We forget that time is the other gravity.

Time is there in everything, everywhere, like gravity. But gravity does not rely on human perception to exist. We only know time when we remember it.

When Ronald Reagan was in the end of his days, an intimate said “He is making new friends every day.” When my mother was in a similar place she simply had no history of the day she was in, but realities I had never heard of were recounted, newly remembered.

I do not remember if I used Emily’s words above in the last four years of these creations. So the poem is new to me. “Time never did assuage” for our intimacies. What we did is us, it we remember it.

I will be five years old, in a black room, tucked into bed, alone, for as long as I remember it. The sinews of the response to malady were strengthened over these sixty-two years, and could be gone tomorrow.

Memory becomes history, and society remembers time when human events lose it. The realities that are created from events are not always the events but they are the history of time.

There are those who know the absolute impossibility of Jesus. The present overcomes the history when our history is defined by who we are now. Legends are not history. Of course, inventions that pretend to be events, are events. But legends can be dismissed.

History is, like facts, a sticky thing. Because time is part of our lives, we know it. We know the entropy and impossibility of denying the Holocaust, despite the desires of some. We know that history is not now, despite those who want to recreate the 1903 Penn Station Railroad in New York City.

So it is fact, not legend, that something happened 2,000 years ago.

There is no videotape, but now we know that anything described by anything can be as manipulated as any memory, So, like gravity, the fact of time travel in history cannot be wished away by the facts we know.

Something happened.

People, all of them in all recounting, were not noble, they were afraid 2,000 years ago, My ignoble generation will see the anniversary of 2,000 years of time passage since an event that has uniquely focused part of humanity.

We look to find salvation. We want time to heal all wounds.

“Time is a test of trouble,

But not a remedy.”

Building a new Penn Station will not make our culture great again, even make what ails us better. I can never undo my childhood, because it is with me every day. What happened, has happened, if we remember it.

Inventing the impossibility of facts is something we try very hard to do. A beloved friend said to me “I can have a good childhood if I want to.” No, only if you do not remember time, without memory, there is no history,

History happened 2,000 years ago. It broke the norms of what was history then. It was supernatural because we do not understand it.

I do not understand why I was not alone in an empty, black room sixty-two years ago. But I was not. For some that is childhood compensation, a PTSD response. Sure. We all cope when “suffering strengthens”.

But no. I was there. I am there now. Love was there, because it just is. It is not healing the pain that is, and will be there. Love, like time, does not “assuage”. Jesus was murdered. But love is God in our lives. Completely unnecessary, unearned, most often unrequested, I am loved.

I just have to accept it. Not easy, because I know history.