Memory's Last Breath

by Gerda Saunders

  My skepticism about religion started in earnest when I first read the biblical exegesis that gives the dates of composition of the various sections of the Bible and discovered that all of the books were post-hoc accounts, removed from the events by as little as 60–70 years and as much as several centuries. So how about the Exodus 7 snake story:

  10 Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh… and it became a serpent.

  11 Then Pharaoh called the magicians of Egypt and they did in like manner with their enchantments.

  12 But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.

  Carel, after studying your map, I saw that you had become smarter and smarter overnight and your memory better and better. Your snake story has now gobbled up all of the stories the rest of us have told. Unlike Pharaoh who hardened his heart at the display of God’s power, I am hearkening onto our Carel-Moses to part the waters of the Sterkstroom when we all join you in the in situ inspection! (o.s.f.h. )

  Carel, 10-1-2013:

  I am in my noppies (fat dumb and happy) with the “emergent Truth” and look forward to our en masse bethinking of our testimony at the altar of the Snake.

  Part V

  Post-post-hoc email commentary from the senior snake-killing eyewitness and the not-yet-born earwitness

  Klasie, 8 years old.

  Carel, 6 years old.*

  Boshoff in his 30s, self-portrait†

  Gerda, 9-2-2014, subject line “Die pofadder het weer uit die dode opgestaan,” or “The puff adder has once again arisen from the dead”:

  Working on my book. The now documented story is MY truth, since if we go by seniority, I likely remember best, given that memory is strongly associated with words and I had many more words at eleven than you, Klasie and Carel, at seven and five.

  Long live the puff adder!

  End of Research Report.

  Coda to Research Report

  Part VI

  Frangible memories

  Email, Gerda to American family, 10-9-2014:

  My beloved brother Klasie died today at the age of sixty years, two weeks after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. His daughter Vida called at 3 am our time to tell us. He died with his wife, daughters and stepdaughters, and grandchildren at his side. Tertia and Mickey were there too, they also called us. He died on the living room couch, where he had spent the last days of his life with kids clambering over him during the gaps when morphine dulled his pain.

  Klasie, my big brother, I’ve loved you since you were my little brother and love you now.

  Klasie and Gerda in South Africa, 2002

  It seems to me that the discrepancies among witnesses to the killing of the thirty-nine puff adders could be subsumed under the current neurological model for memory—every time you recollect a memory in spoken or written narrative, or merely think of it in private, it gets changed and reconsolidated. However, other attempts to check the veracity of stories I reported in my journal have not gone so well.

  Item: A friend, who mercifully is now an even better friend, was “aghast, horrified, actually” about my retelling of his coming-out story he had told me decades earlier. When I looked into the matter, I found out I had conflated his story with that of another person in a way that made him seem much more naïve than he had been about his sexuality.

  Item: More than a year before my diagnosis, I accidentally gave a doll from my children’s baby days to my son Newton and his wife Cheryl’s daughter, Aliya. I was convinced the anatomically correct, newborn-sized boy doll, named Bossie for my father, was the one we had bought for Newton when he was born so as to parallel the anatomically correct, newborn-sized girl doll that we had earlier given to Marissa. I was “aghast, horrified, actually,” when my children corrected me: both dolls belonged to Marissa. Moreover, Bossie was not just any doll, but rather newborn Newton’s gift to his sister at the moment he first met her when she came to the hospital, so that, as the parenting book suggested, she would have her own new baby and not feel left out because of her infant brother.* How could I have forgotten an event into which so much planning had gone? As a photo shows, I had even placed Bossie next to Newton in the infant crib on wheels in which the nurse had brought him to my room from the nursery where he had been for observation so that he could give it to his big sister. Moreover, this event had happened only thirty-five or so years earlier. What did that mean about my memory of events going fifty, sixty years back? To correct my doll blunder, I sheepishly explained to two-year-old Aliya that Ouma—my grandchildren’s name for me—had made a mistake and asked that she give the wrongly gifted doll back. Fortunately that turned out great, since Aliya had decided that boy dolls are no fun because their clothes are not pretty.

  Given that my memory already has a record as long as my proverbial arm, how can I possibly vouch for the truth of the stories I tell? Truth is, I can’t. It is little comfort that, according to leading neuroscientists, nobody—not even the most honest writer who also happens to have an expansively documented past—can swear that everything she tells is “exactly how it happened.” Be that as it may, I have less confidence—and rightly so—in affirming the “this-is-exactly-how-it-happened” status of my recollections than I imagine most other memoirists do. My fading memory is a fact that, whether I fess up or not, figures into every story I tell.

  As the seventeenth-century translator of Don Quixote asserts about Cervantes’s protagonist, though, my lies, too, “are not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in; like Falstaff’s, they resemble the father that begets them; they are simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short.”

  If you know that you will get things wrong, why, then, write in the memoir format, a genre in which writers are always in danger of being accused of “nudging” the truth, making things up or—Oprah forbid—completely fictionalizing?

  I write memoir for selfish reasons: it is a way, accessible to me and preferable to playing memory games on Lumosity, to flesh out my shrinking self with former selves.

  I write to remember, to inhabit, for a while, my earliest self, an entity I describe by appropriating Carel’s portrayal of his first self in his poem “Heimat,” a self “formed by straight tobacco rows… / where the earth was deep, rich, moist and black.” Unlike the spoiler snake of the Bible, the Snake with a capital S from my childhood is not an instrument of banishment from paradise, but rather a means of re-entry into the wonderland in which my soul unfolded before the “withered crops, pestilence and winter’s cold” had “conspired to my father’s broken dreams.” Once my mind “had warmed / to treasure islands,” I probed the world beyond our encirclement of mountains and greedily made it mine, grasped time in my two-fisted clutch and pressed it to my heart.

  I write to admit, from my crone’s nest atop the “strange Country” with “all Things new, and unknown about” in which I am growing old, a sky-high bird’s-eye confessional, stripped of lattices and screens and open to the world—I write to admit that the more the world around me confuses me, the better it feels to escape to that patch of earth, “deep, rich, moist and black,” where my desires are still “bounded by the mountains, and if they ever stray, it’s only to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, the steps by which the soul is shown the way to its first dwelling place.”

  I write to internalize a Law of Nature, a fiat not subject to human understanding or memory, a truth I intuited as a child witnessing wriggly life without number turn to thirty-nine unmoving columns of death, a truth I assimilated intellectually as a young woman studying quantum physics, a truth I must now embrace with my fate-battered psyche: time’s arrow points only one way—forward.

  I write to embrace my place in the cycle of the generations. My body, my brain, my cells—all subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the entropy, or disorder, of this, my closed system, always increases, until its parts no longer cohere and again return to the elements that birthed them.

  Deep, rich, moist and black.

&
nbsp; I write, in other words, so I won’t die of Truth.

  Chapter Three

  The Grammar of the Disappearing Self

  EVEN NOW, AS DEMENTIA wreaks its havoc on my short-term recall, memories from my childhood in South Africa persist in vivid detail.

  One Sunday afternoon, when the world of the family farm was still new, my father took me along when he went out to see how the tobacco seedlings were coming along. Four years old and filled with self-importance, I climbed into the passenger seat of our second-hand blue Willys and my father drove off along the two-track road with the high grass middelmannetjie, or central ridge, that scraped the bottom of the car and that the recent to and fro of farm machinery had carved from the veld. After a short drive, past the tobacco kilns, past the water pump, we stopped on the road.

  Pappa lifted me onto his lap so I could see out the window. I remember his eyes through his glasses looked as big as an owl monkey’s. Curls of smoke from his cigarette perfumed my hair. Beyond the blue of the car door, Bible-black soil stretched bumpily toward the horizon. About twenty steps into the choppy blackness, a white patch of ground winked in the sunshine. It was rounded at the top like a small dune, or a high-water dam some big girls had built on the beach back in Cape Town. Already feeling the kielie-kielie of the sand between my toes, I said, “I want to go play.” Pappa opened the door and looped me out onto the grass beside the wheel tracks.

  Feeling the grass prickle against my tender feet, I held on to Pappa’s fuzzy leg. In Cape Town we had worn shoes and socks all the time, but I was determined to get tough like my cousins and had peeled off my shoes the minute we got out of church that morning. As we climbed in the car after the sermon, Mamma had, as always, insisted that my sister and I follow her example in staying in our church clothes until after our midday dinner—she had given up on the shoes and socks—but she said nothing when Pappa stripped off his tie and jacket even before we had left the parking lot. At home, he had immediately changed his suit pants for everyday khaki shorts. In the lands that day, as he stood beanstalk-tall beside me, the only sign of his church attendance that remained were his black deacon shoes and socks. It would take many years before I would add together his resistance to church clothes with his scientific world view to understand that he was an atheist. Oblivious of such matters on that Sunday, I scooched up the skirt of my pink dress and tucked it into the leg holes of my panties. Gingerly I stepped out on the sharp-edged clods with wheat stalks sticking up from them, yellow and brown.

  “Where are you going, Gertjie?” Pappa called.

  “I’m going to play in the sand,” I said.

  “What sand?” Pappa asked.

  “Over there,” I explained, pointing toward the white beach I saw in the distance.

  My father dropped to his haunches, wrapped his arms around me, and stood up. Pointing to the white shape, he explained that it was actually a plot of germination beds that had been seeded with tobacco a few days earlier and covered with strips of cheesecloth suspended by wires. He had spoken about germination and had even put a pinch of the flyspeck seeds on my palm. “Berrinkies,” he reminded me.

  In an instant, the whole scene snapped into comprehension. I recalled the soft bed of cheesecloth that fell in folds to the floor by the dining room table where Mamma’s Singer would whir for a whole day as she stitched lengths of the white fabric together. In the living room, my sister Lana and I would stake out our separate territories in the unworked fabric, only flying out of our soft nests when Mamma called for help. I would flap over to the Singer so Mamma could arrange a l-o-o-o-ng veil of fabric on my head, and I would spread my arms like wings and glide outside to the far edge of the prickly brown lawn, where I let the veil slide off me like a cloud leaving the moon. In the meantime, Lana would clamp the next piece of fabric in her pointy-armed wing and drag it to where Mamma was rubbing her wrists before again cranking the Singer’s handle.

  That day in the lands as I lurched in Pappa’s arms high above the black turf toward the seedbeds, his breath in my ear and his heart boxing with mine, awe spiraled around me like wisps of smoke: A word can do that! A word can change sand into cloth!

  Berrinkies.

  The astonishingly prolific British author Iris Murdoch published twenty-six novels in her lifetime. Additionally, her oeuvre includes five books on philosophical issues, six plays, and two volumes of poetry. Murdoch’s prose vacillates between astutely observed and hilariously bizarre, the whole brimming with dark humor and unpredictable plot twists. Her storytelling strips her stiff-upper-lipped characters of their veneer of civility. As she peels the onion of their selves layer by layer, she reveals a hollow core echoing with yet more language.

  In her fifteenth novel, The Black Prince, Murdoch depicts the reverberating core of the self as an instrument of redemption, the only route to divinity, albeit one purified of religion. Under her pen redemption comes about through words: my self is only what I say, and only by opening myself to the pain of my words can I attain the redemptive pleasure of claiming to be a self at all.

  Bradley Pearson, The Black Prince’s narrator-protagonist, explains to Julian, the twenty-year-old woman with whom he is in love, why Hamlet is his favorite work of art. “Hamlet is words,” Bradley says, “and so is Hamlet… He is the god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation.” The god is Shakespeare himself, who created Hamlet and then emptied out the prince’s self by—in Murdoch’s image—peeling his living body out of his skin. When Julian asks whether Shakespeare isn’t then turning Hamlet’s pain onto himself, Bradley responds,

  Of course… But… because love here has invented language as if for the first time, he can change pain into pure poetry… He [transforms] the purification of speech… [into] something comic… Shakespeare cries out in agony, he writhes, he dances, he laughs, he shrieks, and he makes us laugh and shriek ourselves out of hell… What redeems us is that speech is ultimately divine.

  Murdoch’s own relation to words, speech, writing, stands testament to her conviction that there is no self without language, no route to “ultimate divinity” without the mediating power of words. Predictably, then, her writing is characterized by a rich and imaginatively deployed vocabulary. However, in Murdoch’s later novels the kinkily erudite lexicon that used to be an essential part of her identity becomes progressively depleted.

  Upon the 1995 publication of Jackson’s Dilemma, which would be her last novel, Murdoch’s critics and admirers alike were struck not only by the work’s impoverished vocabulary, but also its lack of coherence and other oddities. As Susan Eilenberg put it in the London Review of Books, gone were “the perfection of tone, the witty throwaway symmetries of accident and insight, the artfully balanced… rhythms and geometries of passion and form” that had for so long characterized Murdoch’s writing. These trademarks of mastery had been replaced with “prosiness… didacticism, and… reliance on whimsy, allegory and magic,” which Eilenberg found tedious. Following the launch of Jackson’s Dilemma, Murdoch’s audiences at public appearances noticed that she often appeared bewildered. In 1997 a medical diagnosis confirmed what some had begun to fear: the grande dame of British literature, then seventy-seven, had Alzheimer’s.

  With revisionary hindsight, everyone from linguists to neuroscientists to her own husband found in Murdoch’s past behavior and writings harbingers of the dementia that would completely erase her identity—and indeed her life—in the short span of two years. Her husband, John Bayley, traced journal entries back to 1993 that struck him as out of character. While Murdoch had based the very possibility of a relationship with Bayley on his unqualified respect for her private self-sufficiency—a stipulation that even required him to condone her affairs that spanned their forty-five-year marriage—in her final years Murdoch declared a growing emotional dependence on him that implied the fracturing, even the disintegration, of her formerly impenetrable self. Affectionately referring to him as Puss, she writes, “My friends, my friends, I say to the teacups
and spoons. Such intense love for Puss—more and more.” After Murdoch’s death, Bayley applies the idiosyncratic wisdom of the poet A. D. Hope to their last years together by saying that he and Iris had moved “closer and closer apart.”

  Bayley found Murdoch’s journal entries from 1993, two years before Jackson’s Dilemma was published, unambiguously troubling. “Find difficulty in thinking and writing,” she wrote. “Be brave.” Four years later, during the year Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she composed a note that was downright ominous. “My dear,” she wrote, “I am now going away for some time. I hope you will be well…” She set aside the sheet, took up a second one, and wrote, “My dear, I am now going away for some time. I hope you will be well.” A third sheet consisted of pen marks that did not add up to any intelligible lines.

  As Murdoch’s illness continued to crumble away her language and reason, she gradually abandoned attempts to write. Soon sense departed from her speech as well—except to him who loved her deepest and longest. There came a day when Iris laid her hand on Puss’s knee and said, “Susten poujin drom love poujin? Poujin susten?” Bayley needed no more help than her hand gentling his cheek to distill from this jumble the grammar of love.

  Like all white farm children in South Africa during the 1950s, I knew that I would be going to boarding school once I reached my teens. Since I started school at five and subsequently skipped a grade, I was two years younger than my academic peers. For me, therefore, emancipation from the relatively untrammeled part of childhood came three months after my eleventh birthday, in January 1961.