Last year, I wrote several holiday-themed letters. I thought I’d pick up on that tradition today, which, as some of you may know, is a public holiday in this country. You’ll excuse the longer pause between letters. I have been busy writing other things. Primarily, I’ve spend a few weeks writing a chapter on Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, which is coming together nicely, just in time for the Hidden Nabokov conference at Wellesley College in a few weeks’ time. Today, I finished writing a short story titled “Woman and Dog,” (named after a meteorite called Woman and Dog that hit Greenland some thousand years ago, in case you were worried that I might do something as banal as write about my dog), which I submitted as a writing sample for an emerging writer scholarship right here in Brooklyn. Earlier today, I suddenly realized that I also have to factor in my calendar two academic commitments, a chapter and an invitation to join a research group, that I had made some time ago and then conveniently either forgotten all about, or intentionally repressed the memory of, until opening my inbox this morning. Let’s just say that I find it rather difficult to muster the kind of zen-like focus on the present moment evoked (hubristically, as usual) at the end of the previous letter. Instead, I’m thinking about investing in a reasonably priced time turner. If I live every day twice, can I be both a novelist and a researcher? I’d become one of those great sleepless artists that populate Nabokov’s novels, only I can’t write unless I sleep (or sleep unless I write, but that’s another story).
So, Memorial Day, huh? Let’s see. I began my investigation where every amateur anthropologist begins, which is to say by asking a member of the local tribe. The answer was somewhat short of illuminating (and my apologies to the native in question, whose observations are usually very much to the point), and can be summarized as an injunction to “remember shit.” My Canadian roommate also did not know what the object of remembrance is supposed to be, but with a neighbor’s intuition pronounced that “it’s probably got something to do with the military.” Cha-ching. Memorial Day is celebrated on the last Monday of May to commemorate the U.S. military personnel who have died in service. Originally known as Decoration Day, it probably dates back to the years following the Civil War, when the practice of bringing flower garlands to soldiers’ graves in the end of May spread around the country. The war itself had concluded on May 9, 1865, with the surrender of the Confederate army, but came to be celebrated a few weeks later in the end of May likely for the rather pragmatic reason that flowers were more likely to be in bloom also in the northern states. We may also wish to remember, on this sweltering late May day (28°C in shade—I am writing this from a hammock—which in Fahrenheit amounts to “try to remember your calculus, you barbarians”) that springtime was considerably cooler over a century and a half ago. “Memorial Day is also considered the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States,” as Wikipedia kindly informs me.
Googling some of this information now (I never pretended to be an actual anthropologist, merely a writer with an overactive mind), I manage to tap a little deeper into the paradox of this holiday. Memorial Day is one of three—three!—public holidays dedicated to those in the military, the other two being the Armed Forces Day on May 21, celebrated in honor of those in active military service who still have a pulse, and Veterans Day on November 11, presumably in honor of those who no longer serve actively in the military but can otherwise still be counted amongst the living and breathing population. This triptych of dead, alive, and retired members of the armed forces says something of the symbolic value attached to taking up arms in these quarters. Given how often U.S. citizens take up arms against one another—in this very unmerry month of May alone, there were two large-scale mass shootings, one at a school in Uvalde, Texas, and another at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York—it pays to ask whether a little less arms-worship might be the way forward. In the 7 days since 19 kids and two teachers were killed by the school-shooter in Texas, there have already been another 14 shootings that had at least four victims, according to the The Washington Post (“U.S. Sees at Least 11 Mass Shootings over Memorial Day”—the article itself is unfortunately behind a pesky firewall but has been updated to reflect the constantly changing numbers, as Americans do their best to honor Memorial Day by making sure that there will be no shortage of graves over which to hang garlands of flowers, even if they are not filled with the honorable corpses of soldiers but with the inglorious remains of office clerks, supermarket cashiers, and middle schoolers.) Everyone reading this knows all of this already, and nobody better than Americans themselves, so let us move onto other aspects of remembering.
Memories are always selective. For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten. This became clear to me this morning as memories of forgotten deadlines and other commitments suddenly rushed to my insufficiently caffeinated brain. It’s also pretty obvious on a national level: The different cultures of remembrance—including those relating to the Holocaust in Germany, to the Winter War in Finland, and the Independence and Civil Wars in the United States—require that we actively keep forgetting about whatever does not fit the official memory. Memorial Day, which originated in the Southern states when mothers of fallen soldiers started bringing flowers to their dead sons’ graves, is a great example of the partitioning of memories that belongs integrally to all cultures of remembrance: Remembering the deaths of Confederate soldiers, are large part of what we are remembering are the deaths of countless (mostly young, poor, and white) men who died defending other (mostly old, wealthy, and white) men’s right to continue enslaving black men, women, and children. On the other hand, several bills have been passed in Texas in the past years to limit how much teachers are legally allowed to tell pupils about the history of enslavement, according to The New York Times (“Texas Pushes to Obscure the State’s History of Slavery and Racism”). Some memories will be celebrated, others violently suppressed. Such is politics, especially in the ultra-polarized nation known to some as the United States of Awkward Thanksgivings.
There is no easy way of fixing whatever the root cause of these divisions is—or even of identifying it. I’m just running with associations here (that’s largely what these letters are about, at least to me), but it seems that social media is definitely not helping. Just this morning (after re-remembering my academic commitments but before starting to edit my short story), I was reading an excellent essay, “The New Puritans,” in The Atlantic, in which journalist Anne Applebaum points out that people’s ability to withstand ambivalence and discomfort seems to be decreasing rapidly. Especially in higher education, anyone who makes others feel uncomfortable—physically, ideologically, socially, or intellectually—is perceived as a threat that must be silenced:
Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.
For someone who thinks that it is the civic duty of artists and intellectuals to make both themselves and others feel uncomfortable, this is not exactly good news. Being able to withstand people who think differently, speak differently, look different, have different values, different memories, different pasts, and different futures, seems to me a mark of intellectual and emotional maturity. We might not see eye to eye on a lot of matters, but if I experience our disagreement as personally threatening, then how secure am I about the values, principles, and beliefs that I do hold dear? More importantly, I am not my opinions. My opinions can, and must, change as my knowledge of the world grows, as the result of reading things that make me feel uncomfortable but also of meeting other people whose views might cause some discomfort, and trying to open myself up to their ways of seeing the world. This is the problem with identity politics, I think.
Anyhow, my laptop is overheating and I have a date with a particularly lush elm at Fort Greene Park, where I plan to retire for the rest of this spectacularly hot day. May your memories cause you a suitable amount of discomfort, whatever that may be.