Sweeping away time

I don't think I'm the only one who would like to erase the past, or parts of it. Certainly, we all have regrets that haunt and pain that lingers on. This notion structured the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein two ex-lovers had medical procedures to erase the memories of their relationship from their minds. Of course, it wasn't so easy or "clean." Erasing someone else also means erasing part of your own personal history and self-construction. Love is not just about giving and generosity and otherness. It is about desire and memory and projection and hope and self-reflection... and perhaps a sort of self-deception. I don't believe this cheapens love. I just think we shouldn't fool ourselves that love is pure.

Except perhaps in the case of parent-child love. I do believe that purity exists there, if nowhere else in the world. And what if this is the relationship you want to erase? This much more fundamental relationship? In my case, I would like to erase my father from my memory. I know this sounds horrible and indecently cold. My past with him, though, seems like a lie. Or worse, a trick of the mind. And I would like to get rid of the dirty feeling that is sterilizing the warmth and richness out of my childhood and family history.

I've been having awful dreams again. Dreams that I had when my father first abandoned our family just about a year ago. Dreams where I am kicking, punching, violently attacking my father... and all the while, screaming at him "Leave us alone. Just leave us alone." I am not a violent person by nature. So what is going on? Seems clear enough. I want him erased.

I don't find the anger to be therapeutic. I find it to be a poison that begins to infect the rest of my life, my other relationships. My secure childhood translated smoothly into a trusting way of being in the world. Now I feel like Pi when the ship carrying him and his family to Canada sank. "The men were nodding vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw my overboard did I begin to have doubts." (Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 105) My family was thrown overboard and I have begun to have doubts: doubts about my current relationship when there is no reason, doubts about the strength of the bonds within my remaining broken family, doubts about anything except being completely alone.

And doubt in crisis becomes fear. And fear, according to Pi, is often acted out aggressively. The animals who kill one another in the lifeboat. Similarly, my dreams of rage against my father. But I do not want to be a person raging against the world, raging against the world within my own mind, raging even against the chimerical world in which I attempt to rest.

"Anecdotes sweep away time," writes Roger Angell in his reminiscence of his dead wife and how the passage of time separates him from her at ever-increasing speeds. (Roger Angell, "Over the Wall: A change of plan," The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2012) My family anecdotes are frozen, not in time, but in the space of some otherworld, a world that I cannot enter, a world -- it seems -- of which I have never been a part. I want to sweep away this time, sweep away my past, my lovely childhood memories that are now so tainted and stained with the blood of a family cut in pieces. I want to sweep away time so that I can create time... and space. Just as Roger has already had his gravestone placed next to his wife and carved with his name and birthdate ("it only lacks the final numbers"), I want to create a space, a permanence that my own family (my husband-to-be and my young son) can count on, one which they can return to again and again knowing that space is a marker of meaning: as Roger knows, one of his trips back there will be final and that is "only keeping a promise." I want to build a space that houses a knowledge of security and deep warmth. I want my loved ones to return to our space. I want to create a space that holds a promise. I want to keep promises that were not kept for me. And to do that, I want to sweep away the past that seems inhabited by others, for that is the best way I can think of it now. The alternative is that my dusty past is inhabited by deception and lies, loss and pain. A past that handcuffs me to sadness and does not let me choose, as Pi would say, the 'better story.' I want to choose the better story.