At
least half of what we remember is probably imaginary. Not that it isn’t true. Far from it.
But precision gets shaky after a while—long before we get to what we
euphemistically call “senior moments.” I remember an old illustrated history of World War II
that was on my parents’ book shelf, some kind of official account with many,
many black and white photographs.
One I thought I recalled quite clearly was a photo of two high-ranking
German officers in uniform just after they were captured, sitting down looking
very dejected and depressed. When I returned to Savannah to the house where I
grew up on Ridge Road, I retrieved that somewhat tattered book—probably damaged
from all the page turning I used to do looking at all the vivid pictures of that
war in the midst of which I was born in 1943. I looked up the photo I remembered. There was only one Nazi officer and,
yes, he did look dejected, doubtless even depressed because he was faced with
two grinning American GI’s, one of whom was pointing a rifle at his head. So
what I remembered was mostly true but just not altogether precise. Caveat
emptor! Yet those images
probably set me on the way to a life as a photographer. Even today my whole conception of World
War II is firmly set by those images—far more vividly a part of me than the
text itself.
I
often wonder about the images we recall from our dreams. Just how accurate is the content? Merely the effort to recall them seems
to alter the dreams, no matter how close we are to waking, imposing a linear
logic mostly foreign to oneiric existence, more associational than our proud
reason might want to believe, analogical
rather than logical. William James suggested as he reported
in Talks to Teachers, that even our
waking thought is somewhat chaotic and disorderly, that the “stream of
consciousness” requires considerable effort if we want to herd all those unruly
images into some semblance of reasonable order. Does this effort involve some sea-change that renders the
truth of our end result a little (or a lot) in doubt? Sometimes even a directed attempt to imagine something, an exercise which Jung called “active
imagination,” produces some strange results.
Once while perfectly wide
awake—not even hypnotized— I was told to go down into an imaginary tunnel and
walk through it where I would meet someone with a gift, someone accompanied by
an animal important to me—a “totem animal”—and who would carry a gift in his
hands in a box which I was to take and open. I did this as an exercise of pure imagination and free
association to see what would come up for me as an aid to my life as a
writer. As I emerged from the
tunnel I saw an old black man approaching in a pair of denim overalls,
accompanied by a possum walking along like he was tame. The man had a small ornately carved
wooden box in his hand. When he opened it there was an immediate flash of
brilliant green light from a crystal in the box. He gestured for me to take the gift.
I stopped the exercise, utterly baffled
by the dream-like result. What I
did notice was the Southern character of the images—both the man and the animal
were powerful icons from my upbringing.
I was in Boston when I did the exercise and had not lived in the South
for more than a quarter century.
Yet somehow those images felt “right” and “true” in some deep way I
could not easily fathom.
To
this day I puzzle over the paradox of the gift of a beautiful emerald as a
symbol of a writing career, a gift offered to me by a figure so humble in the
South—yet at another and higher level perhaps a more ancient image of Wisdom
itself, despite the equally humble animal that was his companion. Hardly was I confronted by Athena
leaping out of the brain of Zeus accompanied by an owl. For me, though, the
imagery remains a profound truth. Though I may wish to read Homer in the
original language, I would be foolish to ignore the oracular utterance of that
exercise on that day so long ago, far though it was from the Temple at Delphi. I may call myself “a Plutarchan conservative”—and I do
love and take guidance from Plutarch’s Moralia—but
I have to remember where I came from.
I may not ignore my humble origins in the South. It may be humiliating even to
acknowledge where I came from, but somehow the people and animals and landscape
in that place are all essential to me. Somehow my origins—and I hear “This
Little Light of Mine” sung by Fannie Lou Hamer in the background—are part of
the gifts that I have received as a writer. I can only respond with “Amazing Grace—How Sweet The
Sound…!” It was the only song at
my father’s funeral—sung by a beautiful but solitary soprano. It was the song that came on the
television years later in the hospital where my mother spent her last hours, a
‘tele-vision’ right over her bed. If you know the history of that song, then
you also know how closely woven into spiritual unity are the two races that
predominantly make up the South.
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