Rhapsody of memory
Proper 23C
2 Tim 2.8-15; Luke 17.11-19
Mnemosyne, (also titled Lamp of Memory)
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (completed 1881)
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead (2 Tim 2.8)
TWELVE o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Moonlight shakes your vision. You see things and you know in your mind what they are, but the silver chill of the moon shapes them differently. The clear sights of sunshine are no more - memory holds the vision as much as what you actually see. Is this why lepers were literally shut out of communities at night? During the day their disease all too obvious - but in moonlight you might stumble into the unclean unaware of the contorted features, or the missing fingers. You might mistake the wretched form for a person like you or me, and without knowing stumble on deathly contamination -
cross the boundary - without knowing. A person like you or me? Memory tells you not, even if the shadows hide.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the
door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength
has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
When the silver light is cut by the yellow of a lamp then all of a sudden deep shadows and searing light shapes new forms.
The poet speaks of gaslight - I can only just remember it, noisy and searing white - I can imagine the bleaching memory, casting a shape as if a whitened and smoothed branch washed by a million waves and honed by sand and pebble. But its not drift wood - it’s the ghostly form of a face half hidden, half disclosed. What you see is what you remember - the woman or the wood, the hair curled or the rusty spring, fragile metal or feeble face? A person, a mother, a friend, a threat, an offer, a prostitute? Who else stands in lighted doorways at half past one in the morning? This is a woman on the margins - the places most of us don't like to admit are just around the corner, hidden in the shadows. Her existence is in the shadows, in the margins, at the place where the good people go only secretly. Strange thing about Jesus - he seems to relish the shadows, always crossing the boundaries (Samaria and Galilee), always looking for the margins (tax collectors and zealots), always seeking the people of the shadows (adulterers, prostitutes, lepers). Neither blinded by the incandescence of disapproval, nor dismayed by the darkness of memory's prejudice. He is free - to see, to re-member, literally put people back together, to re-member them. He sees more than the shadows disclose, his memory so much more than we have forgotten - prey to our selfish needs and easy compromises.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
the moon holds no grudges,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."
The moon has lost her memory. In moonlight the woman is no longer hemmed in by the distain of the people who see her in the light of day. The memory of who she is obscured a while. The silver chill surprisingly comforting. She no longer has to keep out of harm's way for fear of being exposed. The leper too finds he has common cause with those other nine - lepers also. Healthy bodies would have made them severe enemies - what would nine good have to do with one hated Samaritan? The distortions of disease makes for a common currency of suffering that overturns ethnicity, class, religion, background. But if disease and night-time overturns some memories - others are made more obvious by the chill
of the air- smell kindles what lack of light obscures. The daylight will return.
The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the
wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for
life."
The last twist of the knife.
What did he do from midnight until four? The poet doesn't tell us. Was he just looking on, letting the memories be stirred by what he sees and smells? Or did he fall prey to temptation? Or did he resist all inducements and now returns home dismayed as the sights of life he has seen? I can't tell, but memory has the key both to the understanding of what he has seen and what the new day will bring. And so it was for the leper. As he walks with the others, he like them, is made clean, and lost memory is recovered he's a Samaritan again and they are Jews. What has he to do with them?
A Samaritan has no need to show himself to a priest at the Templein Jerusalem -indeed he's likely to be lynched if he tried! He remembers who he is, and who they are. Memory is the key - the last twist of the knife.
He recovers who he is - memory throws up a crowd of twisted things. He's a foreigner, not one of THEM. We get the thanking all wrong - he doesn't return like a good boy thanking a kind friend, far from it. He returns to his foreign patron, the one with superior power in who's debt he is and says his formal 'thank you's' which ends the relationship. This is hard for us to hear because it so goes against the grain of what we might ordinarily think is going on here. In a society of patronage everywhere, like first century Palestine, a thank you ends the patronage relationship - it acknowledges what has been and declares that it is no more. I have no more need of your patronage; the obligations of it are ended. Stand on your own feet Samaritan, stand as a Samaritan, in no debt to any Jew or Jewish idea of God. Startling stuff for Jesus commends him for his assertion. Indeed going on his way completes his healing.
The little lamp spreads a ring
on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the
wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for
life."
The last twist of the knife.
A new day will begin. The Samaritan will walk in the sun again as a Samaritan. The hiddenness of silver moonlight gives way to the blaze of daylight that shows things for what they really are. Eternal glory struggling into vision in the despairs, and chains of existence.
The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful--
for he cannot deny himself.
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things
but the word of God is not twisted, a new day has begun.