Memory, Identity and the Void

I spoke with a college student who was working at a local ice cream place many months ago -- she had a stack of books with her, and I asked her about them. One of them was a fictional memoir of being in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.

The difficulty of remembering in an amnesia-culture: why put the effort into remembering such a painful thing against the amnesia of the media machine? What justifies the effort and the result? How could such an event, the arrival of negative content, ever supply the glue for a people? Doesn't any robust identity require something positive done -- positive not as the description of a "happy mood," but the positing of something concrete and praiseworthy, something emulable, something divine? Does reality consist in nothing but the threat of an irrupting void, which must be remembered or else ... or else it has won a victory of sorts? Why remember and sustain a memory of this when the positive content given to you in a consumer culture is against this -- when such a memory cannot be sold or even really comprehended?

The Armenians seem to have negative content as the axis of their tribal identity. You would think they would elect an ecclesial identity, which has positive content, to gather together. Instead their identity holds together around the axis of a memory of suffered atrocity.

It all reminds me of the Void.

Comments

[joe]

The murder of 1,500,000 of one's friends and neighbors could put anyone in a bad mood.
Do the Armenian churches not constitute an ecclesial identity?
Does their language and literature not constitute a cultural identity? This posting deserves the racist crap of the week reward.

[Abba Poemen the Ubermensch]

Joe, you radically misunderstand me - you should know that I am no "racist."

First of all, I wrote this blog post months ago, and set it to post today. I didn't know it would coincide with a breakthrough decision by part of the US Govt. to acknowledge the genocide as such, only to have countermoves already being taken to downplay it.

The Armenian genocide is a terrible thing. The Armenians _do_ have a language and a literature and a local church that constitute _both_ their cultural _and_ ecclesial identity.

What I _am_ saying is that I _know_ many Armenians (do you?), and they don't ever attend their Church, but they'll sometimes send their kids to Armenian school to learn the language. This is pretty consistent across the dozens of Armenians I know - I've never met one who attends Church regularly. Should I be surprised?

Further, I could easily turn the camera on any other ethnic group in the US - how about the Irish? There is the thinnest phantom of a cultural identity, which usually reduces to consumer options of which tatoo to get, or which decal to put on your car, or whatnot. Do they know the story of St. Patrick? No. They couldn't tell you what century he lived in. They can tell you all about green beer, though. Can the Irish over here, generally speaking, tell you the first thing about the Christianization of Ireland, or their own ecclesial tradition? No.

[joe]

I neither know nor care what the U.S. government said about the genocide. Perhaps I overstated the case by calling the posting "racist." I did not call you anything. Indeed, my purpose in revisiting the blog a few hours after my posting was to consider deleting the last sentence. The timing of when you wrote yours is irrelevant to the genocide of nearly a century ago. Yes, I have known Armenians. I have not found them to be notably better or worse than other Christians.

[joe]

A Parvulis Libera Me, Domine
(From Littleness Free Me, O Lord)

KEEP me, O Lord
From the little, the interfering and the stupid;
From the infection of irritation and anger over nothings;
Deliver me, and keep me, O my Lord.

From all promptings to decry the person or work of others;
From scorn, sarcasm, petty spite, and whisperings behind the back;
From the dishonest honesty of frankness meant to hurt;
Deliver me, and keep me, O my Lord.

From hasty judgments, biased judgments, cruel judgments,
And all pleasure in them;
From resentment over disapproval or reproof, whether just or unjust;
Deliver me, and keep me, O my Lord.

From all imposition of my own fads and interests upon my acquaintance;
From burdening and boring others with my own anxieties and ailments;
From self-justification, self-excusing, and complacency;
Deliver me, and keep me, O my Lord

- Dean Eric Milner White

[Abba Poemen the Ubermensch]

That's a beautiful prayer - I'm considering incorporating it into my Lenten routine. God knows I make enough of those errors.

Here, however, the Armenians were not singled out as worse or better than any other group. I was not passing a moral judgment on them, though looking at what I wrote, I can understand why you would have mis-read it that way. I was only identifying an instance of the Void as it relates to memory - I was citing an example of how we - _all_ of us, not Armenians - remember atrocities better than we remember posits.