In his Preface to Robert Walzer’s The Tanners, W.G. Sebald writes:
What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and of the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension?
It occurs to me that all the essays in this issue are investigating the many kinds of memory: familial, historical, autobiographical; memories that lodge in places, in relationships, in generations, in cultures, in history. The essayists in this issue are historians, anthropologists, archaelogists of our psychic terrain. For me, their renewed appreciation for layered time and shifting meanings, those “similarities, overlaps, and coincidences” help me frame questions about the future, about the ways that chains of consequence and skeins of meaning stream from the present.
I began writing this on All Saints Day, November 1st. When I was a boy I preferred the days before and after All Saints though: I loved Halloween for obvious reasons, and I approved very much of the “all” in All Souls Day, a restoration of the rest of us to time’s consideration.
A few days later, my granddaughter, five, burst through the backdoor after school, “Grandpa!” I had just viewed a brief Instagram video from Gaza. In it a child was lifted in someone’s arms, her body limp, her brain flopping from her bloodied skull. I hugged my granddaughter tightly. I held her for dear life. I held her a bit too long before I let her go. “What’s wrong, grandpa? Are you crying?”
A few evenings later, I watched democracy die, watched right up until the bitter end at about 3 am, as if I were a hospice attendant. A white supremacist oligarch, patriarch of patriarchs, misogynist of misogynists whether we want it or not, had huckstered and defrauded and hacked his way into the power. Again. And all the gangsters of the world called to congratulate him for making the varsity: gangsters who have been legitimized as the state — L’État, c’est moi — and identified with a country, with a people.
All wars are gang wars, for territory, wealth, power. Demogogues can depend on the post-traumatic responses of people who have been injured by history, by war, by injustice. That is the true “cycle of violence,” the cycle of vengeance that whirs like a turbine, powering the ambitions of greedy sociopaths. War is the game of games, the moneymaker of all moneymakers. The manipulation of human beings and their passions, turning their grief into rage, their fear into hatred, is how the war game is played and the money gets made.
And so, while gangsters rely on mythological futures, patriotic and religious, to hold sway, we need essayists like these, who will keep on telling us about the present and the past and how many ways they include each other, and about how our moment includes the past as memory and the future as what we hope for and what we stand for.
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
