I’ve been reading a book written in another desert by another desert people– Exodus. I’m at the end–they’ve just finished building the tabernacle (have to admit I skipped over a few chapters of “fifty loops of blue sewn on each curtain…”). God sends a cloud to sit on the tabernacle during the day, and fire burns in it at night “for all to see,” just as he led the Israelites through the Sinai desert with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. And at this point, they’re waiting to start out from the wilderness to the Holy Land, but they can’t move until God lifts the cloud; then, they know it’s time to go.

I meditated on the cloud and the fire–why would God choose those particular signs to give? Since I’ve been writing my chapter on the Delphic oracle and the foundations of prophecy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the particular ways in which prophecy makes the divine legible. I don’t have an answer, but I made something plain to myself that I have thought all along.

I mean, there’s the obvious reason that clouds contrast with the blue sky and fire contrasts with the night. So, if God was just being strictly logical, he might have hit on these solutions. But since I’m a mystic, I don’t generally stop at the logical. I thought of God concealing himself in a cloud when he spoke to Moses on Sinai, so that Moses would not be destroyed by God’s unadulterated glory. And I thought of Pentecost.

That’s when I realized that I have always treated clouds and fire as languages I just can’t understand. Maybe this is because I grew up where I grew up, and clouds are so distinct and sculpted here, their margins so clear that you can watch them shift shape and dissolve second by second. Maybe it’s because I sat around campfires as a child with no one talking and watched the tongues of the fire wagging like watching a TV with the sound turned off. But to me they are both so obviously also the word of God–maybe not words directly about our relationship with Him, like the bible is, but maybe words about how the world all holds together. Maybe they *are* the words that hold the world together.

Then, I thought, clouds are wild, but fire is something  we’ve made…. But that’s not really true. We didn’t make fire, we learned to *channel* it. We use it. We also channel clouds when we drive pistons and turbines with steam. Now, this is Babel. This is Francis Bacon and the Royal Society striving to “Penetrate” Nature to learn her secrets, to learn God’s “Maker’s Knowledge.” What they told everyone was, we’re not trying to be like God, but if we can learn the languages and systems by which He made everything, we can help him out and fix the effects of the Fall. We can return Mankind to Eden through science and ingenuity. It’s our sacred duty.

Fire, water, wind, mountain…. This is why I went into rhetoric, Maggie, really and truly. It’s why I became a reader and a writer. All around me, always, there were these texts inviting me to read them, texts I couldn’t read, but if I only could I would come closer to God. I don’t want his power, like the builders of Babel. I want his heart.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Golden), 1995/2008; Collection SFMOMA, through prior gifts of J. D. Zellerbach, Gardner Dailey, and an anonymous donor; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through prior gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim; and the Art Institute of Chicago, through prior gift of Adeline Yates; partial gift of Andrea Rosen in honor of Felix Gonzalez-Torres; © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; photo: Ian Reeves

The photo doesn’t do it justice, but the installation at left from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a curtain of golden bead strands that serves as a portal to their exhibition entitled PassageWorks. The first room is on Memory and emphasizes the dissociative quality of that human faculty; (re)membering something implies its absence.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about the problem of memory. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the force of memory in shaping my thinking (and right there you can see the circularity that has infected my inquiry!)–therefore, my identity. I spend so much of my mental time and energy trying to reframe past actions in a narrative that coheres with my story about my ideal self. Who is that ideal self? You could read nearly any of my novels or stories and see bits and pieces of her. She is a fighter–self-disciplined, powerful, virtually humorless (I know! The irony….) She operates completely consistently from a  code of ethics that could be described generously as a warrior’s code, less generously as a stubborn, selfish, utterly independent pride. She is pure power and control, which lends her absolute immunity to criticism or mockery. It follows, then, that she is thin and strong and always performs at her peak.  She is sublime, not beautiful. She is an object of desire in exactly the same way that a Song dynasty tea bowl is, or a distant mountain. As well as this cold, intellectual desire, she inspires respect, fear, and admiration–but not affection; affection implies codependence and thus weakness….

Um, OK now that I write it out it doesn’t seem so cool; trust me, my ideal self is totally Oscarworthy when viewed in technicolor through my…memory.

I’m not going to launch into all the cognitive psychology and philosophy I have read on memory. In my opinion it boils down to “We don’t really know how it works.” My personal meditations on memory have produced the sum total of the following insights:

Memory is like a wound. You have to worry it to keep it open. Otherwise, it heals and vanishes.

Memory is story.

Memory is pathology.

Memory is growth.

Memory is the ultimate human tragedy. Or forgetting is.

Memory is self.

Memory is damage.

Three “types” of memory: episodic, functional, and factual (oops, the CogPsy made it in there)

Memory is minstrelsy.

Memory is always displaced. Or is experience? Do we experience everything through the filter of our memories?

Memory is the opposite of loss.

Memory is loss. Therefore,

Memory is forgetting.

Memory is an illusion.

Self is an illusion.

Memory is annihilation.

Sigh. If its all trauma, how can it also be my key to growth? How do I get better as a person if I don’t recalculate based on past injuries and mistakes? How do I grow as a Christian if I do not remember the miracles large and small that Christ has done for me, the promises He has made and kept. All of those accumulated satisfactions build bedrock beneath me that won’t be washed away. But lately memory has seemed much more of a hindrance to my growth than a help as I spend hours regurgitating mistakes and regretting sharp words.

The key for me has been prayer, and it’s been through the book you gave me, David Hassel’s Radical Prayer. Hassel, as you know, imagines that memory is a very powerful force in our prayerlife and our interaction with God. The first phase of his spiritual retreat, then, is the Prayer of Personal Reminiscence. I remember being floored when I read this; I had been worrying about memory, and I hadn’t even said anything to you about it, and then you gave me this book, and there it was right there–the key to getting started understanding memory! Bless you, my friend.

Hassel recommends starting by praying through positive memories of goods received and extended by the praying person. I started with my childhood because I don’t have the courage to do my adulthood quite yet–it’s the territory I have the most problems with, and I wanted to start out with something with training wheels–my childhood was very blessed overall. I prayed through my happy childhood memories with God and immediately noticed two things: 1. There were more of them than I thought; 2. I was happiest when I was perceiving beauty, learning, or creating–especially creating. The first revelation was a little surprising to me because my strongest childhood memories tend to be of anxieties or humiliations; but, it turns out that these memories, while potent, are far in the minority. The second revelation was not a surprise; I’ve chosen a career based on the first two phases (perceiving beauty and learning). However, the truly happiest I was as a child was when I was staying up all night to finish a school project of a story, a piece of music, or an artwork of some kind. This phase of the Prayer of Personal Reminiscence reminded me that I’m a creator at heart, not a critic.

The second subphase, the unhappy memories, wasn’t as challenging as I thought it was going to be and was incredibly illuminating. Here’s what I learned: 1. I had way fewer unhappy childhood memories than happy ones 2. Those memories all circled around three emotions: fear of abandonment, desire for control over circumstances or other people, and fear of disapproval. Wow, just three things, and they’re the keys to the biggest obstacles in my spiritual walk! I started assembling bible verses to use as counternarratives (like Nelda taught me!) when these negative thoughts assail me. When I read Romans 8:1-2 again (“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death”) tear sprang to my eyes as a pressure-chamber in my soul blew wide open. That’s it. There is NO condemnation for Christians. There might be “OK, I screwed that up, better luck next time.” There might be “I hurt that person and need to make amends,” but there is NOT the humiliating, searing, crushing weight of condemnation that absolutely puts the light out inside me everytime I remember something stupid, awkward, or hurtful that I did in the past. That feeling is a lie from the Enemy–that’s it, a lie! I need not to give it a voice in the story of my life. I need to counter it with a story of who I really am. Here are the verses I found that tell the right story:

Control issues counterstory: Jer. 29:11; Rom. 8:28, 9:16; 2 Tim. 1:12

Abandoment/Isolation issues: Heb. 13:5; Rom. 8:38-39

Disapproval/condemnation issues: Rom. 5:8; 8:1,31; James 1:27, 4:4; 1 John 2:15-17; 1 Cor. 1:25; Is. 2:22

So, I’m not even through the first phase of Radical Prayer; I still have to deal with my adult memories as well as pray through Christ’s memories (the gospels). But, it’s a first step, and it feels good.

So, the question really boils down to this one: Has the internet killed logos? This worry is an old one. St. Augustine fretted that conversions based on emotion would not last and ended up convincing the Scholastics to treat most everything in Aristotle and Plato as pagan devilry–except logos. Somehow, only logos is really seen as “fair” in a Western paradigm that has trained itself over a long period of time to privilege the mind and be suspicious of the heart. Logos is supposed to be the zamboni that levels the ice for everyone; to wit, we have inherited far more argumentative “fallacies” based on false appeals to emotion and character than we have based on failures of the syllogism.

But does this new model sell logos short, and therefore stack the deck against its survival in the digital age? The pre-Aristotelian definition of logos contained many meanings: word, speech, order, ratio, discourse. The authors of the New Testament specifically identified logos with the supernatural Word that gives life in the first chapter of John. Does the digital age in fact, then, restore to the logos the supernatural power that Aristotle and his most influential readers (particularly Cicero, Augustine, and Boethius) stripped away from it in their desire to sever persuasion from its “uncivilized” pre-Socratic roots in the muthos–story, ritual, and mysticism? Are we relapsing, in other words, into Homerian times, where logos and muthos weren’t so easy to tell from each other, and we persuaded by telling stories? Walter Ong would predict this development as a phase of the new orality.

Fancy thinking, there, but what if my millennium generation students can’t distinguish an exaggeration like “McCain can’t fix the economy because he thinks the middle class is anyone who makes less than $5 million a year!” from a valid argument like “McCain won’t bring change to Washington because his voting record shows he has agreed with President Bush 90% of the time”? (And they can’t; we just tried it in class.) What does this mean for their voting, for their ability to understand the persuasive tactics that classically-trained rhetoricians such as Obama and McCain use on them? The internet is not going to teach them to do that–unless they watch Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart, the savior of classical argumentation. Now, there’s a sentence that would make Neil Postman spin in his grave (God rest him).