The lyre of Orpheus

I had planned to write next about Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, but we went to the symphony on Sunday. And whenever I go to the symphony, I get ideas. I keep a little notebook in my purse to jot down these ideas, and inevitably, during the first performance of the evening, I slowly creep my hand into my bag and retrieve my notebook and pen as quietly as I can manage. 

Sunday’s performance opened with Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. I had never heard of Dimitri Shostakovich, and I was spellbound. His symphony reminded me of all the things I remember that are no longer fresh. Like: the moment after my grandparents died, and I went to their house with my mother to help clean it out, and a vine had grown through the casing of the dining room window and spread up the wall towards the ceiling. In the hallway outside the dining room was a door that led outside, but it was permanently shut, and high above the ground with no steps. My grandmother kept a planter in front of it. I had always wondered why that door was there. I remembered walking up the stairs to the second floor, and how difficult it was to make a slinkly slink down the carpeted steps. I remember the attic room with closets full of my mother’s and aunt’s old clothing. I remember the bookshelves filled with their old books. I remember the kitchen table by the window with the country green plantation shutters.

None of these memories are fresh. I’m petrified by what I can’t remember. I remember how much I loved that house, and I loved it because it was my grandparents’ house, because my grandparents were there. But I can’t remember the wallpaper in the kitchen. Or the kitchen chairs. Or the floor. I can’t remember the stove. I can’t remember the tables in the hallway or the knick knacks on them. I can’t remember the color of the carpet in the downstairs bedroom. 

I can’t remember how many games of Go Fish I played with my grandmother. I can’t remember how many times I watched my grandfather flip over cards in his endless games of Solitaire. And I want to remember. I want to remember the sounds of their voices, their turns of phrase, the way they hugged. 

But sometimes, I can be caught off guard by memory sneaking up behind me, and I can remember everything, like the morning we spent shelling peas from my grandfather’s garden at the kitchen table. Or gathering walnuts in the yard. Or going to the pool in the summer. 

Memory is what makes our stories possible, our narratives of life and self and others. Even the spaces, the absences made of forgetting are just the spaces in the weave of the fabric. We don’t always notice the holes, but they're there, holding the threads together. Sometimes the holes are what allow us to notice the thread. Sometimes we see it on our own. And sometimes it takes an entire symphony for us to notice the way the past is held together in our minds, and to remember what we can of it.