The Case of Pinochet

Role of Memory...
 
 

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget about Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget about Sinai. And so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

In Poland, in the years after World War II, people began to ask how many Poles had actually perished in the war. They debated whether five-and-a-half million or six million people had died. Some concluded that since they could never know exactly, they should just forget the issue and move on. The poet Zbigniew Herbert grappled with this debate in a poem entitled Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision, in which he concludes,

"and yet in these matters
accuracy is essential
we must not be wrong
even by a single one
we are despite everything
the guardians of our brothers
ignorance about those who have disappeared
undermines the reality of the world."

These are wonderful lines. As a country democratizes, citizens look forward to enjoying the rule of law and free assembly, but they want them to be real, not founded on mass willed ignorance.

                                                             On the one hand, then, people strive for the greatest possible truth
                                                                about the past. On the other, I think of a short piece written in 1970 by
                                                                the poet W.S. Merwin, Unchopping a Tree.  He describes the
                                                                step-by-step process of how one would put back together a tree that
                                                                has fallen such that its leaves, twigs, nests and so on have all broken
                                                                off. All "must be gathered and attached once again to their respective
                                                                places across an endless painstaking process." At last the scaffolding
                                                                for reconstruction must be removed.

Finally, the moment arrives when the last sustaining piece is removed and the tree stands again on its own. . . . You cannot believe it will hold. How long will it stand there now? . . . You are afraid the motion of the clouds will be enough to push it over. What more can you do? What more can you do? There is nothing more you can do. Others are waiting. Everything is going to have to be put back.

                                                                What is spectacular to me in that passage is both the vivid imagination
                                                                and the preposterousness of the project. A line in the last paragraph
                                                                speaks of "the first breeze that touches ... the dead leaves" They are
                                                                still dead. Imagine the tremendous labor involved in putting a dead tree
                                                                back together. The author here is depicting action which does not tend
                                                                to life, action that does not move forward.

Finally, I want to draw on an essay written in 1945 by Maurice Merleau-Ponty about the legacy of World War II, translated as The War Has Taken Place.  Merleau-Ponty writes about the paradox in trying to remember history, as by recording it. But meanings change, and efforts to preserve history, to hold events and persons to where they were at a given moment, may in the end serve less to preserve than to mark passage and change. For example, we preserve the books and clothes of a loved one who has died. But, "Once they were wearable and now they are out of style and shabby. To keep them any longer would not make the dead person live on. Quite the opposite--they date his death all the more cruelly."

We must not forget, but we must remember in a living way. Truth commissions must be future oriented; they must make space for living.

                                                                                                                  Lawrence Weschler

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