On Living in the Past

Or awareness and the place of memory

Although their lives were tragically cut short by the event, when the submersible Titan imploded, no one on board knew what was happening. Neither did they experience any pain. What we sense and know of the world and ourselves is mediated and rendered sensible and knowable by our bodies and their systems of nerve and neural tissue. Between the moment we come into contact with something and become aware of that contact, a whole series of physiological and otherwise events must transpire within ourselves. And that all takes time—not much time, but time nonetheless. So much time, in fact, that the Titan crew would have had their brains and nervous systems crushed before they could have any awareness of physical pain or the hopelessness of their situation.¹ There would have been no time for them to process the physical effects of their contact with their rapidly imploding surroundings through their nervous systems, for their brains to do what they must do to render that manifold contact transmitted through their nervous systems into coherent percepts, and then for them to experience and know those percepts their brains had worked to prepare. In their situation they knew a blessing that accrued to them by virtue of embodied consciousness being what it is: always living in the past.

For if all the activities that directly give rise to, grow out of, and ground our awareness or consciousness of things—the activities of sensing, feeling, evaluating, knowing, choosing, and loving—transpire after a whole host of events unfold between our immediate contact with things in their present configurations and our awareness of them, then we are always aware or conscious of things not as they are but as they were. A moment with a friend or lover we want to hold on to, a strikingly beautiful vista we wish to stay with, the deep peace in a snowy landscape we find poignant in its passing—all of these things, when we are aware of them, we judge and value as present, even though they are not so. Oh, the pastness of what we are aware of may be slight—so slight, in fact, that most of us can live our lives as if we are immediately aware of the presentness of things. No matter how slight, though, pastness is pastness, and illusive presence is just that—illusive.

It is strange, then, how so many of us devote our lives to seeking some sort of immediate transcendence through involvement in the presentness of things—through sensual experiences of all sorts, through sex, meditation, prayer, work, the experience of things expensive and dangerous to attain. None of that will give the sort of immediate transcendence hoped and longed for; for that sort of transcendence would only be ours, truly be ours, once we are aware of it—and to be aware of something as a human being is to be aware of something that, in our awareness of it, is already in the past, is already no longer exactly what it was.

To be a human being, awake and aware, is to live in the past. For to be a human is to be aware, and awareness for us is always awareness of things past.

Or is that entirely so? We seek immediacy, and we denigrate the experience of the pastness of things—that is, we denigrate memory of things as inferior to their immediacy and the experience of their immediacy. One need only look at how we treat the old, whose mode of living is more on the plane of memory than on that on which is pursued knowledge of the immediacy of things: we shunt them off into places where we need not see them and need not think of them. We neither value memory highly nor value repositories of memory; our actions reveal as much.

Which is, again, strange, given our pursuit of immediacy and an awareness of things in the immediacy of their presentness. For if memory is the place wherein we are aware of and know things in their pastness, and if all we are ever truly aware of as living human beings is things in their pastness, then our lives in their most human dimensions are always unfolding, always being lived, in and through memory. What is present to us is present to us insofar as it is in memory; no other presentness is so immediately open to us. Memory is the place of present awareness and knowledge, the place where present choice and love unfold as if from their root.

What would happen if we accepted the pastness of human awareness, of human consciousness? What if we accepted that the only presentness open to us is the presentness of memory? What would we value, and what would we mourn? How would we live, and how would we approach the end of our lives? And how would we consider each other in our chosen pursuits?

Thoughts and questions on an eve in November.

A blessed week to you all.

(P.S. I’ve been working with a friend on getting an essay he’s working on ready for this substack. I’m excited for it as it discusses how to approach the work of the ancients and medievals fairly—something a lot of us fail in doing often enough (I know I do). In any event, stay tuned!)

(P.P.S. My thanks to those who have pledged a paid subscription should I ever turn on paid subscriptions. I appreciate your confidence in my writing. For now, I am trying to ensure a steady enough output of sufficiently thought-out material, and I am not yet confident things are at the point where I could reasonably charge people for my writing. Then again, I have always been my harshest critic.)

1. This article is interesting insofar as it discusses the host of known physiological and neurological events that transpire in our experience, awareness, and evaluation of pain—events that take time to transpire.