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| Old Belchite, Province of Zaragoza Autonomous Community of Aragon, Spain |
Tertullian’s Corner
The City of Lethe and the Guardians of Memory
By Rosa Martha Villarreal
In The Divine Comedy, the souls who had earned entrance to heaven would first wash themselves in the River of Lethe. The waters of forgetfulness would free these souls from memory, and, thus, transform them into a state of complete happiness.
I thought of Dante and his allegorical journey this summer in Spain. Madrid, Sevilla, and Barcelona, the iconic centers of Spanish culture display the elegant contributions of the peoples who once ruled the Iberian Peninsula. And amid these ancient cities, a new, almost singular city inhabits the same space. Their modernity is fluid, eternally young, confident, and free of the revanchist ideologies and irredentist fantasies that still plague parts of the world. The large public plazas are a nightly open party, a subconscious embrace of amnesia.
The moment is all: The pleasure of a good drink or the delights of food, human companionship, and, yes, the embrace of commercialism. And there is peace, as if the very momentary rejection of historic memory has liberated the human animal from its baser nature. It’s Nietzsche’s triumphant world of anti-moralists. Madrid, Sevilla, and especially Barcelona are New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. All of these cities transform themselves every night into a singular city. The profane has triumphed over the sacred, and the world is better for it.
Walking at night at El Puerto del Sol in Madrid, Jorge Luis Borges emerges from the shadows of neon lights. He becomes my Virgil.
There came a time when . . .
At that moment, a young man, his eyes fixed on his phone, walks into a lamp post. His friends laugh. He shrugs off the laughter and continues reading his phone.
. . . the entirety of the world finally became transformed into a City of Lethe. War, ethnic and religious strife had become extinct. The entirety of humanity lived in large metropolises. Agriculture had become mechanized. Humans still farmed as a hobby, much like pottery-making had become a hobby many years before. Human populations slowly declined and finally stabilized. There was no longer a need for large families to ensure prosperity and old-age security. Prosperity, more than ancient identities, became the defining character of people. Without the competition for resources, without the disparities in wealth, nationalism and class went by the wayside.
But it came at a cost: memory was erased. Collective amnesia was not achieved by a state decree nor mass indoctrination nor chemical infusion. There was no vaccine of forgetfulness. Amnesia evolved by itself. Memory, unused, became as if a rudimentary tail. The festivals commemorating the past–days of independence, saints’ days, birthdays of leaders–became pretenses for celebration. The speeches lionizing the past and its accompanying imagery had been replaced by the symbols of commercialism. Even the celebrity cults of old were anachronistic. People no longer needed the fantasies of celebrities since they, too, had obtained that manner of living.
At first, museums were maintained and the universities still hired historians. But over time, fewer and fewer people went to these temples of memories. Soon the museums were abandoned due to indifference. Historians, too, disappeared because their source of employment seized to exist. The study of history had gone by the way of the discipline of philology and alchemy. The museums were locked though not destroyed. They stood as quaint monuments, like the gravestones of ancestors, who were reduced to mere names and dates on fading stones…
*****
Madrid is not only the capital of Spain; it is also the capital of the Hispanic world, its museums the temples of memory. Carlos Fuentes once remarked that Spain took America’s gold and left us her gold: The Spanish language. Small book stalls line the perimeter of El Parque del Buen Retiro at the end of El Paseo del Prado. It is a bibliophile’s dreams. In these book stalls, one can buy the works of the great masters of the Spanish language from every country in the Hispanic world. The language is the glue of our imaginings and dreams. The Spanish letters are a collective and simultaneous dream across oceans and landscapes.
On route from Merida, Extremadura, to Sevilla, Andalucía, our Uber driver, enthusiastically talks about the Roman ruins near Sevilla. “We’re pretty awesome,” he says. “We defeated the Romans, and the Moors, and we conquered the Aztecs and the Incas.”
“Es una raza muy peleonera,” I say of the Spanish people. It’s all in good humor. No resentment on my part; no hubris on the Spaniard’s part. The past is water under the bridge of modernity. We’re enjoying ourselves. We share blood and language, and especially prosperity.
For a person who hates war, I’m strangely attracted to the history of war. Civilization has not been able to eradicate the scourge of war. There is almost an ecological analogue. Like old forest that must die in a firestorm to produce a new ecosystem, the deaths of civilizations have given rise to new worlds. The old world is reinvented, memories and blood salvaged from the ashes and broken stones. The rebirth is like a graft on the charred remains of an ancient tree.
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| A plaza in Madrid |
On a previous trip to Madrid years before, my husband and I went to El Museo del Ejército. The museum was housed in El Palacio de la Buenavista. For all of Spain’s remarkable military history, the museum was a lonely place. A few souls wandered about the suits of armor, swords, harquebuses, and other instruments of death. People tire not only of war, but sometimes the memory of war, of a civil war that is still a living memory among the old and the young who have heard the stories from their grandparents.
In Aragon, the entire town of old Belchite–or rather the ruins thereof–has been left untouched as a memorial to the Civil War. At the entrance of the town, at El Arco de la Villa, there is a sign that asks one not to forget. Belchite was a small town that had been continuously inhabited since its founding by Celtic-Iberic peoples during the Iron Age. There is a small photographic display in the tower of El Arco de la Villa. The main photograph is one of the town square about twenty years before the war. Women gossip near the town fountain or buy foodstuffs from street merchants. Children are running about. A dog looks into the photographer’s lens. In a few years, they would be dead among the bombed ruins, many buried in the very churches they thought would be safe. Who could be barbaric enough to bomb a church, forever a house of sanctuary? Our guide tells us that the liberal forces of the republic bombed the Church of San Martín de Tours, killing the farmers and their families who had taken refuge there. Later, the Nationalists bombed the Church of San Agustín, again killing the people who believed that the Phalangist forces, their alleged co-religionists, would not destroy a house of worship. There are never any heroes in war, not really. Only victims.
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| Ruins of Church of San Agustín |
The tour guide is a young woman. Her grandmother once lived in the old Belchite. The grandmother and others had fled and returned on the promise to have their lands returned. It never happened. The young woman remembers her grandmother’s memories, and what is remembered is always darker and subversive to the narratives of politicians and ideologues. Several young people dispute the memories of our young guide’s grandmother. Surely, the republicans were heroes and the fascists villains, weren’t they? The young woman doesn’t get angry. “Mi abuela estuvo ahí.” (“My grandmother was there.”) Moments later, an argument, or rather displeasure that the republican narrative is not being taught well enough in school. Perhaps the sign should have said, Forget.
Borges stands in the shadows of the ruins, waiting for the others to move away before emerging. He walks beside me and speaks of the future city:
After memory became a vestige, sleep became the portal to the forgotten world. For the most part, people forgot what they dreamt because their daily preoccupations would drown out these fragmented images. But others could not forget. They were haunted even in their waking hours. Doctors began to study this occurrence and prescribe treatments. But since there was nothing physiologically wrong with these individuals, a cure could not be arrived at. Most of the inflicted coped with the haunting dreams. Others became so consumed that they took refuge from the City of Lethe and roamed on the outskirts, searching for signs in the flights of birds or the sound of rainstorms. Others collected discarded objects and letters, as if searching for a hidden meaning. They sought each other’s company, exchanged their dreams. They discovered that they had the same dreams, or rather variations of these dreams. Young people, bored by materialistic pursuits, congregated among the dreamers to hear the narratives of sleep. Some, hoping to induce these dreams, would ingest hallucinogens to no avail. Others, charlatans, pretended to be dreamers to capitalize on the phenomenon.
Soon, however, the charlatans would fade, their schemes exposed as scams when the citizens of Lethe discovered that true dreamers could conjure not only ancestral remembrances but personal and unique memories of each individual, unlike the charlatans who would speak in generalities. The more gifted dreamers could induce a trance of waking dreaming. And, whereas the charlatans had made promises of better fortunes and happiness, the prophets of memories made no promises, claimed no greater truth. They merely revealed enigmas and uncovered the relics of thoughts like archaeologists of the unseen world.
Scholars began to take note, document the narratives of the dreamers, publish papers. The scholarship revealed certain patterns. All of the dreamers would enter a labyrinth. There, they discovered different rooms representing a particular time and occurrence. In these rooms, they came upon two-dimensional shades who feigned to be ghosts but which were unfulfilled desires that had willed themselves into beings. The dreamers had to constantly move, embark on a pilgrimage, as if the essence of memory were stored in the muscle tissue, the entrails, the very cells. A corollary to the law of kinetics was discovered from these studies. Maps were developed to show where the dreamers would encounter each other on these pilgrimages.
An entire genre of music developed based on the narratives of the dreamers. Others created paintings which found their way into art collections. Schools of thought evolved about the interpretation of these dreams. These books were stored in a great circular library. . . .
*****
It is impossible for us to separate ourselves from the memory of the past. We remain and will remain fascinated by our heritage. However, the danger of history and memory is that, in the hands of gifted ideologues and demagogues, it can drive the masses to ruthlessness, mass murder, and terror. The demagogue can revive real and imagined grievances from times before. These passions, unhinged from reason and compassion, become a force upon itself like a cancer. So, who will act as the guardians of memory? Who will guide humankind through history within the constructs of reason and nurture our natural empathy? I think the answer is found at El Paseo del Prado in Madrid: the museums, the temples of memory; and the book stalls containing fictions, records of the subconscious mind of our collective memory.
Author’s Note: “The City of Lethe” is a never-written story by Jorge Luis Borges.
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| Rosa Martha in Madrid |