Ricordare

Good evening to all, but especially to the senior class for whom this event marks the beginning of our countdown to your graduation on Saturday. I stand before you tonight with a full heart, deeply honored by your invitation to speak, and humbled by your gesture of trust in me and what I might have to offer you tonight. And though most of the thoughts that follow have taken shape and evolved over the past several, deeply challenging years, I have felt them coming into even clearer, fuller expression in preparing to pass them along to you. During these past three days, my reflections were deepened further as I found myself celebrating young love and the aspiration of life-long relationship with a former student, CdeP '98, and a number of her Thacher classmates and friends. These bonds we share here do indeed run deep...

 

And so, my deepest gratitude to you all for the invitation to address you here tonight...

 

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Graduation. Commencement. An ending that contains a new beginning. This is a time of big transition for you, a time of  journeys, both literal and metaphoric...

 

There are so many things to discuss in this life, and our dialogues together over the past four years, and maybe this year in particular, have taught me more than you may know. Conversations that have been marked for me most memorably by your genuine intellectual curiosity and unflagging thoughtfulness, and more recently by your collective courage in calling for more substantive dialogue around important issues that have profound effects on your individual and our collective wellness: issues of  mental health; issues surrounding both sexual health and sexual misconduct; and essential topics connected to our aspiration to be a diverse and inclusive community. Among my favorite moments of the year was watching you and listening to you speak your truths during the round-table discussions with our 2016 Orrick lecturer, Rena Karefa-Johnson, class of '05, who recognized and reaffirmed the validity of what you see and experience here. Very cool.

 

In short, you are an extraordinary group.

 

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Speeches like this being what they are, however, (which is to say relatively brief affairs!!), I have had to narrow my scope, and choose to speak to you tonight about memory and how it relates to what we know, who we are, and who we become in this life. Of course, you guys are still so young that on the "past-present-future continuum," if I can call it that, your past is relatively short (I have items of clothing that are older than you are!), and the present is fleeting; in your world right now, it is the future that looms largest.

 

 

But, this life inevitably arcs toward a balance that will see your past expanding. The present will continue to be a fleeting instant, and the future will shrink. Slowly for most of you, but it will, nonetheless,  gradually lose its overwhelming hold on your imaginations, to be replaced with an increasingly compelling fascination with your own past. As young women and men on cusp of adulthood, you move imperceptibly everyday toward this "tipping point," and your memories will become more and more important to you as you trace your own way forward on this arc. And, on the eve of your ritual departure from this place, your memories, whether you know it or not, are getting ready to kick into high gear in new ways.

 

The uses of memory are many; but here too, I will narrow my focus. The manifestation of memory most central to your experience here has probably been as the key player in your efforts to absorb useful information you did not yet know (like those pesky verb conjugations!!, or dates in history, formulae in math, etc.). But memory also serves in making meaning of what we do know. And this second experience of personal memory is often triggered by loss. Loss, which can take so many different forms.

 

Soon, you seniors (and several faculty!) will pack your bags, collect your memories and head out, head out into a kind of exile, a ritual removal -- for you, the seniors, a rite of passage.

 

For all of you who are leaving, what you have known here -- the people, the place, the predictable, the ordinary, the invisible everyday, what has become comfortable with familiarity -- will become what you R E M E M B E R.

 

In Italian -- R I C O R D A R E. In Spanish -- R E C O R D A R. From the Latin

R E C O R D A R I: to  pass  back  through  the  heart,  L E  C O E U R, the core, the

center. We re-member, or piece back together, the fragments of our experience and what we know, to give it shape, the body of our knowledge.

 

In French -- S E  S O U V E N I R --, from the Latin -- S U B V E N I R, that which

comes up from below, from the gut, from the soul.

 

 

You will re-member. Remember what you want to, what you need to. You will re-member what you have made yours, what you have made of yourselves. And maybe, too, you will re-member images of what you would like to become.

 

 

You will remember what you know.

 

 

In French: connaître, to know by the senses; and savoir, to know by the mind.

 

 

We are tempted here at Thacher (and, I suspect, at most of the institutions to which you are headed next year) , not exclusively, but undeniably, I think, to concentrate on what we deem to be quantifiable, le savoir, what we can know by the mind. It is expected in academic communities like ours that we will evaluate explicitly and implicitly each other’s learning, our expertise, our general mastery of facts and formulae. I’ll hazard that many of us would admit to having spent considerable time here fretting about what we don't know, or cannot remember. Fearful of the world’s response to lapsed memory, a failure to understand or to retain. Worried that what we don't know or do not understand will somehow conspire to humiliate us. So we learn to dissemble, to  H I D E,  to mask what we do not know, or don't want to know. And, in this lurks a terrible danger, namely: that the “liar will become the lie,” that fear will teach us to hide from what we don’t know and close us off from the possibility of further discovery, of broader knowledge and deeper understanding.

 

 

Toni Morrison has likened this phenomenon of repressed memory, or maybe more aptly for you unacknowledged or unspoken memory to a "veil," the veil between what is said and what is unsaid, what is known by virtue of having been acknowledged and enunciated, as opposed to what has been hidden behind a film of repressed memory when things recalled are too hard to bear. These difficult memories can be public or private, ones that were played out on an historical stage, or experienced more privately in the intimacy of our relationships with others. In her novel Beloved, (which some of you had the chance to study this trimester), Morrison explores the ways in which these public and private memories overlap to shape the decisions we make and frame the lives we lead. Others of you explored memory and its power to heal in Leslie Marmon Silko's C E R E M O N Y, charting the central character's path from dis-ease and confusion to re-integration and wholeness through the reclamation of both his personal and the Laguna Pueblo's stories.

 

The complex interplay between the R E-membering or repression of what we know has everything to do with the meaning we are able to make of this life, how we "write" our own private stories, as well as the ways in which we inevitably participate in writing more communal narratives: our country's, our school's and even our global story. And here we come back to you, you who are the authors of your own lives. As you head out from the safe embrace of this place, into your own more fully fledged adult lives to write your own history, Can you hope to learn to see to the core, to le coeur, the heart of your own experience, both private and public, and to make a practice of bearing witness to your many truths?

 

 

I think so. And I would like to suggest to you tonight that you will be well served in your

aspiration to do so by re-membering what you have been taught (or simply allowed) to

dis-member in our prevailing culture of conspicuous consumption and instant gratification. Namely, your soul. The meeting place of the mind and the heart.

 

 

Our fullest intelligence, the integrated heart-mind, the mind-heart. We become people of integrity when we learn to value the whole of our intelligence, by allowing the mind to inform the heart, and the heart to inform the mind. By giving voice to what we know -- and by bearing witness to what we see, even when that means speaking truth to power, often at some risk -- indeed,  by risking the loss of our own comfort, in not only standing up, but in standing by-- in putting our bodies forward to be counted. We must piece back together what we know with intent -- with intent to let the souvenir, the memory, subvert the comfort of our complacency.

 

 

The poet Mary Oliver offers this observation: "This is the first, the wildest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness."

 

 

To R E - M E M B E R is a demanding task, as those of you who know Morrison's Sethe or Silko's Tayo can confirm. Here is Emily Dickinson’s sense of what the H E A R T's

role might be:

 

 

                                                            -928-

 

                                                The Heart has narrow Banks

                                                It measures like the Sea

                                                In mighty - unremitting Bass

                                                And Blue Monotony

 

                                                Till Hurricane bisect

                                                And as itself discerns

                                                Its insufficient Area

                                                The heart convulsive learns

 

                                                That Calm is but a Wall

                                                Of unattempted Gauze

                                                An instant’s Push demolishes

                                                A Questioning -- dissolves.

 

 

 

 

The heart and mind, then, together, invite you to push out on the limits of what you know. To rip through the unattempted gauze, that veil of "wilful blindness." For it is in being ripped open by these moments of epiphany, a sometimes painful process, that we let the light in.

 

 

So, ready (and you are ready!!) to wrestle with your fear of the unknown and of the inevitable losses that leaving entails, seduced by the spirit’s curiosity, you dare to leave.

 

 

As you head out, R E M E M B E R ...

 

 

R E M E M B E R: that perfection is a seductive illusion. Resist the temptation to focus solely on the outcome of what you do, whether it's a course assignment or a sports competition. Champion, rather, the process, the journey.

 

 

When you sit down to write an essay, R E M E M B E R that the guy who invented the genre (I am not making this up!) was a 16th century French scholar named Michel de Montaigne, who called them essais, from the French verb essayer, to try, because that's what they were: short expository pieces in which he attempted to write his way into insight and understanding. Make it a point to do the same: approach everything you do with a genuine openness to discovery.

 

 

R E M E M B E R: As you go, to listen to and trust the logic of your heart, its convulsive, passionate pulse.

 

 

G R O W your M I N D: Push out into the unknown with a commitment to honor what you learn by standing for what you come to know, something your experience as a class here called on you to do in ways that have moved and inspired us, establishing news lines of communication on essential questions that affect our individual and communal well-being. May we find ways to honor you in nurturing this discourse even after your departure next Saturday.

 

 

R E M E M B E R to build time into your lives and to protect it. Not just free time, but time freely given, to recollect, to reflect, to question. Question  e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

 

 

As the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote in a letter to a young friend:

 

 

“have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you      would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.”  

 

 

 

And R E M E M B E R, in the inimitable words of Paul D:

 

 

                                    "Y O U are your own best thing."

 

 

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So, here we are,  preparing to send you off, for we know that we have to let you go in order to get you back. We will miss you. You will miss each other, maybe even us! But, I hope you will also remember one of the many subtler lessons of the Honor Code: namely that presence is about so much more than physical proximity. Beyond sharing physical space with someone, the deepest kind of presence is grounded in relationship. We are with each other, support and influence each other even when we are physically separated: we carry each other in our hearts. There is powerful presence even in absence if we can open ourselves to it. The invitation to attend Caroline's wedding this weekend was a beautiful reminder for me of this simple but powerful truth.

 

 

To the Class of 2016, as you head out from here I wish you: Time freely given, Time to live the questions, deeply, and to love them if you can. For it is by living the Q U E S T I O N S that you will be able to M A P your way forward into your own futures and then, occasionally-back home to us.