The Memory, the Pain, the Porn
We are haunted by memories.
However much we claim to live in the present, or look to the future, our lives - whether social, cultural or political, and whether individual or collective - are pierced by memories of occurrences from the past.
These occurrences can be individual or social, they can be voluntary or imposed upon by others…and they can be either actual or imagined. Regardless, these memories are powerful forces, which inflect and redirect our present day choices.
The significance of these memories is further heightened for the Christian because our salvation is dependent upon a memory. We activate this memory wherever scriptures are read, hymns are sung, creeds are confessed, and doxologies are said.
Because of their power, there are those entrepreneurs, social, cultural, political and yes spiritual, who would deign to exert influence over us at the level of manipulating our memory, with memories being discursively edited, redirected, or even introduced.
As mentioned in a previous post, what accentuates the manipulation is that postmodern culture is an institutionalised assault on memory. From fashions to smartphones, the range of memory and even the types of sanctioned memory are being constantly narrowed, if not eliminated altogether. This is an elimination we are often more than happy to cooperate with, for more often than we care to admit, it hurts to remember.
I had occasion to revisit the topic of memory again after restarting my research on the subject of pornography, with cracking open Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination in an Age of Pornography, edited by Elizabeth T. Groppe (CUA Press, 2020).
The first essay I read of that text was a brilliant piece by Ann Astell entitled “Memory, the Sacrament of Marriage and the Song of Songs”.
Most instructive was the essay’s citing of a 2013 article in the Journal of Sex Research, by Laier, Schulte and Brand. As the article’s title, “Pornographic Picture Processing Interferes with Working Memory Performance” suggests, pornography has been clinically shown to result in short term memory loss.
Building on that observation, Astell then suggested the devastating impact of pornography, not simply for our moral life, but for our afterlife as well. For, as Astell says, pornography
…works to bury and deface precisely this deep memory of the sacramental meaning of sexual relations and erotic love…pornography’s most pernicious effect is the apparent loss or deep burial of memories held “from the beginning”. (177)
The response, Astell suggests, is not simply more of the same, a repetition of what she calls
…a Christian asceticism, which wisely guards the doors of the senses by which impressions enter the memory [and is thus, by its very nature, exclusive of the erotic]. (179)
What is needed, Astell says, is
…a Christian sacramental imagination that strenghtens the remembrance of God’s love through a rich memorial culture inclusive of the erotic.
In this context, her coverage of the history of usage of the Song of Songs was incredibly instructive. Whilst some Christians shy away from the erotic imagery as merely titillating, Astell draws upon the experience of St Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, and their use of the Song of Songs as a means of both healing the memory of shallow and carnal pleasure, as well as an act of rediscovery of the deep memory of God’s love for creation, allegorised in the lover and beloved respectively.
Astell’s essay is not the only one in this volume, so expect more little vignettes as the research develops.
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