The Reader Travels

In Ahab’s Wife, a few shipwrecked characters find themselves adrift at sea in a life boat eating  their dead to live, but blocking out the memory of the trauma. Victims of exposure to sun and salty air, their minds become blurred, and after rescue, they never spoke of what they had to do to survive, perhaps forgetting altogether as part of that survival.

I have a certain fascination with the idea of repressed memory. One of my best friends insists that psychologists who go digging around trying to uncover repressed memories are pure sadists. These things are repressed for a reason, and digging them up will cause a whole lot of damage. Better to leave these things alone and let nature do its job.

My mother has the worst memory of anyone I know, and I used wonder if her childhood was so bad that she’s simply repressed most of it. But then I started watching some of my siblings who seem to have inherited her lack of memory, and I realize it must be something genetic that I didn’t inherit. After all, we had the same upbringing, and nothing very traumatic happened to me.

Or did it?

Once upon a time, I thought I might try to be a lawyer. I found myself in the Houston District Attorney’s office pressing charges against a bad boyfriend, and I thought to myself, hey, this might not be a bad job to have. So, I took a pre-law type class that talked about some of the basics, like the concept of “mala in se,” or inherent evil.

We question whether an act is evil in and of itself, or if there are circumstances that would make that act not evil. We talked about killing another person and how it was usually acceptable in self defense or in war. But what about eating people? Is it never okay, or is it okay if you’re a South American rugby team trapped in the Andes with no other food besides your dead team mate?

I’ll admit it, I wouldn’t kill a man unless he threatened my life, but I might eat him if he lay freshly dead and there were no other bread. And as I did, I would thank him for his gift.

Does that make me evil?