Memory, Brains, Eyes, Henri Bergson, and What a Friend We Have in Jesus

So, when I walked into the bathroom at school this morning, I inhaled a chemical odor that immediately took me back to another place and time. I could not put my finger on the moment, but I knew it was sometime from 1986-1995, I just couldn't remember where I had smelled the smell; it's been killing me to remember. Normally I don't go into this bathroom cause it's not near my office, but today I taught a class for another professor who was unable to be here because her father is dying of cancer in Honduras and she needed to be with him. Thinking abut Honduras prompted me to remember my trip to Honduras in the Spring of 1992. I went, with my Dad, my grandpa, my dad's best friend, and my cousin to Escuela El Sembrador to help them convert a huge field into a lake. Funded by the World Gospel Mission, a praiseworthy Christian Missionary Organization, they help underprivileged boys learn a trade and gain an education in a Christ-centered environment. My dad's best friend, Burt Luce, used to own a good portion of the Blue Bird School Bus Company out of Ft. Valley, Georgia. In 1992, the family sold their interests in the company. Burt is a very wealthy and very humble man and it is has been my pleasure to know him since I was a baby. Growing up, he was uncle Burt, and I never knew that he was crazy wealthy (in retrospect, his Christmas gifts to me were probably awesomely expensive). Growing up Southern, I still don't know why I was allowed to call him by his first name without using an honorific. Burt was like family. So when he invited us to go with him to Honduras, we enthusiastically agreed. I had to pay my own way, which for a 17 year old wasn't easy, but I did it.

The school had gotten on Burt's family's radar sometime in the 50s or 60s. They had sent Burt's father a request to help them dig an irrigation canal. As a very wealthy man and philanthropist, Mr. Luce received many requests for aid. As I remember the story, he sent them a crate of pickaxes and thought nothing more about it, figuring that it might help, but not really worrying about a request made by an unproven organization. So, some time later, he received an invitation to go to El Sembrador and view the dedication of the canal. Intrigued, he went, and found that the pickaxes were all worn down to nubbins and that they had used them to dig a very long canal through hard-tack clay and bedrock over an incredible distance. It was all done by hand and plumbed so correctly that the water flowed without pooling. After that, the school became a priority for the Luce family. In the early 1990s, a decision was made to dam a creek for the purpose of making hydropower. An old lake was drained and a larger field taken, dug down, with the dirt piled up around the edges to make a new lake. We went down to help with this project.

Now it's been some time, but when we got there, they had two bulldozers, a Komatsu backhoe, tractors, dumbtrucks, pickups, a generator, and the like...all purchased by the Luce family (or maybe the World Gospel Mission). We helped build the lake and other stuff.

My Aunt wrote a short article about our trip for the August 1992 edition of the LDS Youth magazine, The New Era:

Helping in Honduras
Many teens in the South run to Florida beaches for spring break, but cousins Marty Craig, an elder in the Newnan Ward, Jonesboro Georgia Stake, and John ‘Mac’ Williams, a recent convert and priest in the Woodstock Ward, East Marietta Georgia Stake, headed to Honduras.
And it wasn’t for fun and games. They worked hard to help finish a dam for an 11-acre reservoir to power a generator for a boys’ school. Not only that, but they helped collect shirts, hats, candy, and machinery in Georgia to take down to the school. Oh, and of course they milked cows, helped build a new building, and shoveled and bagged rice. The school, “El Sembrador,” is almost self-sufficient now.

They also brought four copies of the Book of Mormon with them and personally presented them to some of the young men at the school. Marty is now continuing his missionary work full-time in the Dominican Republic. Mac will follow him into the mission field as soon as he graduates.

My cousin was banned for life from World Gospel Mission properties for giving those boys a copy of the Book of Mormon. I respect their decision, though I would hope they would allow the boys to choose their relationship with God for themselves. No man can convince me of the truthfulness of any Gospel by his words. It is only by supplication to my Heavenly Father to confirm my beliefs through his Holy Ghost that I have faith in anything religious. We should never fear proselyzation when it is done in a spirit of openess and allows for one to know whether something is true by personal faith and personal revelation. I will sit and listen to anyone that wants to talk to me, with the caveat that I be allowed to inquire of the Lord whether what they are telling me is true or not.

I did just that in January of 1991, and ever since then I have known in my heart that the Book of Mormon is true, and because of that fact: Joseph Smith was a prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the Lord's true church upon the earth. I hold this faith not because someone else convinced me that it was true, not because it makes the most sense, and certainly not because of any coersion. I prayed and received an answer to my prayer and that ALONE has been the reason why I have abstained from alcohol, tea, and coffee since then. That is why I never had sex before marriage (a matter of self-discipline that almost drove me mad) and that is why, as my aunt said in her article, I tithed two years of my life after graduation in the service of the Lord. I was a missionary in Costa Rica, called to preach the Gospel in Spanish. I was ordained to the office of Elder in the Melchezidek Priesthood and told to work all day every day to bring the Costa Ricans to Christ. I preached the Gospel to paupers and priests, to drunks and doctors, to B'hai, atheists, Muslims, Rastafarians, you-name-it. I told every person I preached to to go and pray about the message I had brought to them. I invited them to partake of the promise made by the prophet Moroni at the end of the Book of Mormon, where he says, "Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts. And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things" (Moroni 10:3-5). Some people did and received answers to their prayers and were baptized. Some people laughed me out of their houses into the streets. Some people contended with me about the supposed errors of my message. Some people wanted nothing to do with God at that point in their lives. Some people taunted, threatened, and even tried to hurt me physically. The good Christian thing to say is that I didn't mind. Truth is, I did. While the years no longer make me angry over people's sometimes asinine treatment of me, it hurt in the moment. I know Jesus tells us to forgive and turn the other cheek when someone offends us (we can react like lions when someone hurts someone else though, in my opinion), but that is really hard to do. A true Christian makes no claims to perfection. A true Christian does not judge others as less righteous than they are. A true Christian strives to be like Jesus, realizing all the while that he can't, but is still commanded to try. Life is too short to go around pointing out the spiritual or moral flaws in others.

As a missionary I learned that we remember things, experiences from our lives that help us relate with other people. Part of helping others feel and recognize the Spirit is to establish a relationship of trust with them. Oftentimes I knocked on the door of a complete stranger, but within 45 minutes of being there, they were crying with joy over the message we brought. How often do we cry in the presence of strangers? I called upon my memories as a convert to the church to explain to people my own path to faith, baptism, and ultimately their door. Yet, I always knew that most of my memory of things was not in what I could recall at will, but in the subconscious mind that brings things up from time to time.

Some of what follows is paraphrased from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Henri Bergson.

Henri Bergson, a famous early 20th Century philosopher, wrote a book in 1896 called Matter and Memory that addresses some of the concepts I've been leading up to. He tells of memory being like the cone shown at right.
The illustration shows a plane and a cone with its summit inserted into the plane. It represents the plane of my actual representation of the universe, meaning how I perceive the universe and my place in it. The cone symbolizes true or regressive memory. The cone's base symbolizes unconscious memories which are our oldest memories not lost to the void of nothingness. These memories erupt spontaneously in things like dreams, or in my case today, in a smell in a bathroom at school. Descending down the cone we find indefinite amounts of different past memories ordered chronologically by their nearness or farness to the present. At the summit of the cone resides the image of my body which is concentrated into a point, into my perception of the Present. The summit makes contact with the plane and thus, the image of my body "participates in the plane" of my actual representation of the universe, meaning that how I perceive my body and how I perceive with my body, colors my representation of my surroundings.

Memories descend down the cone from the remote and near past to the present perception (of my surroundings) and action (how I move/act in my surroundings). Bergson compares true memory to looking through a telescope. Imagine the cone as a telescope pointing up at the night sky that is our brain. When I try and remember something, at first, I remember nothing at all. But, as I attempt to focus my thoughts and memories by focusing the lenses in the my mind's telescope then some images flash on the screen. The Milky Way galaxy is a giant cloudy mass of stars, but as we focus the telescope, we can make out individual stars amongst the masses. Staying with the telescope metaphor, the images of the stars have to be limited and guided down the tube to the eyepiece so that I can perceive them my eye. The lens of a telescope is massive, but the eyepiece I peer through focuses the wide spectrum of sub- or unconscious thought onto my mind's eye and I can percieve the remote past. When I bite into a Big Mac, I am biting into the first Big Mac I ever ate. When I make love to Mickelle, I am reminded of our first time in the Abbey Inn in St. George on our wedding day. When I look with my eyes I am reminded of the corneal abrasion I received in 1990 one day when I walking home from school after a big storm. I picked up a branch and started banging it on the ground as I walked. A piece broke off and flew up and hit me in the eye. I still have a small mark on my eye, it looks like clear bacteria under a microscope, and when it's bright outside, or when I stare at a computer screen, like now, I am reminded of that eye injury and all the other eye injuries I've had, and as a result of that, I am reminded of where the smell in the bathroom this morning came from.

The Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah is a facility where missionaries are sent to prepare and receive training before their entry into the actual mission. As part of their time there, they perform service work, cheesily called "Celestial Service" (I hate Mormon cliche names with a passion). Every missionary is assigned a housekeeping task to help keep cleaning costs down, to render service to others, and to get some exercise and a break from all the studying. Missionaries are divided into districts of between 8-16 missionaries and they all live on the same floor of the same hall and study and pray together every day. They also talk about girlfriends, basketball, the Gospel, and sex a lot too (As in, what do you think it will be like? Not, from actual experience). My district's Celestial Service was to clean the bathroom showers of another hall--the goal being if you clean someone else's you'll keep your own clean as a courtesy and it also lets you render service to someone besides yourself. The cleaning consisted of spraying the walls in the stalls with a grime remover, letting it soak, and then spraying them off with a high powered hose. While the one chemical soaked, we took another really powerful chemical and used it to clean all of the stainless steel and other metal in the stalls to remove hard water deposits. It was this same chemical that I smelled this morning in the bathroom. I arrived back at this memory by focusing the telescope of my brain on an old eye injury, which then reminded my of an eye injury I suffered while doing Celestial Service. That day it was my turn to use the hose to spray off the stalls. I had started on the first stall while the others used brushes and that chemical to clean. As I was using the high powered sprayer, this one missionary named Elder Millet, decided he was done and needed to clean that chemical off of his brush he had been using. Right next to my head, he reached over my shoulder and placed his brush in the stream of water before I could react. Due to the high pressure, the water sprayed back into my face, heavily laden with the caustic chemical on his brush. My left eye immediately began burning like the Medieval moastic library fire that destroyed the last copy of the the Syntagma pros Markiona mentioned by Irenæus in his book Liber adversus omnes hæreses (how's that for esoteric?). I had to go to the doctor. I remember thinking how odd it was to see both the ubiquitous blue-covered Children's Bible on the waiting room table and the Book of Mormon. The eye healed and I had not revisited the smell of the damaging chemical until this morning when I walked into the bathroom. I'm sure the is some Freudian term for this process I've gone through today, I'll just call it a Bergsonian moment. I had planned to write a blog entry about a smell whose memory I could not place. Somewhere along the way, my brain remembered and I feel all the richer for it.