Memory

Yom Kippur is a holiday of remembrance. Yizkor the first service is often attended by mourners—though by definition everyone is a mourner. "Kaddish," the prayer for the dead is a poem by Allen Ginsberg. The greatest work about memory A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was written by someone  whose mother was Jewish. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the title of his autobiography.  Judaism is not alone. The Tibetan Book of the Dead influenced Gaspar Noe’s Into the Void in which the central consciousness is a dead soul. Dead Souls is the Gogol masterpiece. Then there is the architecture of death the necropolis and the practice of the mortician. Charon takes his passengers on their final voyage across the Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star