I implore my memory to reach back, to seize all doubts
and despairs, all hopes and passions, all dreams and funerals,
all prophecies and disappointments, all the killed, crippled
and wounded, desecrated, all exalted on altars and wrapped in
flags, all intoxicated by happiness and sobered from sorrow, let me
remember all weepings and jubilations, all funny stories and loves,
all sins, all leaps into the unknown, all fires, floods, earthquakes
and God's commandments, let all the tender fragile ties that bind
body and soul, me and someone else, be revealed, let me perceive
all conceptions and gentle abandons, all the shameful
confessions and states of purity, let the remembrances of a
l
these vibrate inside me and my surroundings, and let me be
included in the collective guilt and the collective absolution.
I, thus, request to be able. to keep neighbors in front of and behind
me, be the middleman of messages from the future even though
they at times are strange, incomprehensible, threatening or
calming, brief or tedious. It is probable that none of us fully
understands the whole game, but courage itself is absolute
and all-knowing.