Afterthoughts: The Work of My Great-Grandmother’s Hands
A Substack collaboration between Margaret Anna Alice, Ed Brenegar, and rolandttg.
Introduction for my readers:
Margaret Anna Alice and I have had a fascinating exchange of ideas for a couple years or so. The post below began as an invitation by her after a comment that I made on her post. As you can tell, this became much more than a comment.
As the title below shows, we are addressing many different topics as a set all tied together by our experience in the modern world. I’m sure that there will be more of this kind of interaction to come. If you would like to be in conversation, leave a comment. Any disrespectful or malicious comments will be removed. In other words, be gracious and generous, and good things will come to you.
Reflections on Generational Memory, Time, Simulacra, Hyperreality, and Their Representations in the Films “The Matrix” & “Donnie Darko”
Margaret Anna Alice, Ed Brenegar, and rolandttg
Jun 11, 2025
After I published The Work of My Great-Grandmother’s Hands, Ed Brenegar emailed me about a post he was about to publish on generational memory. This prompted a fascinating exchange about the nature of time, memory, trauma, loss, mortality, reality, simulacra, AI, technology, art, philosophy, and explorations of those topics in The Matrix and Donnie Darko.
The Work of My Great-Grandmother’s Hands
·
May 14
EB:
My story.
When I was 11, my mother was injured in a water skiing accident. It had a devastating impact on her body and mind.
Her mother was the matriarch of the family. Loving and focused.
When I turned 12 she told me:
“You may do anything you want, but do not bring shame to the family name.”
It has guided me ever since.
MAA:
Goodness, that story gave me chills. Thank you so much for the preview.
You have not only heeded that wise advice but have indeed brought honor to your family name.
EB:
I’ve read through the Substack posts that you linked to.
I read very little Substack stuff right now. Not that there isn’t good stuff, but the compulsion to always be informed is unhealthy.
I don’t want to be riding on that train.
I am sorry for your loss of Michael. It will remain with you for the rest of your life. Grief is that edge of reality where love lives after tragedy.
I am sorry for the abuse of scammers.
Your anecdote of sweeping away cobwebs and Michael telling you that you were destroying spider’s homes hints at how our empathy and optimism often place us at risk.
I have stories for another time.
Some of us find ourselves in moments of time that almost become archetypal.
There is no other explanation. Other people may not see it that way, but we experience it that way.
Whether we see things that others cannot see, or we articulate and empathize in ways others cannot, our lives are different.
Two years ago, I was invited to join a group of polymaths for an every-other-week conversation.
The host saw something in me that she wanted in her group.
The thing is ... I am not like them. I can relate to them, but I don’t have the same issues that they do.
While very much an extrovert, I find solitude welcoming.
Thanks for your comments.
I’ll keep you in my thoughts and prayers.
MAA:
I completely understand re: Substack. I have barely been able to read any Substacks for a couple of years now but especially since losing Michael.
Thank you for remembering the spider’s homes anecdote, and you make an astute observation.
I’ve Lost Half of Me: Pitched Past Pitch of Grief
·
August 9, 2024
Interesting story about the polymaths (Michael and I both fell into that category, too). As an introvert, I can relate to how you felt, although it’s surprising to hear that coming from an extrovert.
EB:
Time passes.
The memory of some things remain, others disappear in the wind.
What does remain does so because it has some value for us. Even if it painful.
I’m told that for some emotionally disturbed people, they cut themselves because the pain brings a sense of reality. In a world of the spectacle, this makes perfect sense to me.
Just received [news] a few minutes ago, that my mother’s youngest sister is close to death. Her oldest sister died in January, two months shy of her 100th birthday.
The long close connection of my mother’s family has convinced me that most history is generational memory. I believe you understand this.
I think you’ll find this short video that I did on Thursday comforting as Michael and your story lives on in your memory of him.
My God’s comfort give you peace.
MAA:
I appreciate your poignant reflections, Ed, and I think you are onto something with generational memory. It is surprising to me how profound a kinship I feel with my great-grandmother even though she died before I was born.
I am so deeply sorry you and your mother are facing the loss of a beloved aunt/sister and in such close succession to losing another one, too.
In addition to grieving, your mother is likely having to confront her own mortality and you are having to face losing her given she is in between both of them in age.
You probably remember me sharing the poem Love Abides in my first post about Michael. I hope reading it brings you comfort, and perhaps it will bring solace to your mother as well.
Wishing you both peace and gratitude for the blessings of those you love, even as you prepare to let go,
EB:
Thank you. My mother was the first to die of the four sisters. She died in 1978.
I believe what I am seeing is the tyranny of the Eternal Present.
I wrote the following comment this morning on a friendship Substack about tech:
“Start fast. Die fast. Never build. Only expend.
“There is a philosophic idea that has taken greater hold of the mindset of creatives in the tech space. I call it the Eternal Present. The past and the future are bound in the present. The past and future do not exist. The past must be destroyed because within its memory are the warning signs of societal collapse. The future is now, and always will be because to see it otherwise is to realize hubris never wins.
“It is also a function of media culture where everything is a spectacle, capturing our attention for those few seconds of the Eternal Present, constantly forcing us to scroll to the next twenty-second clip, presenting entire libraries of knowledge reduced to a few words of wisdom written on a scrap of paper. There is no ‘remembrance of things past’ or yesterday’s Breaking News. It is all in the moment, and the moment is all we have. This is why connection is essential to relevance and influence.
“Ironically, you can walk away from all this and realize that none of this vast expenditure of financial and human capital has anything to do with what matters. It is an Icarus venture.”
MAA:
Oh my goodness, your mother must have died tragically young. I wondered if she was still alive when you mentioned her sisters but wrote that based on the hope that she was. You must have been painfully impacted by losing your mother at such a young age yourself.
Perhaps you mention that loss in your video. I paused it to record the quote I restacked and haven’t yet had a chance to resume it.
These words pierce home right now, not only because of My Year of Stoic Challenges (margaretannaalice.subst…) but also …
The Future of Leadership with Ed Brenegar
Generational Memory - Special Episode
Thank you for sharing your insightful comment, which made me think of not only Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle (which you may have been referencing) but also Daniel Boorstin’s The Image.
Interestingly, I never thought of the Eternal Present as a negative mindset, perhaps because I’m part of the creative class. When I am working in a state of flow, I am conscious of only the present moment, which liberates me from regrets about the past as well as anxieties about the future. It is also a state of mind I associate with Eastern philosophies like Taoism, which is indelibly tied to Michael.
Eulogy for the Patron Saint of Insects
·
September 18, 2024
And yet he was also deeply sentimental about objects from his past and reflected on his memories more than I do (or did, since I find myself dwelling on many memories, especially those involving Michael, now), perhaps because of his own early experiences of loss.
As you hint, relegating the past to a file drawer also diminishes the present, which is imbued with the resonances of the past and the residues of those no longer visibly present.
As always, it is a matter of finding a healthy balance between living in the present and treasuring and learning from the past with hopes of preventing destructive patterns from repeating in the future.
EB:
Great insight.
This relationship between Generational Memory and the Eternal Present is incomplete without a corresponding understanding of the future. Right now the only way I think of it is an extension of the Present that creates our Legacy of impact on others.
Much to ponder and learn.
I sent Ed a draft of this article to review, and he wrote:
“If you want me to add how my thinking has advanced since I wrote that, I’m glad to do it.”
I took him up on his generous offer, and following is our supplemental exchange.
EB:
The following quote begins the first chapter of a novel that I am writing. Working title: The Simulacra of Time.
“There is no past, nor future. Only the now.
All that once was considered in time has vanished into a simulation.”
What I see is that our past is a product of generational memory, whether happy or traumatic.
With this realist view of time, we find ourselves in the midst of the above quote. This perspective I call the Eternal Present.
So what do we do with the future. We connect with our desires for meaning and contribution. We focus on our legacy that is passed down to our children and grandchildren.
Time functions in a cyclical manner. I am a product of the past six or seven generations of my family.
However, our society is oriented towards individual self-creation, so it is difficult to see anything other than my quote above.
What do you think?
I was in the midst of replying to the above when he added:
EB:
Sorry I wasn’t clear.
The quote describes the Eternal Present.
I’m working off T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which begins with this.
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Of course there is also Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury:
“Clocks slay time … time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.”
For me this means that we live at the intersection of the past, present, and future. If the present is the only thing that exists, then there is no accountability for past deeds, whether good or ill. We live without a sense that our lives matter.
MAA:
I would definitely be intrigued if I saw a book by that title sitting on a shelf.
I can’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. You might appreciate the following quote from it:
“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.”
The friend who shared it with me worked as a graphic artist on The Matrix, and he informed me Simulacra and Simulation is embedded as an Easter egg in one scene:
Baudrillard also introduces the concept of hyperreality, which, according to this article:
“he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been replaced by false images, to such an extent that one cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal.”
As I wrote in my first essay, we have been corralled “into a Matrix-like collective delusion that enables the powerful to extract our resources for their own gain.”
A Primer for the Propagandized
·
April 25, 2021
With the escalating integration of AI into nearly every aspect of our technology-mediated experiences, we are now entering a hyperreality in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern between human-created content and AI-generated simulacra (note there is a difference between simulacra and simulacrum according to this source, which explains “simulacra refers to copies or representations of something that has no original, while simulacrum refers to an image or representation that is not an exact replica of the original”).
This severing from reality and the deep, generational roots you rightly celebrate as integral to our identity produces the vacuous interiorless lives and nihilistic worldview prevalent today.
That reminds me of a quote Michael read me from an art book decades ago. I can’t remember the exact wording and would probably never be able to find it, but the Chilean artist Matta was comparing the emerging New York School of artists with their European progenitors. He said they were merely copying the techniques without possessing the underlying knowledge that sparked those discoveries. In other words, they were producing rootless, plastic, soulless simulacrums of the originals wrought out of hard-won experience.
That is a long way of saying I full-heartedly concur with your statement:
“that we live at the intersection of the past, present, and future. If the present is the only thing that exists, then there is no accountability for past deeds, whether good or ill. We live without a sense that our lives matter.”
What you’re describing, it seems to me, is the inevitable nihilism that results from living in hyperreality.
As a sidenote, I want to say I was inexplicably smitten with the phrase “Burnt Norton” when I was in high school. I had an aesthetic response to it akin to swooning.
Recalling that made me think of the scene in Donnie Darko where the teacher is explaining to Donnie why she wrote “Cellar Door” on the chalkboard:
“This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful.”
Like The Matrix, Donnie Darko probes questions of time, consciousness, reality, memory, and dreams that also tie into this discussion, but I must stop myself there as I could easily spend hours on this discussion but am already hours past my bedtime.
EB:
This is so good.
What is interesting is that my real life and my dream life are merging. I’m having dreams where my mother is present. It raises real questions about so many things that in our scientific world are treated as settled. Since I have been a person of faith since birth, though not religious at all, even as a minister; so many contradictions and paradoxes; it is part of my generational memory. My awareness is outside of space and time. Because it doesn’t make sense it does.
Thank you again for inviting me into this exchange.
A few days after I published the post about my great-grandmother, rolandttg—a guest author on this heart-piercing piece—sent a note in response, and I requested his permission to include it here.
The SSRI Suicides: Ode to Wookie Bear
Margaret Anna Alice and rolandttg
·
October 27, 2024
rolandttg:
Interesting from the Heart story. There is no doubt the work ethic of yore is a thing of the past. I have know workaholics like Johanna. I have a strong work ethic, but I would never call myself a workaholic. More like “work hard and play hard”. We live in a stone house I general-contracted and did much of the work with the stone, painting, helper, and creating all of the gardens and landscaping. Jo Ann and I dug up and or picked up 143 tons of sandstone with just 36 inch crowbars to build this house over one fall / winter/ and spring. We worked on weekends after driving up 2 1/2 hours. We worked New Years’ Eve in the snow sleet and rain. I got poison ivy a half dozen times, even after. wearing latex gloves under my work gloves. After my in-laws arranged to have it trucked to our property, I helped move, cut, shape, lay, and point it. Estimate I handled every rock 6 times. I wore the point off my crowbar twice. I am not handy by any stretch of the imagination, but it turned out I was a pretty good amateur stone mason. My stone mason was a great teacher. Finishing the last section by myself.
The face phone effing kids of today would do well to read this, but it would go right over their heads.
MAA:
Thank you for your thoughtful reflections and especially for sharing that beautiful example of the profoundly fulfilling nature of hard labor! You and Jo Ann have an intimate knowledge of your home in a way few people can understand these days. The fact that you did it together and continue to inhabit that space deepens your relationship and shared memories.
What are some of the generational memories you’ve carried down, dear readers?
Note: I made minor punctuation tweaks and embedded links where appropriate.
© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC
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Thank you for the profoundly thought-provoking and touching conversation, Ed! I continue to mull over these concepts.