i read the following in the march edition of the observor's music monthly magazine: "This is DBC Pierre's first memory: he is at a New Year's Eve party in Australia, aged four, when, improbably, he hears the distant squeal of bagpipes ushering in the new year. He is rooted to the spot. 'I come from Scottish blood, after all,' says the man born Peter Finlay, fastidiously assembling a hand-rolled cigarette. 'And looking back, because it left such a strong impression, it makes me wonder if you have genetic memory, if your blood is home to a kind of intelligence.'
memory.
i have been thinking about this theme for a while. i have scribbled down many quotations about memory. for now though, i think i will risk a few of my own thoughts.
memories mess with time. there you are, having a conversation with someone, in a room in daylight, drinking a mug of tea when suddenly you are elsewhere, in a field, in darkness, under an oily sky, wearing a fleece three sizes too big and straining to see shooting stars which may or may not be perceptible because perhaps it is the presence of the person at your side that makes the sky seems magical rather than the emperical stratospheric reality above your head. the reason for this transportation? the utterance of a word, the light flickering on the floorboards, the sound of a vowel, the taste of the tea. the past coughing to make itself heard...to be remembered and, however briefly, relived. this past which weaves into the present and changes everything...utterly alters the way of sitting in the chair in a room in daylight. for the present moment is two moments. and the cinefilm that is playing in your head exists for an audience of one. the conversation is occurring alongside a conversation you are having with yourself, with your past, with the people in that past. and then comes the realisation that the person you are talking to has a cinefilm of his or her own flashing on and off as well.
how memories plunge us places we could not have predicted we would venture into. how they lunge us back and forward and undo the neat linearity with which we like to approach the world.
but who is this 'you'? it is of course me. me in memories. for i am contained in these cinefilms which play without a trailer's notice. they remind me that memory goes deep....deeper than even my conscious capacity for recall. if i am in memories, they are also in me. genetically perhaps. stored in my body somewhere. my first memory is not of bagpipes. mine is a sight and sound which confronted me, but nothing so comically bizarre as dbc's party. i am remembering to remember this moment. how it has shaped me, and everything which came afterward.
remembering helps us tell our secrets to ourselves.
Anne Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces, is an incredible meditation on memory. i had the privilege of meeting her at a poetry festival in st. andrews (StAnza). she is an amazing woman. here are a few quotations...
"We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephermeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled."
"History is amoral: events occured. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue."
"There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, one can make a map."
maybe memories are braille to our blind stumblings into the past...bumps which make trials on our maps for our future.
who knows.
