So this post might not be a
whole barrel of laughs. You can just flick on past it if needs be. I won’t mind
at all.
The other day would have
been my brother Michael’s birthday. Well, it was his birthday, in fact…
except it wasn’t. You know the conundrum. You’re familiar with it, I reckon.
There is also some planning currently going on for a memorial for Patricia’s sister,
Penelope, to at least partially compensate for the restrictions that we
observed for her funeral back in lockdown, which so many partying leaders
apparently did not.
It's been that kind of week
where all these loved ones who are no longer with us seemed, somehow, close at
hand. That included Mum and Dad, both now gone a reasonably long time, but still
well able to colour a scene or turn a mind from one thing to another.
In fact, it’s Mum and Dad who
are driving the admittedly-limited momentum of this week’s blog post. The thing
that my mind is turning over, the thing that’s got me at my desk typing like
this… well, it relates to memory and the curation of valuable memories. Yes,
that, with a little pinch of Existentialism tossed in.
Still here? Man, you’re a patient
one. I think I’d be long gone, if I wasn’t the one writing it.
Here’s the thing.
I have a particular memory.
It’s a nice memory. It concerns an event that lasted no more than 60 seconds.
There were three people there and I was, obviously, one of them.
Here’s the other thing.
Two of the three people who
had some stake in that memory are now dead. That leaves only me and this tiny, quite
insignificant memory.
I’ve never written it down
anywhere. I imagine I might have shared it verbally with Patricia and possible
some others, back around the time it happened, but, like I said, it’s pretty darned
insignificant so I don’t imagine it’s stuck very fast in anyone’s mind.
Here’s the other, other
thing.
As I’m the only one left, I’m
obviously the only one who holds this memory. When I go, it’s gone. It might be
small, it might not be earth-shattering, but while I’m alive, it at least still
exists. The potential for it to be retold, to be recounted, it's still a thing.
When that big red bus finally comes and runs me over, that’s it baby. Case
closed.
The solution is simple. I
will write it down. Here in this very blog post. It will only take a couple of
sentences. Four or five at most. Doing that doesn’t bequeath immortality on it.
Nobody’s under any illusions there. Computer servers will fail and rust, blog
host companies will be soaked-up by bigger companies who will discontinue them.
The web will be replaced by something else, probably something implanted right
in our heads. Even though I write it down in the next few paragraphs, it will
still eventually be lost in time, as every single thing ever will be lost in time.
But it gives it a little
more time, doesn’t it? It increases the longevity. A child, a grandchild,
stretching it, let’s say a great grandchild might happen upon the text on some
dusty obscure archive and say, “Look at that. A genuine memory of times and people
long gone.” That makes it worthwhile, doesn’t it? As Hamlet said, “It is meet I
set it down.” So that’s what I’ll do then. Right here, right now.
…
…
…
And that was the intention.
The design of this post, inasmuch as any design every exists here. Do an intro,
set it up and then type up the memory and move on. Done deal.
But it’s not that easy. Not quite.
Sitting here, with the
Saturday Chilli bubbling away in the kitchen, I find I don’t want to write the
memory down. Correction. I have no issue with writing it down. What I singularly
don’t want to do is to share it via my ancient blog with Facebook and Twitter
and whoever else happens past. I thought I did but, right on the edge of typing
it, I find that I don’t. It’s tiny but it’s personal. And, much more than it being
personal to me, it’s personal to the other two people in the memory, the people
who are dead and gone. Except in these kinds of weeks when they’re very much
not.
So I won’t write it down. I’ll
leave it be, here in my head. And it may warm and make me a bit sad in equal
measure from time to time. And when I too die, as I some day will, then the
little thing will be no more, as so many other things will also be no more.
Now, as I think about that, that
seems like no great hardship, no great misfortune. Whoever demanded that memories
had to aspire to live forever? Whoever mistakenly dreamed that they could? We
are, after all, “such stuff that dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded
by a sleep.”
So I’ll leave it alone. Let
it ride. It’ll be okay.
Sorry for wasting your time.
2 comments:
You've not wasted our time, of course. On a handful of occasions I have recounted a memory to someone close only to realise, even as I was speaking, that it would never transcribe from my memory because I couldn't recreate the moment, and without context and the presence of the other people concerned, it was nothing. Some memories can be cherished but have to die with us, and I think that's no bad thing.
“The public have a right to know!” How many times have the Press hollered that from the rooftops? But here’s the thing: we don’t, we so don’t. I don’t know SO MUCH what difference is your wee secret going to make? If you look back on my 1300 poems there’s SO MUCH autobiography there and the kind of stuff most autobiographers never quite manage to include because the dates and time and fact and figures take up so much space. The thing is the stuff is kinda encoded. Only I know the personal stuff that’s there. When most people read a poem which begins “My dad was…” they’re going to assume I’m talking about MY dad whereas the fact is I’ve written the poem in my daughter’s voice: I’M the dad in question. I expect my daughter’ll join the dots when the poems finally end up in her possession but maybe not. Words, let’s face it (you and I have to face it all the time), are pretty useless and SO MUCH is lost in the translation. Makes you wonder sometimes if the effort’s worth it. Yes, yes, you could’ve transcribed your memory but I’m pretty sure you would’ve been disappointed with the result because what makes it special to you would’ve been lost in the process. My dad once woke my brother and I up and took us out the back door to see a red moon. There you go, that about covers it. He woke us up, took us out the back and we saw a red moon. That definitively covers it but I cannot for the life of me describe what that felt like. Wouldn’t know where to start.
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