The Times of Remembering, The Times of Forgetting

  THE TIMES OF REMEMBERING, THE TIMES OF FORGETTING

Memories like islands now in the silted waters of his mind.

He remembers the times of remembering. The child who could not but remember when there was so much to learn. The sight of the green leaves of summer on a perfect smudgeless blue sky. The sound of grinding metal from the goods railway at the bottom of the road. The smell of soapy sticky tar new pasted on the road. Then the teenager sitting in smoky Kardomah basements forcing a coffee to last two hours. And the young adult seeing the world, going backstage at the Moulin Rouge, watching the Mississippi stillness at Natchez Under in the spectre-shadows of bygone river pirates, watching a Turkish goatman bring his herd home beneath a late cooling Anatolian balcony.

Those things he shall remember. They were saved when the brain was still open and empty. Nothing to click. Fully automated. So many things to remember. Taxonomies beyond Linnaeus in every young brain. Memories of perception, of dream, of vision, of imagining. No notebooks needed. No verbs either.

Life is not a consecutive narrative, not by the time you have enough of it to create a narrative. Bits of it return in random gobbets, often welcome or at least sweetly wistful. Recent times are different. Memories struggle to find a resting place in clogged brains. Imaginings are fitful, fragments, remnant pieces of effulgent old fantasies. Dreams are harder to take hold of and seem like old friends though just introduced. Dreamed many times but never before breaking into the thinning layer of consciousness, the stretched membrane fighting the confusion that always lurks behind. Now he writes variations on a theme, nothing new. And he dreams similarly. Except for the dream, the permanent, steady, admonitory one that disappeared rather late in the day.    

There were temporary dreams that spoke of passing pressures. Waiting in the wings as the school play unfolded. Not knowing when to enter, not knowing what he would say or when. Who would give him the cue? And yet he never acted. Dreams are rarely literal, there is always some metaphor unfolding. Are we all equally creative in dream? Does the dull kid at the back of the class dream with the complexity of Shakespeare or Cervantes? Are we all equal in potential but divergent in achievement? Tobogganing down an escarpment road in Brighton- what was that one about? Flight, loss of control. Like motives dreams are a mix. Meaning is subjective (though there were those who made a living out of one-size-fits-all interpretations.)

So is memory, which changes just a little every time it breaks back into consciousness. If we could go back in time we would be mightily surprised at what we have subsequently made of key moments. The present is gossamer thin, gone before we grasp it. The future is uncertain to say the least. The past rules us. It is a permanently DIM presence. That is DIM the acronym- oh how we love them even three letter ones, ambiguous and misleading as they are. Tobogganing in a snowless Brighton. I did live there, rented a place on Marine Parade from the BBC. That’s the Best of Brighton Cottages. DIM is Dream, Imagination, Memory the ingredients of our hinterland.

You see life is not a narrative. It’s a series of images made from five or maybe six senses. Seemingly random, certainly tuned to a different logic. Pronouns too change. The third person has become first. I remember; I forget. Is that significant? Does that make it any more likely that anything I write here accords with lived experience? I may be no more me than he was. Writers ask questions; we are under no obligation to answer them.

Only the dream has continuity in this tale and the narrator (he, I, whoever) has revealed nothing of it yet. Only that it was in the days of remembering not the days of forgetting. The first things that are forgotten are others’ imaginings. Novels and films can now be constantly enjoyed since I (he, they) cannot even remember ever seeing them before. The new ones; they have to be pretty good to be effectively saved in that overcrowded brain. He can never remember who the murderer was. Wonderful in its way. Yet he loves cinema- loves the greats, the real film actors who know that less is more, a sort of vindicated homeopathy of the screen. Gabin the greatest of them all, Barbara Stanwyck, the greatest actress (honestly, watch her, watch how little she does and the power of it), Judy Garland the sweetest, and Burt Lancaster star of the last film that truly made its mark on him. It’s called The Swimmer. Nobody has heard of it (a small exaggeration clearly). I have never seen an actor create a dream as Lancaster does here. A very special performance.

For many years I lived in a small flat in North London. It was part of a Victorian house squeezed into a terrace in an area that even today struggles to be hip as most parts of inner North London do at some point. Hipness goes with low prices. Does anyone think Mayfair is hip? I constantly dreamed it was bigger. I’d find several more flats per floor occupied by happening people. And at the top of the house I realised I had only discovered one half of the place. A buzzing demi-monde. Across a gable corridor there was some sort of mirror image going back down- not exactly, for symmetry is boring and most worthwhile design partakes of the picturesque. Outside the street too had burgeoned. Everything looked better, the shops, the houses, the cafes. All designed by me (though not of course in the dream). What did this mean? It repeated itself many times with the smallest of variations.

I continued to live in my small flat, and I was outwardly content. I spent time in pubs and cinemas. I went to Ronnie's and the 100 Club for my sort of music. I went on long seasonal walks- the rundown areas beyond London Bridge after Christmas, then at Easter the Royal Hospital with its beautiful lawns and lush floral borders, and the Chelsea Pensioners, the survivors, themselves the remnant flowers of England. I was out of doors but I was in too, belatedly partaking of the pleasures of online. Online, what a funny word. He joined (this is getting too personal- he, he, he) various cinema clubs including the biggest, chatting to others. One day he saw a post by a lady, of some style from her picture, and clearly a proper cineaste, more so than he was. He wrote; she replied; he wrote again waiting for her to tire of him but she never did. They married and that dream, the dream, became redundant, otiose, obsolete. He was no longer sampling a small part of his house, his life. He had started discovering the things he had missed, the rooms, the rambling corridors, the people that had passed him by. It was all so simple really, the solution. One man, one woman. Compatibility, deep friendship, love. That, unlike the dream, would never fade away.