Anyway, my point, as you’ll see, is not a complicated one. How the past is documented, to a great extent, determines how it is remembered. If I hadn’t gone to that café on that wet morning in June, I wouldn’t have written those words, and so I probably wouldn’t have been able to recall, certainly not in such detail, those moments in the still of the night. Inevitably this begs many further questions, such as the selectivity of memory, or the inevitable way that words first simplify, and then begin to replace, the actual lived experience. And here there is a difference between the oral and the written use of words. If, for example, you’ve ever tried to recount a story from your own childhood you will be aware of how, even if you’ve repeated these story several times over the years, it never comes out quite the same. A detail about the weather on the day of the bee sting, or the friend you were with when you got cut off by the tide, these will be different every time you tell the story, possibly reflecting your mood or who you’re telling the story to. Maybe only subtly so, but it will be different.
Contrast this fluid truth with the unbending fixity of the written word, which Socrates distrusted so much and compared to ‘glass shards’ which he believed would disable people’s memories. Ironically, we only know about this view of Socrates’ because Plato wrote down his thoughts later on – in the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus: ‘for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember for themselves.’3
But perhaps Socrates places too much trust in people’s power of memory, with or without the written word. We can all think of examples in our own lives of sharing memories with those closest to us, and being shocked when the other’s memory of an important day or event differs dramatically from our own vivid recollection. And we also know that memory can be a fickle, capricious companion, sometimes tripping us up, sometimes giving us only a glimpse of the past. If you keep a journal, one of the most disorientating aspects is to revisit a day in your life ten or twenty years ago, and find that significant details are quite different from your memory of them. Perhaps there’s an inherent frustration with trying to remember anything from the past in detail. Maybe there’s always the sense, the suspicion, that some of the truly important aspects remain, tantalisingly, just out of view. Even on our deathbeds, the blurred periphery of the vision is what we will be seeing, rather than the reality. In a similar way, on waking, we often remember the prosaic part of the dream, but sense an astonishing beauty or uplifting revelation, just beyond the reach of our memories.
This doesn’t mean that reading other people’s accounts of their lives, their pasts, is necessarily frustrating. On the contrary. But it does mean that although we might feel there’s a remarkable truth to D. H. Lawrence’s depiction of childhood, or his relationship with his mother in Sons and Lovers, for example, or Gorky’s description of his grandparents in My Childhood – when Lawrence or Gorky themselves reread what they had written, they would have been aware of the partial nature of what they had captured. They would both have understood that there is no writing about memory without vast simplification.
The narrative arcs of our lives are never simple, and rarely arcs at all. They never travel in one direction, despite the human urge to tell ourselves that there are definable ‘phases’ and ‘cycles’ in our existences. We need to make sense of our lives, to see beginnings and endings, but the reality is always different. The vast simplifications of the stories we create – the ‘epiphany’ experienced or the ‘closure’ achieved. Does talking about ‘the end’ of a relationship even have a meaning? As if we’re finishing a meal or a book. Often our thoughts and feelings for the other inhabit us for many years in an extraordinarily intimate way – long after we’re supposed to have stopped thinking about them. The way past lovers often make their way into our dreams. The absurd idea that you ever ‘get over’ the death of someone you’ve loved. If this were true, then how to explain, years later, finding yourself in a café suddenly ambushed by the music they loved, weeping, seeing their face again?
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And then, finally, there are some things that simply defy being written about. Not because they are invisible, or partially seen, but because they are central to our identities. If we wrote about them we would not only reveal vulnerabilities in ourselves that are kept in the most remote place inside us, but we would also be in danger of tempting the fates. Think about the love of a parent for their child, the child for their parent. An intensity of love unlike any other. A love that enables and disables simultaneously. That stays, however much it changes its form, for as long as you live.
Perhaps such love can only be written about in retrospect. As if a forcefield of energy surrounds it, when the parent is still alive, making such communication impossible. After the parent has gone, words can try to find the force of this love. And, very occasionally, words can (if only for a moment) reach into this place. This is the writer Jonathan Franzen opening the fridge in his mother’s house, in the last days of her life:
For the week or so before she was hospitalized, my mother couldn’t keep any food down,5 and by the time I arrived her refrigerator was empty of almost everything but ancient condiments and delicacies. On the top shelf there was just a quart of skim milk, a tiny can of green peas with a square of foil on top, and, next to this can, a dish containing a single bite of peas. I was ambushed and nearly destroyed by this dish of peas. I was forced to imagine my mother alone in the house and willing herself to eat a bite of something, anything, a bite of peas, and finding herself unable to. With her usual frugality and optimism, she’d put both the can and the dish in the refrigerator, in case her appetite returned.
And this is the film director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini writing to his mother:
Only you in all the world know what my / heart always held, before any other love.6 / So I must tell you something terrible to know: / from within your kindness my anguish grew. / You’re irreplaceable. And because you are, / the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness. / And I don’t want to be alone. I have an infinite hunger for love, love of bodies without souls. For the soul is inside you, it is you, but / you’re my mother and your love’s my slavery …
Sons. Mothers. Still one of the hardest of all bonds to write about. And a hole in this book. My mother, a presence who hovers over almost everything I’ve written about. Yet, almost invisible in these pages. Corinne, the sun in my universe for more than forty years. Giver of life. Giver of love. Giver of hope. The person I have loved more than any other. And who I have worried about more than any other. Even as I write these words I am aware of the danger of expressing such thoughts. We’re all supposed to outgrow the love of our parents, and the love for our parents, but I don’t care. I’ve got to a point in my life where I think love, wherever it’s found, in all its forms – love of partners, love of friends, love of family – needs to be celebrated. No, more than celebrated – how weak that word sounds – it needs to be glorified. No, more than that too. I simply feel in awe of this love.