And how it serves…

(Listen to my reading of this article here: https://bretthetherington.substack.com/p/memory-the-sincerest-of-witnesses)

One of the strangest things about our memories is how they come to the brain from seemingly nowhere at all.

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I was washing up this morning and the clearest recollection anyone could possibly have from childhood just flashed back into my mind. It was summer in 1980 and my family and I (from Australia) were in England on our final day, on a holiday that felt like spanned years.

On this specific day, I was in my father’s birthplace, Newcastle upon Tyne, kicking a football in the thick green grass with my 11 year old twin brother Matt and I was sharply conscious of the fact that today we were going home to Canberra: the airport was beckoning in the hours ahead. I was – something that now surprises me – a bit sad to be going but also keen to go back to the assorted mix of kids who made up our classes in Year 6 primary school.

The day was odd for another reason.

During the entire three months we were travelling in Britain, this was only the second day it hadn’t rained. That fact was not lost on me then. It had been an indoor summer. Reading and dreaming and writing had replaced sport in my life.

It’s often said how unreliable memory itself is. Surely though, memory is also a sincere witness.

Yes, witnesses too can be untrustworthy and slip into error but memories repeat themselves, they might alter in minor or sometimes major details but their complete accuracy is hardly the point.

Memory serves. Not always correctly but the act of remembering enriches our lives and literature owes the biggest debt of gratitude to it. Writers like Paul Auster or Antonio Muñoz Molina virtually rely on memory to pump air into the lungs of their stories.

Here’s an extract on this theme from my as yet unpublished novel:

Trent faced the screen and the screen faced him. We drag our memories with us from place to place but those memories drag us around too. Whatever happened to all my creativity and those bits and pieces from when I was a kid? I’d love to know. He rubbed his chin.

Now, I’m ordering the universe in a different way. That’s my job, isn’t it? There’s a kind of thrill to be found in placing seconds or minutes of people’s lives into sections of an Orwellian memory hole which is never filled up because new data is constantly being fed into it. Every one of these commands or requests or phrases of dictation or overheard conversations happened in the real world somewhere. For this instant only I have power over it.

In the dull quiet of the wooden-panelled office, processing fingers tapped dozens of white keyboards on white tables.

The domain we work in is similar to a historian’s world. I can truthfully put these utterances – I prefer to think of them as ‘experiences’– in the right place or I can mislead the ghost in the machine, the system. I don’t often throw in a lie but one in every few hundred cases I like to intentionally move into the wrong category. His eyelids flickered. That way, I’m reminding myself I can still cock a leg and spray some control. I’m more than a mere servant. I can even be the ruler in my miniature kingdom of information.

On a similar note, this extract of John Ruskin’s prose is from the end of his autobiography, Praeterita, a book that influenced Proust’s shaping of memory:

“How things bind and blend themselves together! The last time I saw the Fountain of Trevi, it was from Arthur’s father’s room . . . Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds stilllighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, “Cor magistibi Sena pandit,” and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”

Thanks to Anshuman Mody for the Rushkin quote above.

(My use of bold text for the exquisite verb stilllighted. It grabbed me and shook me.)