..shared
it is apparent from the other descriptions that we were really in different
places at what may well have been different times.
Occasionally I find that people have appropriated my life and memories as their
own which seems to cruelly deny my existence. If someone else was leading my
life what was I doing at the time? Have I ceased to exist in the past? Do I
become the thief and see myself leading a richer life?
Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22nd, 1963? I was sound
asleep and I didn’t hear about it until I got to school in the morning,
and then I didn’t believe it. I know that I was at Christ’s College.
I know I was told whilst I was opening my locker in Condell’s House, a
grey timber building on the far side of the school quadrangle. The locker door
was incised into a fine gothic tracery through generations of compass points
and pen knives. But as to what was in my locker – a geometry text book,
Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a wooden tennis racquet? – I don’t recollect,
even though I opened that locker several times a day for four years.
Neither can I remember who told me. There is a vague blur, eager with the gossip
of death and historic events vicariously lived. Ready for some recreational
grief and mourning.
What was the weather like? Apparently there was half a millimeter of rain and
the temperature reached 16.5 Celsius, so I can draw my own conclusions – put
together some antipodean panorama of the day created more from photographs than
from actuality.
Or I can re-establish what surely must have happened.
“It was a cold grey day in Christchurch with low hanging clouds and drifts
of rain that somehow portended tragedy. I strode into the Condell’s house
after running my obligatory five miles around Hagley Park, anxious to regain
my composure before the solemnity of morning Chapel. Suddenly I became aware
of the silence and I froze in front of the elegant Gothic tracery I had carved
in my locker door with the penknife given to me by Charles Upham VC and Bar.
‘He doesn’t know! My God he doesn’t know!’ It was the
instantly recognizable voice of Nigel ‘Sam’ Neil who even at this
young age showed the characteristic richness we would all come to know in such
films as ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘My Brilliant Career.’
This you can see is much more interesting than the probably uncomfortable uncertainty
of not really knowing how to feel at the death of an American President who,
even far away, was seen as a light and inspirational hope. From being an uncertain
observer hovering on the outskirts of history, I have established a more certain
place amongst those whose fame and glamour I can bask in by association.
But I know it isn’t true, even though there are elements of fact – none
of which are actually associated with me. Charles Upham did go to my school
and was a war hero and had a farm at the mouth of the Conway River near some
of my relatives’ properties. Sam Neil also went to the same school, but
I have no recollection of the fact. I have been told that we vied for the affections
of the same girl, but again I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
People craft recollections into stories that replace what actually happened.
Events which were mortifyingly public are transformed by humour into a bearable,
shared humiliation. Minor triumphs become major victories, a kiss becomes a
conquest and we were all of above average intelligence and good-looking.
We are constructs of our memory, the sum total of our experiences writ in uncertain
flesh. Our memories exist as uncertain connections between the synapses and
ganglia of the brain, replaced, uncertainly replicated and renewed slowly over
time so that the original memory is not original at all, but a chemical clone.
Unless there is some moment of involuntary memory, the Proustian Madeleine,
we scramble slowly back through the dusty cupboards of the past to find the
clues, not just to who we are, but who were the other people with whom we shared
the doubts of existence.
For as long as we remember these inhabitants of a distant past country they
still live, in some strange fashion, through our eyes. My maternal grandmother,
to my knowledge, left no diary. I suspect that my mother may have some of her
photographs, but she lives with much the same fragility she had in old age in
the decreasing recollections of those who survive her. So she’ll remain
always a plump country woman with grey hair, slightly crooked teeth, and an
air of amiably determined vagueness, sharpening a knife on the step, providing
comfort to those whose illness was driven by an intense dislike of school, slowly
fading inside herself with perhaps the comfort of more than an occasional gin.
Somehow I hold to the idea that there is some fixed reality which exists outside
of recollection, that there was a physical truth, a series of flowing arrangements
of atoms, times and space. Yet I also believe there is also a human construct,
our way of making something tangible that which at many levels is unknowable.
And so, like the poetic creation of Zbigniew Herbert
‘… descending deeper
Into the self’s recesses
Mr Cogito
Discovers months
Left without marks
Not a single note
Even a banal one
Like – underwear to laundry
– buy chives’
I shall weave and unweave every night the frail tapestry of memory searching
for notes to hang a life upon.
