The end of Entropy

Dick’s
Toolbox cont.
..too expensive to make. And they were still seriously,
seriously good.
So when I returned this year, once again with Elizabeth, to find ‘For
Rent’ signs in the window and the view inside of an overturned table and
scattered newspapers on the floor; I felt desolated. The world, my
world, was diminished. Another small commercial death, another loss, another
fragment of memory to be filed away.
A day later we went to the restored Mayfair picture theatre, to which, nearly
50 years ago, my brother and I trooped along the esplanade in the gathering
dark, our collection of sixpences and shillings jingling warmly in our pockets.
We saw the French lose Dien Bien Phu in “Jump into Hell”, a grainy
black and white film that documented the failure of the French to keep Indochina
and maintain their last pretence of empire, and which led inevitably to the
Vietnam war. As the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in ‘The March of Folly”
in words that, with little change, are applicable to today
‘Having invented Indochina as the main target of coordinated Communist
aggression, and having in every policy advice and public pronouncement repeated
the operating assumption that its preservation from Communism was vital to American
security, the United States was lodged in the trap of its own propaganda.’
And we saw Pat Boone singing to Ann-Margret and Pamela Tiffin in DeLuxe Colour
and Cinemascope – which was a trauma of a different and more innocent kind.
Even discounting the fact that Elizabeth and I were seeing Peter Jackson’s
‘King Kong’ galumphing at unmerited length and decibels across the
screen, it wasn’t in any way the same experience as those years gone by.
Of course it could never have been, but I was seeking that Proustian moment
when, fuelled by a chocolate dipped ice-cream rather than a Madeleine, the past
and present became one. It may have been because the theatre was now just ordinarily
small, or maybe it was the mumbling hunch-back in the front row that fractured
the resonance, but I was locked firmly and sadly into 2006.
Slightly overcome by intimations of pizza shop and movie theatre induced mortality,
I remembered a short story by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges ‘The
Witness’ which commences with the death of a Saxon who had seen the face
of Woden, the sacrifice of horses dogs and prisoners and whose passing would
remove the last first-hand images of pagan rites,.
Borges wrote “We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come
to an end when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things,
die in each death…..” We each retain unique memories, our own lives
and those of relatives, places, friends and enemies that will slide slowly into
the past; slipping from the present like a drowning person slips from his reach
of their tiring rescuers. At some stage Kaikoura will lose contact with the
past I knew, a past already fractured through ever more fugitive memories, part
of what was a shared language or recollection. I was caught in a story of unravelling
threads which I really could not explain to my daughter.
The most abiding memory was of my great Aunt Emily, white haired, progressively
more frail and of disintegrating health and cooking ability, with whom Mike
and I had often stayed for holidays in a Kaikoura dominated by the smell of
seaweed, the cry of gulls and the clump of waves onto the steeply shingled shore.
She lived in what to us seemed a dark and Dickensian wing of the house, opposite
the room where her sister had taken to her bed and died amongst the dusty smell
of rose water and chamber pots.
Once or twice every visit she would make Mike and I sing her favourite song
as she played the piano. Always the same song every year. I think we sang it
well but it wasn’t until years later when I reread the lyrics that I wished
that we had sung it better. The song was “I’ll walk beside you”
and the last verse went ..

I’ll walk beside you through the passing years
Through days of cloud and sunshine, joy and tears
And when the great call comes, though sunset gleams
I’ll walk beside you through the land of dreams.

She does, as I hope we all will.