memory-essay #3
In film sound there is a rerecording technique called worldising. The soundscape of a scene is engineered to evoke the perception of the characters onscreen.
How sad it is if fantasy and memory start to take each other’s place. Like screen dreams or rear projections. Phantom fictions of long ago, memorials to what never happened, what could have been. Life not lived, the past as a counterfeit not even believed by its forger. Non-experience mourned. Missed opportunities transformed into ghost memories ... until some cybernetic revolution finally cancels out the loneliness and grief on the outskirts, in the old shadows — so that real and virtual are the same.
The night and the city are beautiful and empty. The sadness and the years have been left behind. No one speaks now of obligation. The line is broken and there are no ties. Unworldised, you are far away. You aren’t there. You can go anywhere, and your pain out there in the dark is a measure of the cost not only of having left but also of going back.
How sad it is if fantasy and memory start to take each other’s place. Like screen dreams or rear projections. Phantom fictions of long ago, memorials to what never happened, what could have been. Life not lived, the past as a counterfeit not even believed by its forger. Non-experience mourned. Missed opportunities transformed into ghost memories ... until some cybernetic revolution finally cancels out the loneliness and grief on the outskirts, in the old shadows — so that real and virtual are the same.
The night and the city are beautiful and empty. The sadness and the years have been left behind. No one speaks now of obligation. The line is broken and there are no ties. Unworldised, you are far away. You aren’t there. You can go anywhere, and your pain out there in the dark is a measure of the cost not only of having left but also of going back.
memory-essay #5
“Now I go back thirty-five years. No I don’t go back, you know, as a matter of fact. No. Alright, I come back.” [credit] A collector brought rare plants into the garden created out of the old quarry. Then new owners came like settlers, whose only desire was to conceal their history and be accountable to no-one, left to their own devices, their freedom more important than anything.
They built out the house and made the garden still more beautiful, so you could look from the village road over the low stone wall, and be deceived by the green and immaculate mask (with a k) hiding the soulless, neurotic family masque (with a q) replaying day after day on the other side of the wall—replaying day after day, all so they could respect nothing, remember nothing.
Before my final university exams I used to go to the famous gardens nearby with revision cards, and after a while fall asleep in the warmth of early summer, and it was so peaceful and I was happy then when all I had to do was memorise what I had learned.
Often in the evening I sat with a friend for half an hour, talking of little else than our playing cards and the cribbage board, and being in the comfort of his kindness was a different sort of lesson.
Thirty years later we were talking again, he and I, and I said to him that I would go back to those days if I could and he said oh I would too and I thought it was beautiful how an old man treasured what was gone. And it was the time of goodbye and he called me by the nickname he chose when I was still a teenager, and like a father he called me by my given name.
A strong wind blows through the quarry garden as it was and as you see it now from the strange high place of return where, however, words reach you from below.
First come kindly words: “Don’t linger there, it is better to move on—give up this lonely and unhappy vigil, don’t get lost in the leaves.” And then something more: “You don’t see things clearly, there is so much you’ll never understand, and you’d be wise not to let your lurid imagination rip. Your remembering twists the truth. And who are you anyway to say this beautiful garden is guilty and forgetful?”
cruelty
The thing about emotion: if you’re trapped in the sort of violence of other people’s emotions, actually the only way you survive that is by rising above it or standing back from it or being able to see it from the—but I think that’s in a sense what I was trying to say about Albert—the boy’s— language. So it may be that it’s covered. Do you see what I mean?
... guilty silence?
I had in my mind these two videos I’ve seen. Again it’s this idea that in time there can be sudden moments of a new insight, a new element of knowledge. Or—it’s difficult to explain—you see something, you suddenly catch a glimpse. Perhaps it’s something that moves fast and you can’t see exactly what it is you’ve seen, you’ve just caught a glimpse of something, and this happened to me. I saw quite recently video footage of parents who had killed their daughter. And they were on a plane. They’d got onto a plane. It was in business class or first class and the video was of them being arrested and I think one of them says “it’s us you’re looking for”. But what I was struck by was that their faces were very plain and inexpressive and they didn’t say anything. They did’t fight or struggle or attempt to deny or bargain. There was just this sort of strange guilty silence. Again one can read into it—perhaps they were relieved. Whatever it is. I don’t think it’s psychological, but I connected it to something.
There’s another video, which I think is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. I knew about it. It was freely available but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it until at a certain point I did, you know. It’s a little boy. I think his name was Albert and again he was killed by his parents. I think he was starved to death. They had video of him and audio of him. So I don’t know if they—I didn’t want to look into all the details. I think it was a father and a stepmother. There was a step-parent involved. Anyway there’s this footage or audio. It gets confused in my mind which is the audio and which is the footage. And they make him sleep on the floor and he doesn’t have food. And there’s video of him waking up and he makes his bed or tries to make his bed but he’s so weak he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he has language. He has this extraordinary clarity of language. I guess he was six or seven or eight, and you hear him saying—again, you know, I couldn’t watch this more than once so maybe I remember it differently—he says nobody loves me and then he says nobody feeds me. So it’s something about—in my mind I put these two videos together in terms of the clarity of the boy’s language, you know. He can say—because he has no guilt—he can say what is happening, you know, and it’s not the language of feelings. It’s not the language of pain. It’s the language of description.
It reminds me of a story from Auschwitz. When the Russians were coming to liberate Auschwitz, the Nazis force-marched the remaining prisoners. It was a death march, but they left behind the sick, and there was a boy there, a little boy, and no one knows his name. Primo Levi writes about him and gives him this name, which is something like Hurbinek. I don’t know how you pronounce it. There were children born in Auschwitz. And he is trying to speak, you know. And there are these women there and Primo Levi says they were “too tender and too vain” to help him speak. But there’s a teenage boy there too who just, you know, keeps him company and, in the telling of it, he learns a word or two—or the shape of a word or two—which perhaps no-one really understands, and then he dies if I remember correctly but, you know, there’s this effort at language. This beautiful effort even in those circumstances to find some words.
MIMESIS
[transcript lightly edited for flow]
It’s coming from a very, you know, from a place of pain really. So it becomes, you know, more difficult to talk. Whatever you say is kind of policed in some way.
This sense of removal and distance. A conscious decision to almost say something without saying it.
There were ways for me to say the things I wanted to say without actually saying them, and in fact by making other people say them somehow.
Yeah I’ve really wanted to induce a sense of suspicion within the work. I don’t know if that makes sense, you know, that this pain that is being represented or that is being constructed somehow IS constructed. Or like to what extent can you trust your own feelings or assumptions, which somehow feels a lot more painful. Yeah, being put in this position of kind of—
—but feels a lot more painful for the audience or for the maker, do you mean?
—for the audience.
Okay, this could go two ways, and they’re sort of related, which is funny because it’s kind of what you just did. There’s a sense of this salvation having failed to some extent. But then there’s another sort of element—maybe that’s what I mean about the asceticism—it’s kind of like an acceptance of this situation, this thing that must be endured.
Maybe sadness isn’t quite the right way to describe this. It’s more what would come after sadness. It’s almost like, you know, what comes after the point where the pain is unbearable, like to the point where you can’t—you know—that it has to go—like it has to become something else in order for you to be able to live with it. And so almost it becomes something that’s—not that has no emotion but that it’s in some way dismissive, or like more distant than that, less open.
I actually like protein bars more than regular candy bars. There’s something about their chewiness or something.
Yeah I don’t usually have them. Maybe I should.
…a response to the huge impact of what had happened. And the shock and the sadness and the sense of the lack of possibility in life, you know, that it wasn’t any longer possible to think of life as this thing that goes on, if not forever than for the foreseeable future. So I definitely think that it’s about dealing with psychic pain and, you know, the loneliness of these kinds of experience. And something that happens when—well it’s what you said actually—it’s when you get to a stage where you know that there’s no really significant healing or, as you said, salvation. I mean, like all these things, sometimes the thing said at the beginning is the most important thing. So this idea of failed salvation, and I think that that is what I’m trying to think about. How do you live without the hope of healing? I’m not talking about medical, physical healing. I’m talking about something else. And can you even really talk about it? Can you ever really find a way to state that experience of pain or—I don’t know. I think it does in a certain way go beyond the ordinary names and ordinary language.
I always get this sense of something that’s a bit—that is too much to even deal with—that it’s somehow there but, you know, it’s like you can’t stare directly into the sun. You can’t stare directly into certain things, you can’t. You know it would be—it’s too difficult—it’s too painful, so therefore it must be, you know, it’s always present because you can never get rid of it but it must be sort of held back. You can’t just let it loose.
MEMORY-ESSAY #4
“I was appalled at myself, I was just, I sat there and just cried like a baby and prayed to God, ‘Give me the strength to get away from this shit, and live the rest of my life in peace’.”“For me it was a question of almost, without sounding too pompous or pretentious, sinning. I had committed to myself so many sins. I was trying to make up for it, and the struggle to get back was harder because of that. I’m talking about sins as far as work is concerned.” [credits]
Thirty years old and I thought I couldn’t ever escape flat-sharing. Then, luckily, I was accepted in a secure housing scheme and it became possible in theory to live a different kind of life on my own.
I lost a long-term job at a cultural institute. I visited Malcolm in his grand college rooms filled with his collection of art books which seemed like something out of another age. I asked for his advice. “Try to be an independent,” he said. He also told me that his illness was in remission, but he died not long afterwards. He never enjoyed the peak of his eminence. And maybe it wasn’t a small matter that he made the time to give honest and difficult advice to a former student who felt lost.
Then I was a contractor working from home, years before the pandemic made it normal. Instead of giving me independence, gradually the work invaded my home. It was the mid-2000s and I remember reading somewhere the idea that what went along with increasingly insecure terms and conditions was a new level of subjection to work, the proof of it being (the writer said) that, more and more, people dreamt about work, and so it was for me.
There was restructuring, a new regime, and suddenly I thought “at last I have a reason to leave”. But it made me nervous and so I weighed the pros and cons. I wrote lists, the good and the bad, feared what might follow but kept realising that there was no-one in this whole literary world that I truly admired. Some I respected for their ability or even brilliance, but where was anyone really resisting the careful institutional instinct of pushing it only so far no matter what, which bit by bit eats away at you and which now I was deciding to reject?
I went to see my old tutor in his plush common room and admitted that sometimes I felt like a failure. Why couldn’t I realise my potential, build a career? Why wasn’t I nimbler at working within the rules? There was more than a trace of a smirk when he asked me, “Do you want to be some kind of saint?” And what he said hurt me, this man I so want to be kinder and cleverer than he is, but also all my life until now, all the almost forty years since I was brought to this country I have been in one way or another surrounded by the barren culture of its education system, with all its envy and ambition and mediocrity, and I have tried in earnest and good faith to adapt to it, and even if part of me wishes I could have succeeded on its terms, I also loathe it. And so now I’ve given up whatever standing I had, and if that now means I can be scoffed at as someone trying be a saint, and if also I don’t yet know the true nature of the trials of regret and self-doubt that are coming, still I am determined to seek something better than a false home.
“It was a question in the end of atmosphere. I would get settled and something would happen. I would have noisy neighbours or I would have terrible conditions and would be thrown out of flats because a man wanted to sell the place or various reasons. All the time in the six years I was rather working towards what I call a silence where this could come to me rather than me force it. So I’m having this kind of experience. It was very important that it flowed to me rather than me trying to push it on and so I was looking for the right atmosphere.”
“When you first take up an instrument in the beginning, that’s all that is, isn’t it? So why should you want anything different now than you wanted in the beginning? Because it’s just your love of what it is. I wouldn’t play to anyone, I’d just sit in a room on my own and play. The room and the silence is totally important because that’s what you’re doing, you’re just existing in a room and then it’s like you’re trying to break into the silence. Yeah absolutely, and then move out of it again. I like silence. I get on great with silence.” [credits]
MEMORY-ESSAY #6
[transcript lightly edited for flow] Because at the end of the day you’re kind of in charge of your own memories. It’s such a personal thing that only you have access to, which you can experience in this isolated way. What you’re actually connecting with is not an actual person but an image of a person or your own sense of who they might be. And in that way, that’s something you have direct access and control over, and not an actual other person.What is going on when someone is speaking on behalf of someone else, or the artistic work that can convey or encapsulate or represent or encrypt, encode something in a way that can’t be done ordinarily?
Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary way. Maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood.
There are these processes that happen. I don’t think the word is communication. These affinities and transmissions and manipulations—there are all kinds of words that one could use—altruisms, identifications, echoes.
Something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious—but something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level. It would be an act of great importance, and great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier—not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness. But I’m not even saying it’s possible. Perhaps sometimes you can only reach the person, or unlock the words, after death for example. Perhaps it can only happen in the memory of someone, in loving memory. That one person remembers and makes sense of the unspeakable, unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else. And it’s too late, but still it’s something. It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated in that way. So it’s about finding or stumbling upon these mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time.
I live such a reclusive life now. I don’t see much of London any more. I don’t really go on public transport much any more. Sometime last year, I used to be more and more interested in this sense of the desolation of London. This sense that everywhere you looked there was more and more evidence of social collapse and beggars and people obviously disturbed and unhappy. And then it just kind of fades away. You get used to one sign, the next sign, you forget what it was like before. It’s the same process as gentrification but much worse.
This beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset—darkening of my new windows.