THIS IS WHAT MARCEL PROUST referred to as ‘ma mémoire, la
memoire involontaire’, how it can ambush you in unexpected places.
Lost times, sought or regained.
Old
photographs and letters either from others or sent by oneself are the main mind-joggers,
and give rise to a strange and unsettling nostalgie
du vie.
I was looking for a particular piece of artwork in the glory hole that
is the study’s stash cupboard. This is an old repainted wall storage cabinet, too useful
to throw into a skip when I revamped the kitchen, and so it was secured to the study
wall by the carpenter with hefty coach bolts.
Anything
and everything which might come in useful is stowed in there, to be forgotten –
until a hunt for some missing item disturbs its comfortable slow decay. Sheet
music, art materials, old diaries, ancient VCRs (remember those?) pre-digital
photographic equipment, piles of files.
It was a foolscap
pocket file, reposing at the very bottom of a heap of odds and sundries which
caught my attention. Pulling it out from under was a major excavation.
Unlabelled, and suspiciously chewed at one corner by a mouse – or cat - it
turned out to contain various bits and pieces hoarded by my late mother, which
I’d simply shoved in the cupboard without inspecting. There is so much to do
when someone dies that little things are overlooked, I guess, and then
forgotten.
Mother kept personal items: letters, birthday cards and now-faded photographs, the letters mostly home thoughts from abroad. And she posted out to me some of the things I missed. One letter sent to South Africa accompanied a carton of cigarettes. You couldn’t obtain decent European brands out there – Africa mostly imported US Virginia blends, or faked-up its own look-alikes under licence: not to my taste. I was addicted at that time to French Gitanes and Gauloises disques bleu - Dordogne tobacco, or dark brunes from Syria and Turkey.
In the same parcel was Oil of Ulay – English skin dried out in the parched climate – biscuits, and a local newspaper, which only made the nostalgia worse.
Ye gods!
Was I that homesick?
Strange: I’d never experienced such when abroad solo – only when with another person, and not always then. I actually prefer travelling with people - certain people. There’s a message in there somewhere, if only I could figure it out.
Strange: I’d never experienced such when abroad solo – only when with another person, and not always then. I actually prefer travelling with people - certain people. There’s a message in there somewhere, if only I could figure it out.
But it is now all so long ago as to be almost a
personal historical archive. I cannot remember writing half that stuff, but
much of it was already flagging up uncertainties, prophecies foretelling a
future which, at that time, was still only a possible
future. A life is full of crossroads, places of decision.
How is it
that we don’t consciously recognize things at the time they occur, things which later on become all too
apparent and which do not surprise us because, deep down, we already know them? Very weird,
this buried material - like living backwards, being an archaeologist excavating
your own life, noting the stratigraphy of the separate layers.
Remind me never to go in for hypnosis!
But if, in Auden’s phrase, ‘art is our chief
means of breaking bread with the dead’, then memory’s in there, too. There
is an art to memory – the Greek Muse Mnemosyne
– ‘not-forgetting’. Auden added: ‘Without communion with the dead, a fully
human life is not possible’. I believe I found the quotation in Adrian Barlow's
‘World and Time: Teaching Literature in
Context’ (CUP, 2009) but – in common with far too many of my little library’s
volumes of late – it has proved impossible to lay hands on. Eng. lit.’s been
displaced by the ever-increasing number of Classical and Greek tomes.
The quotation goes the rounds, though. It was
employed by Alan Bennett in The History
Boys (the film one of the late Richard Griffiths’ finest performances) –
and I also recall the same Barlow volume for its praise of Umberto Eco’s opinion, that we should reject the idea of
an interpretative free-for-all – something I concur with. It leads to fashionable
theories.
However, ‘World & Time’ underlined Susan Sontag’s simple advice: you cannot be a writer without being a reader – a constant, insatiable and omnivorous reader, anything and, in fiction, everything: from Beowulf toVirginia Woolf to Wolf Hall.
The brain is a strange thing. Mine needs defragging. Perhaps it’s reading and / or computer-screen overload. I am increasingly living on another world ~ theories of myth, the ambiguous magic of Orpheus and the mysteries of Greek. Language is amongst the most remarkable of man’s distinguishing attributes, but its multi-faceted shifts and meanings are complex.
Is dyslexia something to do with how we deal with symbols? This is all letters and characters are. Ancient Greek has helped – as did learning to sight-read music when I was younger. It’s only western Latinate text which manifests the phenomenon – serif or sans-serif, no difference. A coloured overlay’s a partial solution – alas! not applicable to an e-reader’s stark black text on dazzling white, which is a pain. Scholarly articles in my topic field can be downloaded to Dropbox and sent to a portable reader, but ...
Brightness can be adjusted, font face enlarged, etc., – but the visually-challenging white remains.
Not all with
dyslexia experience difficulties – everyone is different, and their
difficulties are diverse, too. For me, it’s basically mismatching and lapses in short-term memory function. However, dyslexics may also own multiple strengths,
not obvious to others, which could – and should – be learned from by the non-dyslexic world.
These include intuition, visualisation, creativity, ‘seeing the whole
picture’, making links between things and grasping connections, problem-solving,
synthesising information and verbal communication. All and any of which are extremely positive and beneficial skills – definitely advantageous in some situations! i.e., don’t always view something which makes you believe you’re atypical or ‘different’ as a negative.
However, ‘World & Time’ underlined Susan Sontag’s simple advice: you cannot be a writer without being a reader – a constant, insatiable and omnivorous reader, anything and, in fiction, everything: from Beowulf toVirginia Woolf to Wolf Hall.
Caveat lector. Dyslexia’s
been truly bizarre of late – dunno why, unless it’s connected to eyes being being tired or
mind distracted, a lack of co-ordination between the two. Apart from a sentence suddenly deciding to turn itself around like a palindrome (from the Greek, ‘running backwards’), or dance about – up, down and every whichway – and transpositions worthy of the Rev. W. A. Spooner
himself, ‘H’ recently substituted itself with a Cyrillic ‘И’ (ē, transliterated as ‘i’). I'm used to Greek’s ‘H’ corrupting into a majuscule pi: this happens surprisingly often in printed texts, too, so it’s not just me. However, a Greek ‘H’ is the
majuscule of eta, ‘η’ (translit. ‘ē’).
It seems it’s ‘e’ which is problematical, for some weird reason. The most frequently-employed vowel in the
English language, an ordinary ‘e’, can even execute a party trick of flipping itself: ‘ǝ’ –
it’s prone to this at times. But I have never, ever, attempted to decode Russian, so where the ‘И’ and ‘ǝ’ stem from I cannot tell.
The brain is a strange thing. Mine needs defragging. Perhaps it’s reading and / or computer-screen overload. I am increasingly living on another world ~ theories of myth, the ambiguous magic of Orpheus and the mysteries of Greek. Language is amongst the most remarkable of man’s distinguishing attributes, but its multi-faceted shifts and meanings are complex.
Is dyslexia something to do with how we deal with symbols? This is all letters and characters are. Ancient Greek has helped – as did learning to sight-read music when I was younger. It’s only western Latinate text which manifests the phenomenon – serif or sans-serif, no difference. A coloured overlay’s a partial solution – alas! not applicable to an e-reader’s stark black text on dazzling white, which is a pain. Scholarly articles in my topic field can be downloaded to Dropbox and sent to a portable reader, but ...
Brightness can be adjusted, font face enlarged, etc., – but the visually-challenging white remains.
Not all with
dyslexia experience difficulties – everyone is different, and their
difficulties are diverse, too. For me, it’s basically mismatching and lapses in short-term memory function. However, dyslexics may also own multiple strengths,
not obvious to others, which could – and should – be learned from by the non-dyslexic world.
These include intuition, visualisation, creativity, ‘seeing the whole
picture’, making links between things and grasping connections, problem-solving,
synthesising information and verbal communication. All and any of which are extremely positive and beneficial skills – definitely advantageous in some situations! i.e., don’t always view something which makes you believe you’re atypical or ‘different’ as a negative.
Info. culled from a useful NIACE (National Institute of Adult Continuing
Education) briefing sheet, promoting adult
learning: No. 78 (Feb. 2007). Life-long learning helps!
http://www.niace.org.uk/sites/default/files/78-Dylexia-older-people.pdf
It is no wonder learning is a struggle for some, but, in addition, it’s my opinion the
UK’s current ever-changing educational curriculum, teaching-to-the-exam, is deplorable and,
basically, self-defeating.
It’s regrettable, but there are some incompetent teachers around,
especially at the primary level – where they might be thought to be most
important.
It’s regrettable, but there are some incompetent teachers around,
especially at the primary level – where they might be thought to be most
important.
Librarians and teachers reading
to kiddiwinks about brightly-coloured dinosaurs and encouraging the tots to
jump up and down and make loud dino-noises isn’t going to instil in them a love
of reading for reading’s sake. Reading is quiet, and thoughtful; its storytelling
action goes on in your head, created like a hologram in the space between you
and the author.
Homer knew that.
Homer knew that.
Picture credits: collage, JAS; Gauloises, www.cigarettespedia.com; black cat word cloud, www.tengrrl.com; Millais: Boyhood of Raleigh: listening to the Odyssey – en.wikipedia.org;





