Mnemosyne à la recherché du temps perdu, ou le temps retrouvé

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.

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. 

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.

 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.

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;

LESS IS MORE ... more or less.

SPRING HAS ARRIVED – allegedly. But the clouds of blackthorn flowers in the hedgerows are barely showing white. (The hard sour little blue-black fruits are what we make sloe gin from.) This is climate change with a vengeance. I recall the April my late mother died: the swallows were back here in March, hedges and banks were already showing a riot of early-budding wild roses, the primroses were long over, and the black, white and hawthorns were already in leaf.

  I did not see a single swallow before the 19 April this year, and so far they’re few and far between, even over the farms.

I’m persisting with the attempt to reduce non-necessities in life. Under this heading comes much that many might consider vital. I am beginning to see why religious withdraw from the world in order to contemplate without interruptions!
 Blogging has been rationalised; compose ahead and schedule. Do this for two posts in May and hey, presto! Je peux partir ailleurs, et sans l'ordinateur!

 But ordinary day-to-day living cannot be considered an ‘interruption’. It’s necessary to eat, and to eat one must either raise it, grow it or go shopping, and to go shopping one has to have an income, etc.

  Everything is co-dependent on something else.

 Even, I guess, this random, sporadic process of research and writing – and thinking. It’s the thinking bit which is proving so hard to find space for.
  Friedrich von Schelling said 'All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only to create' (On University Studies, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966, trans. E.S. Morgan, edited with an introduction by N. Guterman, p.34).
  H'm.
  I am reliably informed by one of the 'How to ... ' volumes on my bookshelves that up to 50% of PhD success - being granted the coveted doctorate and not merely an MPhil - depends on how well one does the authorial component: quality of thinking and writing often go hand-in-hand. As far as the thesis-creating lark is concerned, perhaps Chesterton is more apposite: 'If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly'.  On the other hand, what's particularly telling about GKC's pithy judgement as repro'd in my Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (OUP, 1981) its original source is actually one of his essays - Folly and Female Education.
  H'm again. 

April came – and went. 

  We were shocked and deeply saddened to hear local author, Iain Banks, announce he has terminal cancer; The Quarry will be his final book. (His Sf is published under the alternative name, Iain M. Banks.)

  On 5 April another writer put up a post on his own blog which says it all, and far better than any of the pre~ obituaries I’ve come across so far: http://www.richardkmorgan.com/ ~ RKM's blogpost, ‘Raise a glass’ dated April 5, 2013. 

  Banks is a very rare type of human being and a writer of brilliant depth, invention and humour. He will be missed, and the world will be a lesser place without him.

 Contrast this, then, with the three-ring circus that surrounded the demise of an ex~ PM. It was worse than an overblown Roman triumph. The media went overboard. The eulogising was sycophantic to the point of beatification – wall-to-wall for the better part of a week, and as for the pomp of a state funeral (in all but name) which cost a princely sum of millions, words fail.  

  This was the woman who, on getting her foot in the door of No. 10, piously quoted the prayer of St Francis, and then celebrated the sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of 368 lives. Before it was withdrawn I saw Kelvin MacKenzie’s first headline, the redtop’s ugly black six inch caps: Gotcha!  

  I will never be convinced the sinking was legal.

  Thatcher was not a patriot (one who loves his or her country). She was a nationalist and a xenophobe.

‘They’ – that grey amorphous anonymous ‘they’ – say we learn from our mistakes.

  Not that the sudden demise of a USB stick was my error ...

  It just died. Full stop.

  Well, come to think of it, it DID ask me if I wanted it to format itself, which it had no business doing.

  There was some warning - the little light at its nether end was flickering madly on the Saturday night, and I deemed this akin to life support fading, so I backed up a few absolutely vital pieces of work just before midnight tipped over into Sunday morning.

  Thank heaven I did. I’d be suicidal if I’d lost those two or 3 items!

  The very thought of losing close on half a million words (one completed project plus two half-completed ones) gives me palpitations and makes me feel quite faint and pale at the gills.

  Data retrieval’s possible ~ it just costs.

Sunday morning, out came a pile of unused CD-RWs and ROMs ~ back up, back up, back up ...

  Until a new 4GB USB memory stick could arrive from Messrs Amazon, and an unused one, a present from The Economist, was found lurking in a study drawer, I emailed myself with all material as attachments: fail-safe, belt and braces storage in the ‘cloud’ of unknowing up above in the aether.

 

It takes forever, backing-up – much longer than writing or whatever in the first place. And I get in a terrible muddle as to which is the latest version of anything. It is a headache keeping the material in sync, maintaining a modicum of control over writing or remodelling, and rewriting is a major pain. 

  Does make you wonder, tho’ ~ are we not too over-dependent on these machines? Not sure I’d like to be hooked up to life support in A&E when a computer decides to fade, or reformat itself.

  The PowerPoint presentation’s no great loss; it was a novice’s first attempt at best, and I’ve decided my (likely minuscule) audience can have handouts if they so desire. It was mostly pretty C19th pictures of Orpheus, with or without Eurydike, and a Venn diagram and a few bits of Greek sources writ large. 
  I am slightly happier with the construction of the thesis. Ten to ten and a half thousand words per chapter, - seven chapters, max. 73,500 words. That total will bring me in under the prescribed wordcount (eighty to 100,000 words) but allows plenty of leeway for not only footnotes or Harvard inline references but also any addenda to be attached. I am not certain whether current university subcribes to modern technology or insists on a paper-only thesis. The only real way to fit in any extra material is to save it all onto a CD-RW, tucked into back cover of thesis. I know some American universities allow this - but am not sure of UK ones.
  However, such is a long way hence.  

I’ve taken three Sf-stroke-fantasy narratives as latter-day comparison material, including The Song of Orpheus from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (also known as Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, usually referred to as simply ‘Dream’, and sometimes Oneiros, personification of dream, singular – pl., Homer’s Oneiroi) which is closer to its original material than you may think. Like Greek myth itself, Gaiman’s creations are fluid; they metamorphose, shift shape and flow within their own world. As with the internal significances of dreams, linear logic and coherence are not obviously to the fore. The language employed is Anglo-American modern and, after the detailed illustrations of Orpheus being torn to pieces by Thracian maenads, its Epilogue, on the Lesbos beach where his disembodied head washes up, is a dark vision of an utterly dysfunctional father-son relationship.

 

Even though, in this curious mirror-circling universe Dream-Morpheus himself is one of The Endless or eternal ones, at the end of Brief Lives, a follow-on volume, he finally accedes to his son’s wish and consents to slay him – knowing as he does so that spilling family blood must seal his own fate by bringing the Furies (Greek Erinyes: ‘the name that may not be spoken’) down on him – a.k.a. the Eumenides, The Kindly Ones: Gaiman is not short on Greek mythology. And the cover art of the graphic novel has a superimposition of Dream’s face, outlined in white luminous ink, which once glowed in the dark but has now faded.

Oddly, Dream bears a more than passing resemblance to Gaiman himself – (‘I will show you terror in a handful of dust’ – an amended quote from T.S. Eliot, p.49). This Orpheus owes more to a contemporary angst than, say, to Joseph Campbell or Walter Burkert – but the latter’s impact seems truer to the form of Gaiman’s re-telling. In all the three modern literary interpretations I have employed there is a traceable thread of liberation from guilt and hopes for a better world – in that aspect of ‘prophecy’ or foretelling they go right back to Orpheus.

 However, in this world, as it is today, I wouldn’t count on it. The ‘better’ bit, I mean.

Picture credits: blackthorn, © Google images / Wiki commons; Iain M. Banks, photo Iain M. Banks | © An Sionnach Fionn ansionnachfionn.com ; USB flash drive © http://www.amazon.co.uk ; Sandman cover art, JAS’ scan: DC Comics, Inc. 1991