style="text-align: center;">
There’s this memory I have where we’re driving down this long straight road. The windscreen wipers are going at continuous, vision is dull, landscape flat, monotonous and mostly grey. My mother is seated front left, in the passenger side, and my father is driving, wearing a navy merino jumper with interconnecting diamond pattern; a pair of creased trousers; and some black, slip-on leather shoes. I recall leaning forward and asking a question—the kind of existential impuse that children of a certain age develop—I am curious which of my parents will die first, and I go about asking them their ages. My father, at the wheel, turns his head toward me, and tells me that he’s eighteenyears older than my mother. I hestitate, before suggesting that my father will die first, followed by my mother, who will die many years later. I have forgotten what my mother was wearing.
Some months later my mother would walk into the North Sea, her final act in a series of interconnecting events that came to sum up her final few months of life. Somehow torn between her native Germany and Wales, where I grew up, her apparent suicide was located in equidistance from both these places—the symbolic nature of which is not lost on the poetic of heart. The memories of this time, and what is built around it, createa foundational narrative of sorts that I can accept to some degree as authentic—I was, after all, there; that was me seated in the car, and later me standing next to my brother dressed in brand new matching blazer suits, having our photograph taken where my mother had just been buried; newly dug soil at our feet.
These memories are coloured by such recollections, by the inadequacy of language, and, through language, they bare all the rhythm and structure of narrative fiction—my recollections are transfigured by this narrative, but also brought to life by them, and somewhere in the conscious act of retelling, a certain degree of dilution seems to occur. The purity of memory is transformed in this exchange, and the seemingly authentic becomes nothing more than an insufficient narrative, an incomplete patchwork of facts, assumptions, and storytelling. This is a story, therefore, that can’t be told with any real degree of objectivity, but it is told nevertheless.
--
Coloured by Recollection
This childhood memory of a long car journey through Wales has stayed with me. It has no beginning and no end, and in memory, is located in the same nondescript stretch of road travelled countless times. It returns to me as images and sensations from another time, as if I myself were wholly other. The memory of the car journey gains its acquiescence through a web of other, seemingly significant memories that have become interwoven in my mind, like a novel of the self, creating a foundational narrative that I can accept to some degree as authentic—I was there, after all. Yet this memory is coloured by recollection, by the inadequacy of language, and, through language, bares all the rhythm and structure of narrative fiction—my recollections are transfigured by narrative, brought to life by them, but does the mere act of recounting and retelling dilute any shred of authenticity this memory lays claims to? What if memory itself is nothing more than an insufficient narrative?
This is a journey that begins with a memory of a car journey and ends, as so many journeys do, at a precipice—the edge of the world, the ocean. I attempt here to make little steps toward a better understanding of my own being-in-the-world, of a better understanding towards the spiraling melancholy and feeling of loss carried along the road of life, and of unearthing those ruptures that have become buried through the passage of time. As John Banville wrote in his Beckettian novel The Sea: “We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” As Proust and Beckett and James and Barthes before him, Banville is grasping at that somewhat intangible thread of memory, suspending our experiences with meaning before they are broken off, and released into the void of all forgetting. Banville seems to be saying in his novel that life is perhaps nothing more than an elaborate preparation for leaving it.
