My question is: how accurate are our memories? How many of them are fabrications fashioned from a vague picture of the past and coming alive in the present? In other words, how reliable are these recollections and what exactly is the association between memory and current identity? In literature, for instance, understanding a character can often depend on that particular person's way of remembering and interpreting his or her own past. For example, the protagonists in Katzuo Ishiguro's novels "When We Were Orphans" and "Never Let Me Go" create their identities from interpretation of their childhood memories.
And what of collective memory? For example, where I live in Germany there are many Vertriebeneverein or "refugee associations" set up by, for example, the Sudetenland Germans who were thrown out of their homeland in 1945/46 and obliged to make new homes for themselves in post WW2 Germany. Although the number of members of these clubs is gradually dwindling, I recognise the accent when I hear these displaced people speaking to one another in bars, in the changing-room of the gym and in the sauna. It is clear to me that they still see themselves as different and have kept their culture and traditions alive through music, stories and a collective experiences of being unwanted refugees in Germany in 1946. At that time, there were around 12,000,000 of these people. They came, not only from the Sudetenland, but also from Hungary, The Baltic states, Poland and parts of the ex-Soviet Union. Their collective memories form a vital part of their identities and that continues to this day. I have written about them in my novel "Lost Property" - now available on all Amazon stores.
In connection with this theme, I recently read a most fascinating article in the "New Yorker" (October 2018) in which writer and journalist, Janet Malcolm, reflects on those objects and skeletons in her cupboard that offer her glimpses of her own past. These objects are her photos. One such photo is a black-and-white snapshot of a "two- or three-year-old girl taken by an anonymous photographer sometime in the nineteen-thirties. She’s sitting on a stone step, dressed in a polka-dotted sunsuit and matching sun hat—her eyes squinting against the sun, her mouth set in a near-smile." Malcolm might have been tempted to develop a time and place, a memorial to this girl, what she was thinking and what she had seen. Instead, she admits that, "The child in the snapshot is me. I know nothing about where or when the picture was taken. The sunsuit speaks of summer vacation, and I am guessing at my age. I say “my” age, but I don’t think of the child as me. No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and her thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose."
Malcolm goes on to say that "If I were writing an autobiography, it would have to begin after the time of that photograph. My first memory dates from a few years later. I am in the country on a fine day in early summer and there is a village festival. Little girls in white dresses are walking in a procession, strewing white rose petals from small baskets. I want to join the procession but have no basket of petals. A kind aunt comes to my aid. She hastily plucks white petals from a bush in her garden and hands me a basket filled with them. I immediately see that the petals are not rose petals but peony petals. I am unhappy. I feel cheated. I feel that I have been given not the real thing but something counterfeit...I have carried this memory around with me all my life, but never looked at it very hard. What gave this disappointment its status over other childhood sorrows? Why did they fade to nothing, while this one became a vivid memory?
Most early memories are probably like this, and Malcolm's question is an important one. Most of our experiences simply disappear into a vast and black hole of lost time but some shine brightly and make us wonder why.
So - what about the photo shown here - two boys lightly spattered in snow. One of them is wearing what looks like a school cap and both have their eyes turned away from the camera as if they have been distracted at the moment of the camera's click. All pictures of happy friends tend to look alike - even today. Not many of us post pics on Facebook that don't give the impression that our lives are happy and full of friends and wonderful times. All "happy" pictures are alike in that we look back on them in later years and we believe that our lives were better, sunnier and happier than they really were and certainly better than the current state of affairs. How can our current lives possibly match up? Fortunately, I am now able to grasp the inherent lies and dangers that lurk in photos such as these.
I now know that the boy on the left was riddled with self doubts and contradictions that eventually led to alcoholism, wasted potential and an early death. And the boy had enormous potential! He was also my first "best friend" and I have my arm around his shoulder. The pic was taken in 1963 and we are in the playground of Thames Ditton junior school during the long and hard winter of that year. Memory tells me we had been sliding on icy patches in the playground and showing off to the girls around us - like Judith, who somehow managed to get behind us.
So - why is this photo important? Why do I still have it and what does that tell me? Well, Janet Malcolm expresses the answer perfectly. At the end of her article, she writes: "We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again."
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