Friday, November 22, 2013
Autobiography
2: Earth, Air, Water and Blood
So my earliest memory was fire. Casting my
mind back I have a sort of metaphorical sense of what memory is. It's a
concertina which, when pulled out reveals all that extra capacity that
cannot be seen at the outset. Or like a set of books whose spines are all that
is visible on the shelf, with vague titles which must be lifted out, one by one to reveal their mysterious substance. Memory is two dimensional for the purpose of
retrieval and multi-dimensional once you get hold of it. Nothing is actually
forgotten but it can take unusual circumstances and lateral purchase sometimes, to draw people, events and perceptions back into consciousness.
Since an autobiography, to be true and
accurate in all respects, would be vast and never-ending, to embrace the span
of a life, it behoves the writer to provide vignettes, fragments that suggest
the whole like shards of a hologram, isomorphic representations.
After Leeds we moved to Shadforth County
Durham. We lived for a few months across the village green, opposite the
school. Here are a few flashes from that time. Becoming lost and eventually
found in the neighbour’s dog’s kennel with my arms around a dog notoriously big
and feared by the postmen. Going to the toilet just before playtime (not yet
five) and using one of the girls’ outside toilets. Just as I flushed it the bell went and I had
to barricade myself in by jamming the door closed with straight legs, as I sat
on the seat, trouserless. I was petrified with anguish and embarrassment as
girls hammered on the door keening that they knew a boy was in there.
Yet, not
far away across the concrete yard was a lilac tree. It was here that my
immersion in Zen began. I recall climbing it and reclining in its branches,
curtained about by pale purple panicles, shutting my eyes and swooning in the
heavy scent, my ears drowning in the deep buzzing of bees and higher pitched
drones of other insects.
In that Elysium of nature, a stream ran
close to the bottom of our garden. Above it swept down a hill of corn, hosting
the electric blue of cornflowers, the golden fat yellow of buttercups and the
powdery white branches of old man’s baccy. Has my sight faded? This memory of
colour is almost-trip-like in comparison to today’s perceptions. Perhaps my
present eyes do not deceive but in that natural wild-foraging state of early
childhood I saw the very essence of colour, its very spirit as one finds in
Shintoism. All since has been facsimile, perfectly serviceable but without the
power to truly burn the retina.
I dug deep holes on the little path that
ran around the field and covered them in thin sticks and grass and leaves to
trap the farmer. A gang of us trekked to a nearby quarry and stole a length of
rope which we tied high above the stream so that we could swing down from the high
bank on one side of it, screaming like our muscular hero in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan
And The City of Gold. We made dams. We tightrope walked the narrow concrete
divides between the effluence tanks of the sewage farm.
The last snippet, cut from the cloth of
that time, is of a birthday party. I must have been five, I suppose. Perhaps
four or so boys had been invited. They brought presents. The only one I can
remember was from a boy whose parents had no money, or so my mother informed
me. He gave me a tin cow, a Guernsey I can now affirm. One leg had been broken
off. I took the treasure and placed it on my shelf in the sideboard cupboard. I
can see it now, just managing to stay upright, all on its own, lit by the
searchlight of inexplicable pleasure.
It was when I learned that it is the thought that counts.
Labels: Autobiography. Memory.
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