TORN APART
Memories dissected
When my two children were young, they had a doll for Christmas, one that had a thread spring-loaded into its spine which, when you tugged it out by its tag and then released it back, gave the illusion of the doll saying: “I’m torn apart, uh huh!” A squeaky friction of a voice, but made real because children’s imaginations in those days actually worked properly. They only needed the simplest prop for imagination to flourish. Not like children today…
Now that you’re old, the trick is to imagine each memory as real as it was when you first remembered it a few seconds after each instance it occurred. Imagination of a remembered imagination, strengthened by this doubling-up over time. It’s always best to think through old memories as they were, not as they are now … so as to sort truth from fiction.
You think so?
What else do you remember of your children’s childhood? There’s something I’m sure you need to remember.
This process is a bit late in the day, isn’t it? I am very old and here you are trying to get me to change the past…
Not change the past but rethink the past so that it is nothing but the past and not a glorified image of what you want the past to be. Take your children’s doll, as an example. Did you remember the words it spoke correctly? You shake your head.
Maybe it said: “I’m falling apart, uh huh!” Hmmm, that was it. I’m pretty sure.
Not ‘torn apart’? I suspected that you hadn’t got it quite right. I saw it in your eyes. You called it a ‘squeaky friction of a voice’ – you were always clever with words, I remember. Old age hasn’t changed that, I’m pleased to see. But why would a doll say either of those options of being fallen or torn … apart? Doesn’t make much sense … except, I suggest, to someone in the past listening to it within the context of life as it was lived then. I suspect your children didn’t even question the ability of the doll to speak at all let alone question its ability to speak words that made sense by making no sense even to children like them.
Thanks for your comments about my way with words. I may be near death but nearing death is just the time when you need as many words as you can muster but the tragedy is that lots of people lose their words at a time when they need words the most. Logical that the older you are the more words you would likely to have at your disposal. But death is never logical, I suppose. And the nearer you are to death the more danger there is of words slipping away to allow the nothingness of death eventually to slip in more easily - and fill the space the departed words have left.
Will you remember this conversation?
I hope so … for however long it takes to remember it properly.
Will you remember who spoke which words?
Did I just say that or was that you?
It was me.
It’s a thread through confusion, then, an audit trail from the past to the future.
Nothing is quite what it seems. A squeaky friction of a voice. A mispronounciation for fiction? Or a set of words as a simple prop for remembering the imagination that could only live in its own time, its own past.
I imagine a real memory: their faces that Christmas when we gave them the doll. They lit up with a joy. But we should have bought two dolls, one for each of them, as it turned out.
