Memory, and how it got that way

 

Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs.

                                                                —George Orwell, Animal Farm 

Forget remembering the old days, most people`s memories don't go back much before nine days ago. In fact, a neighbour tells me that her mother's advice is that if you do something embarrassing, not to worry; after about nine days people will have forgotten what you did. And our collective amnesia and revision of the past is what Justin Trudeau has relied on. Have a former Nazi celebrated in parliament, go on a vacation to Tofino on National Reconciliation Day, get caught wearing black face? Quick! You're an actor specializing in sincerity and people are suckers for apologies, the more sincere the better. Apologize or not, in a few days it will be as though you never did anything embarrassing. 

    The old days of free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious expression, and freedom to own property, the public will get used to these being cancelled, they will even thank Justin for deleting them. Forget how things used to be, those old freedoms were dangerous to the collective, they made some people feel unsafe, and they were necessarily cancelled. We never want free speech again because it hurts people's feelings, people who say what they think or they believe in something we don't believe in are often deniers of alleged scientific fact or of the latest compulsory belief.

    Remember when we used to own property? When we wrote letters instead of emails? When we read newspapers printed on paper, it was a record of what had happened, not something digital and therefore deletable, revisable, or denilable. Remember? Remember? Remember? Remember? Is it a false memory? Are you confused? Think back to the way things used to be and what we lost and what we still remember. Remember when we had only two sexes, men and women, that’s gone. Remember values and morality? Sorry I mentioned it. Remember seeing someone walking down the street reading a book, absorbed in reading a book? How many people do you see reading a book anymore? But you will see many people walking down the street looking at their IPhones. "Remember to remember" said Henry Miller. 

    Justin Trudeau relies on people having short memories; remember the way it used to be before 2015 and we had our own thoughts, it wasn't Justin's agenda imposed on the country. Remember 2015, there was Justin walking to Rideau Hall with his cabinet behind him, his wife beside him, they were all smiling and laughing and optimistic and glorying in their good luck, their new power and authority; my God, the hubris was palpable! They were going to change the world, instead they destroyed a country. It wasn't a new beginning, it was the end of what we loved. There was Justin and his wife who was wearing a white coat and directly behind her there was Melanie Joly wearing the same white coat and both women were laughing, what was that all about? And there were others there, men and women, some have since felt the Wrath of Justin and been dumped from cabinet, others have hung in there, and all know the true measure of Justin Trudeau. We, too, know the true measure of the worst prime minister in Canadian history. Now we laugh when we see him, now we don't believe anything he says, now we know he was never anything but a high school drama teacher, no great intelligence or profundity there, just ruthlessness and cunning. All the good people, all the intelligent people, have been deleted or jumped ship from his cabinet to escape the shipwreck Justin would make of the country; and the ones who remain? They are the deluded, the hopeful, and the relentlessly ambitious. 

We don't yet live in Animal Farm but we are headed there, and if we end up at Animal Farm our collective amnesia will make us wonder what the past was really like or if it ever existed, all it takes is nine days and the past is forgotten, deleted from memory. As George Orwell wrote,

As for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. . . Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives; they had nothing to go on except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse -- hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

Thinking of Keitha K. MacIntosh

Eleven years ago I heard of the passing of Keitha K. MacIntosh; she was a poet, author of short stories, a publisher, a professor of English at Vanier College, and someone who encouraged Montreal writers, including myself. She was also a good friend; we first met at Sir George Williams University around 1972 when we were enrolled in Richard Sommer's creative writing class; later, I did poetry readings for her class at Vanier College and visited her when she lived in a trailer adjacent to her future home in a 200 year old log cabin. We corresponded for years, and in 1979 I bought property near Trout River not far from Keitha's home in Dewettville. Here (below) is a photograph of her headstone in the Ormstown cemetery, courtesy of the "find a grave" website. 

Last night, watching the Antique Roadshow on PBS, I was reminded of Keitha who was an avid collector of antiques, mainly antique bottles. She told me that she used to find these bottles in the ruins of houses and other buildings that had been abandoned. She and her family and friends explored many of these homesteads in South Western Quebec until the supply of bottles ran out. This reminds me that Artie Gold also collected antique bottles, some of which I inherited after Artie died in 2007; Keitha also published, in her poetry magazine Montreal Poems, some of Artie's early poems. And then I thought of the weeks preceding hearing the news of Keitha's death; I hadn't thought of Keitha for years but I had a curious experience, just before I heard of her death I was filled with memories of Keitha, not just one or two memories but a flood of memories, mostly of things she said about her mother and father, and her husband Archie. Even I was surprised by how much I remembered!

It was at this time, in 2012,  when I was "rampant with memory" about Keitha, a phrase Margaret Laurence uses in one of her books, that I received news of her passing. I have always remembered the past, perhaps more than most people, and, of course, I have written about it, the early death of a parent does that to a person, grief does that, every memory is precious because it is all that we have left of the person, so close to us, that died. Memory is a part of our DNA, years ago I read Henry Miller's Remember to Remember, C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and Jack Kerouac's novels and poetry, "Memory Babe" said Jack Kerouac. 

Before hearing of Keitha's passing, I must have spent ten years trying to write "A Poet's Journey", an essay based on remembering the past and on becoming a poet; and it was Keitha who I was thinking of when I began that essay but it developed into a life of its own and became a personal memoir; writing, editing, remembering, and then it's ten years later but the essay has found its own voice and content. 

Keitha had a Celtic background as I do, and for the Celts memory, the ancestors, family history, and spirit are all important. You might not set out to record the lives of your ancestors, you just do it, as you breathe or have lunch or sleep. It's what we do, it's a natural thing to do, one foot is always in the past and the ancestors are never far from thought. It was a natural event to remember Keitha in the time preceding her death; it was as though she was paying me a last visit before moving to the great unknown.   

Memory is like a dream or a poem, what you remember is subjective and may say more about you than you realize. Two people have the same experience and remember it in different ways, one positive, one negative. Sometimes the memories of siblings conflict, and at those times siblings seem to come from different families. And then, after remembering Keitha in 2012, I thought of Louis Dudek and, again, long forgotten memories returned to me, riding a city bus with him, sitting with him in his office, that particular memory changed my life and I have written about it elsewhere; and I thought of another old friend, George Johnston, what a kind and generous person he was.  

But how much can memory be trusted? I stand behind the veracity of all of my memories but when other people who shared experiences with me give their version of certain events, sometimes they contradict what I remember, sometimes I don't recognize anything they remember, sometimes they add to and enlarge my memories, sometimes we have false memories. But even a false memory has some truth about it, just don't base your life on a false memory; sometimes memories are like poems or dreams. Without memory everyone would be immediately forgotten after they die, as though they never existed, this is something all poets know and our books and poems are a pause in the inevitable act of forgetting.