Tag: Memory
Dimensions: 3 Memories of the Future: A Leak and the Edgy Etonian
{Memories of the Past}
a surreptitious glance in a doorway: you
had been waiting for me
but how long?
i can’t remember, i remember
seeing you at the cinema and us
exchanging glances
(those were the days, mostly, of
glances)
and us not speaking, i was too shy, you shy too
so i started walking
across the river, there: a cafe, old style; what
was i doing in there, could it be, really, that you
waited
outside while i was having coffee inside?
or did i pop in to see if i liked it, but didn’t, or whether you would follow (but why would you? it was an old style cafe; and you didn’t), so i
popped out again, straight away? that seems more likely, certainly it seems more
reasonable…*
you were in the entrance as i came out and i saw you again and you me and it was clear
you’d been waiting for me, there
in the doorway
but still we didn’t speak
how was that even possible: it was obvious
you had been waiting for me, yet
we didn’t speak, i not to you, you not to me
i was incredibly young, you a bit younger,
there by the rhine, in basel, at that time
of glances, mostly, and quietly aching
silences
you were there too maybe two, three years later
now on the southbank
in london
you looked different, a bit, though not much
you had those same eyes, longing
uncertain, a
querying glance, that
glance
that i must have had too
it was the era of glances, of not saying what any of us wanted, ever, of
uncertainty, being afraid
but of what?
of being found out
of revealing too much
too much to the wrong kind of person, of being
vulnerable
literally, viscerally, in danger of injury, death
or afraid merely of actually having, enjoying, living a moment, such one
brief encounter?
who knows
those were days of unspoken desires
at night time
near rivers
only this time i actually asked you
for a light
or you me?
i you or you me, one of us asked the other for a cigarette or a light or for both and
another glance was exchanged and a flame lit up and in that flame we did not look at each other again, we just looked at the hands touching, cupping the cigarette, and that
once again
just was that
how curious
how timid, how cautious, how wary i was
of you
always
and yet how much i wanted to be with you
still
and then there you were in st james’s park: another you, another glance
i on my way home
you on your way where? i didn’t ask and you didn’t say
it was nice
there
to finally meet you
at night, late
by the pond, not the river
to feel your hands on me, taste your lips
such a long time ago now
such a situation between two and three, thereabouts, in the morning
when that park is not closed and not open but we both were
closed and open and there: those were the days
of such stolen moments, so
rare
i miss them no more than i miss you
and i don’t miss you, i’m just maybe sorry
a bit
that it took me so long to pluck up the courage to finally meet you
albeit briefly
we wasted, it seems, a few opportunities, you and i, but
you live and you learn, and nothing
but nothing
can be rewound, reconfigured, restored, it can not even be really
relived, it can
of course be
in one way or another
remembered, redeemed?
to what end? none other than to know that there was such a thing as a path, a trajectory,
or an arc:
a semblance of something resembling a story
a sequence of inconsequential instances, now implanted, the shapes
along which the currents of time have mostly been channelled, each curve, each bend
not just leaving traces but forming them too
until
at last
there’s a torrent
and the river, the brook or the stream
floods its banks and
ignores
these patterns, these half
designs, half
instinctive behaviours half
needed half wanted half detested half worn and half
overthrown memories
only half
ever
because the half that sits underground under consciousness under skin under mind
remains there forever somehow, and
so be it
albeit not always appreciated not always valued not always wanted or loved
you are always
a part of me still, and
welcome
to stay
whatever became of you, i do wonder
and then i forget that i ever did
because life goes on and
there are many more rivers to cross and bridges to burn and transgressions that must be traversed and
comings together
to fathom, just
know that i never not wanted
to know you
Songs & Charades
I take the “fabulous” TGV to Lyon—from said Gare de Lyon, there now safely and without further trouble arrived—and change to another, ordinary train to Grenoble where I get to Anne’s at 1pm and meet “the others.”
The others are certainly Magda, my flatmate from London, whose friend Anne is, and Magda’s dancer friend Ross, who, like her, is from Glasgow, and whom I have met on one or two occasions before, fancying him ever so slightly, but getting from him principally polite indifference, which doesn’t trouble me more than to about that same level: just ever so slightly.
There may have been other ‘others,’ but I wouldn’t be certain now who, and The Tape here doesn’t elaborate, so maybe there weren’t.
What The Tape does tell me is that I now experience a “wonderful sequence of days.” I have virtually no recollection of this. But according to myself, we spend the afternoon playing charades (this sounds entirely plausible, knowing Magda), and in the evening we hook up with some friends of Anne’s.
In my still and always a tad cautious, somewhat incongruous English, I describe this as “so enjoyable, so nice,” as we go out “for a meal” and have “lots to eat, lots to drink.” Then, after dinner and drinks, we get back home to Anne’s and sing songs. We go to bed “very late, at 4 in the morning, or so.” I can imagine this, vividly enough, but not remember.
I do remember what comes next, a bit: it’s a very slow, very lazy, relaxing Saturday. (In my memory, it’s a Sunday, but that hardly matters…) The weather is “very cold,” and it’s raining, which is a good excuse to stay indoors, I record (though this bit again I no longer remember), and play more charades. What I do remember is doing (or helping with) some washing up, and looking out of the window into the cold grey weekend and feeling properly chuffed.
That glow of contentment, a little hungover, I remember it well. (Only now it occurs to me that that was another occasion entirely: that was Glasgow, where we spent Hogmanay one year, possibly the same year, with essentially the same people, Magda and Ross, and quite possibly also Anne. The blurring of the past in the mind over time…)
In the evening, more people come around, and we sing more songs, play the guitar, drink a lot; and by the time I actually record my next entry, it’s Sunday, “a couple of extremely pleasant days” having passed.
Sunday I also have an actual recollection of. The weather had turned fine again, and we took guitars (I imagine there were at least two) out to a little pond, where we all of us sat on the jetty and sang songs in the sun. This, really, is the second enduring memory I have of the whole trip, after the friendly Parisian coming to my rescue: it’s a hazy memory, and in my mind it looks exactly like the kind of 1970s or 80s film where, to tell the audience that something is being remembered, the picture goes all diffuse and vastly overexposed: it’s a warm, light, comfortable glow, just not very clear, not at all distinct. Then again, it doesn’t have to be.
I’ve just told The Tape that Magda and Ross are going to continue their journey tonight (where to I don’t say and don’t remember), whereas I will stay on for another day and then continue my trip to Italy.
Magda walks in on me—possibly having heard me talk ‘to myself,’ which in an age before mobiles is not the usual thing for someone to do—and, with that mix of curiosity and concern in her voice that makes it go a little high pitched, asks me what I’m doing. I explain to her that I’m recording an audio diary, and that I’ll be able to play it to her at some point, though I don’t think I ever did play it to her. I don’t think I ever played it to anyone, and now that I’m listening to it, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I keep getting that sense of near sacred wonder. Songs and charades. Songs and charades…
It was a blissful time. I know it was because although I have hardly any recollection of it, I have a recording of me talking about it. I’m not effusive in my joy, but I know I’m living through another best time of my life.
The first one, surely, was at the Gymnasium Münchenstein, where I spent one and a half years in near comprehensive, intensive, fully lived happiness. Because of the people I was at school with, because of the projects we were doing (we performed my first play and took it on a mini tour to Zürich and a place called Liestal, and it was a tremendous success with the audiences wherever we went), because of the discoveries, the newness of it all. Pain too, yes, now and then, but not much and not lasting and not beyond what you’d expect in your final years of growing up.
The classic freedom of not having any responsibilities yet at all, but being able to follow your inclinations. To travel, to drive (on a whim to Munich and back in a couple of days, with a girl friend who was then almost my girlfriend), to experiment, to be cool. To make a statement and feel good about it. I’m certain we knew then that we were happy and privileged and hopeful and young; and we still knew it, almost as much, in Grenoble, that weekend in August of 1988. The notion I keep coming back to: unencumbered. At ease, with ourselves, with it all.
I’m glad now I have this Tape. I shall keep it, of course, and—if I’m around and still have a machine to play it then—listen to it again in another twenty-five years or so. I have a feeling it will sound no different. It’s endearing, to me at least, to hear me like this, but it is so remote. So unrecognisable: I’m listening to the stories of a young man I barely know at all. How strange. How fascinating too, but how odd. To not, more deeply, feel connected. As someone who thinks connection is everything, and that everything is in fact connected…
Read The Tape in Paperback or as eBook
3 Memories of the Future: A Leak and the Edgy Etonian
In the great scheme of things—and I like the expression ‘great scheme of things’: it suggests both that there is a scheme to begin with, and that it is great—my disorientation of this Tuesday morning is not grave. It is still Tuesday, I assume, though I haven’t checked, but there is no reason to believe that it isn’t, except perhaps for the time-space discontinuation that my being here at the Limonlu Bahçe now implies, if in fact Tuesday it still is.
I boarded a train at Clapham Junction 08:26 and it is now roughly half past eleven. The burger, as expected, was delicious. I don’t suffer from amnesia, at least not as far as I can remember. Ker-ching.
Italicising.
One word paragraphs. Short sentences, more so still long.
What confounds me is a memory of the future; I’m aware it’s a memory because that’s what it feels like and it’s how it constructs itself, in layers, like a relief or part of a sculpture that has age-old dust cautiously blown or brushed off it, and I’m certain it’s of the future because I have no recollection of it in the past, and since I’m not suffering from amnesia I would know if I had.
There’s a leak making itself known in my neighbour’s ceiling which has not been explained. It’s been there for a week now and it first showed itself last Sunday when I wasn’t even at home, I was in Cornwall. I received a message from my neighbour who lives in the flat below me, saying there is a leak, could I check; I texted back, saying I’m on the road right now but if it’s urgent, he should let himself in (providence: I’d pressed a set of keys to my flat into his hand the first time I met him, in case of emergency). He texted me back once again, saying that this was not an emergency and it could wait until I got back, since the stain on his ceiling was quite small and not growing bigger.
Three days later, on Wednesday, Peppe the builder who’s from near Pompeii (where, he tells me, the Mafia is) comes in and has a look around and is hardly perturbed. It’s not, he assures me, coming from my shower, and not from my sink. It might be coming from some old pipe between my floor and my neighbour’s ceiling, but it could also be from an unproof spot in the wall, possibly where there’s a ledge. The building is a hundred years old, after all: we should wait and see. Another three days pass (plus the Wednesday, makes seven in total so far), and again on a Sunday, my neighbour phones me up to tell me the stain has now grown, quite a bit. There has been no rain. I have not been doing anything untoward or unusual since last night, at least not that I can recall, and my recall of events, as has been established, remains intact.
I say intact. I have a terrible memory, if truth be told, and truth be told. What’s the point of telling anything, if it isn’t, essentially, true. Both the leak and the young man who’s been to Eton have not yet occurred, at least not to me, but I remember them clearly, I remember the leak more clearly than I remember the young man, because he appeared after several drinks at a bar and he sounded unfeasibly posh. He said so himself: “I just sound unfeasibly posh,” is what he said. And he did sound unfeasibly posh, it was most incongruous. He was wearing a hoodie-kind top, though it may or may not have actually had a hood, and he was worried about losing his hair. His hair looked fine to me, but then I lost mine at his age, so perhaps I’m just used to the concept of early onset alopecia; apparently it’s genetic.
He fretted about sounding too posh to get girls and professed that he much preferred the company of gay men because they were funnier, he thought, than straight people in general, and he was losing hair over losing his hair—which to me seemed unfortunate as well as unnecessary—and he was dressing down so as to mask the unfeasible poshness of his voice. I liked him immediately, but he got into an argument with my friend whom I was out with that night, even though I told them both to be nice to each other, and later on they did the same thing again. That was a curious evening. I’d already been chatted up thrice by three women, four times if you count the one who came up to me twice. That doesn’t usually happen: I must have signalled approachability.
The young man who’d been to Eton had a gay dad and a gay godfather. And he was rather too fond, I got the impression, of coke. He offered me a tiny bit from a practically empty sachet that he took from his wallet, scooped up onto the rounded corner of his payment card, which means I must have read his name, but that didn’t register. The instant dislike that my friend had taken to him was now getting stronger.
The young Etonian whose name I may have read but which did not lodge itself in my mind, at least not consciously, asked if I wanted to get some more and I said I wouldn’t know where or how but in essence why not (I’d had rather more than one or two drinks…) and he said he could get some straight away, but we couldn’t, for reasons I didn’t quite understand, go to his place for this, even though it was just round the corner. I didn’t think it wise or even just comfortable to stay where we were and do Class A drugs right under the noses of the bouncers, literally on the pavement, and also I didn’t have, nor did I want to spend, any money.
We left it at that and at one point the bouncers ushered us inside (it was coming up three in the morning) and the young man came back and asked us for a pound to get home but I genuinely didn’t have a pound on me, I had been paying by card all night long, and my friend didn’t like him, so he didn’t give him a pound, and then the young man showed his edge a bit and started abusing my friend, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because the music in there was too loud, and my friend looked perturbed but took it all in calm resignation, as if that were just the kind of thing that normally happens at the end of an evening, unpleasant though it may be; and that, I thought, was that.
Except once we were outside, the Edgy Etonian suddenly materialised again and I asked him what he’d said to my friend and he apologised, saying he’d got carried away a bit, or words to that effect, and my friend left and I said goodbye to the stranger who had nearly been pleasant enough a random encounter to become a friend too, but had now rather spoilt it, and I worried about my friend because he’d looked so dejected and also he had to get back to Earlsfield, which is right in the middle of technically nowhere, especially if you’re travelling after three in the morning.
None of this particularly fits anywhere, I realise, but I remember it as I sit here in this garden of civilised repose, in one of the trendier portions of Istanbul. Except none of it has yet occurred, it was all yet to come.
I check my phone. No, it is still Tuesday, coming up noon. High time, I sense, although with a crushing vagueness as to what this might mean, to ‘get going’. I order a Bloody Mary.
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{Memories of the Past}
This post has moved. You can now find it here.
EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
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Songs & Charades
This post has moved. You can now find it here.
EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
If you are the owner of the link that brought you here, please update it; or if you know them, then please do let them know.
Thanks & enjoy.
EDEN by FREI 