Life is like a jailer. As it wanders down the block, large ring of keys jangling on its hip, you never entirely know which cell it is going to unlock, and which memory will emerge, blinking, into the light.
Just writing down three numbers the other day instantly shaved decades off my age.
For the nightclub owners had, in a fit of startling originality, decided to name their premises after its street address and it was an address that people of a certain background, living in a certain area and doing certain jobs found strangely easy to go to. Unlike Rome, not all roads led there, and unlike death and taxes, going there was not inevitable, but in that time and place it seemed like the next best thing.
Few weeks passed without a visit. Sometimes even on a school night. One of the parties for my engagement ended up there. My stag-do ended up there. It was woven into the fabric of my life.
No longer, of course. I have moved away. I have reached the age where bouncers would prefer you to take your custom elsewhere. No longer the image they would wish to present to the young and the beautiful. Fools!
Regrets? No, actually. For, by any reasonable standard, the place was an utter dump. In a basement, the air circulated at the pace of an asthmatic snail. Years of spilled drinks and dropped cigarettes gave the atmosphere a unique, let’s go with aroma, and the carpet a certain tackiness. Having to go during the day to retrieve something which had been forgotten was an eye and nostril-opening experience. The loos worked sometimes. At others, it became a nightclub with a paddling pool.
Even so, at a certain time and under certain conditions, it was irresistible. The flame to which the young moths of that quarter were inevitably drawn. We were young, we were free. We had low standards and we had probably drunk too much.
Despite the latter, writing down the numbers was enough to release the place from the prison of my memory. And it organised a jail-break. There was that time when…I still can’t believe he did that…That was a great night. There we shall leave it. If you want to hear a confession, train for the priesthood.
Memories. Making them is something we are all supposed to do, life like a scrapbook whose pages we are supposed to fill. But whose memories are they? For the me who writes these words is not the me who queued for a night of dingy partying. He looks different. He has done different things. He likes different things. The attractions of a sweaty, smelly basement are slightly beyond him. The memories are of the life of another person. Someone whose inner life he has some mysterious access to.
It could hardly be otherwise. Life is a wave of becoming that subsumes instants of being. And as one becomes, one changes, turns into a different thing. We both are what we once were and not what we once were, our memories the roots which anchor us to our pasts, to earlier versions of ourselves.
But our histories do not bleed into our presents in a uniform way. Those who stay in one place and see the same people can easily perceive a continuity. The people in their lives yesterday are still there today and will be there tomorrow. Move around, change careers, however, and life can become a series of chapters. The past is interesting, perhaps, for the development of the story, but with no particular relevance to the action on the current page. Explaining how we got there, but not what is going on. Memories in that case are less a tool for maintaining identity than an entertainment, a source of stories ready to be recounted. What your friend got up to in that particular club on that particular night is of rather less importance if he lives on another continent than if you see him every day.
Memory is a snapshot. It preserves a moment. You as you were at the time. The other characters as they were at the time. If you change, and you have, so have they. Perhaps you have changed in roughly the same way. Perhaps you have become more similar. Perhaps you have grown more different. Absent regular updates, there is no way of telling.
We overlook this, generally. There is surprise when an old acquaintance is not what we remember and not just in their looks. What we assume will be a meeting of two known quantities is, in reality, an interaction between two strangers who share an unusual insight into part of the other’s backstory.
But what we owe strangers is not what we owe friends. And it is mainly negative – don’t hit them, for example. Memory can distort this. We can feel an obligation based on what someone was, not what they currently are. Perhaps on what we hope they can become again – just give them some time and they’ll become the person we remember. They, of course, might be feeling exactly the same thing about us. Our memories can shape our present behaviour if we want them to be more than just memories.
It’s more comfortable that way. It puts us in a world we think we understand. Among people we think we understand. But, of course, it doesn’t. It puts us in a world we don’t understand, surrounded by people we don’t understand. Because they are no longer the people we did understand and we are no longer the people who once understood them.
There is no shame in no longer going to nightclubs. Indeed, in our ruthlessly ageist society, there would be more shame in still going to nightclubs – a middle-aged man in a polo-neck and medallion does not inspire admiration… But there is a sense of shame in letting go of old relationships. It is a failure, perhaps of a moral nature. I am a bad friend if I let one end. We should have done more. We have let the other person down.
But if we no longer go clubbing because we have changed, exactly the same could be said of relationships. Even more so. Some friends will be like rockets, hurled into space on similar trajectories, changing or developing in similar ways. Others like particles ejected from a dying star, growing ever more distant in the darkness of space, tracing their own paths, writing their own stories. If we cannot tell which is true, we should not assume the former is true. You cannot go back to a dead star. Nor can you expect anyone else to, nor can you force them to.
“Can you go back”? There’s a story there. But it’s no longer my story to tell. And this is not a confessional…
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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