Open Writing

‘We can only take each day as it comes. Time has taken on a surreal aspect.’ Those words were in someone’s letter when he wrote to tell me about his father’s serious, and terminal, illness.
Time takes on different aspects as we get older. When we crept at a snail’s pace to infant school, it took so long for small legs to get us there. Fifty later, longer legs take us there in ‘no time at all’. Perhaps the legs are influenced by the difference between not wanting to get there and wanting to get there.

A small child sits on your lap while you help him with his reading. You follow his progress until he goes to secondary school but then you move away. Years later, you see him again and he proudly puts his own baby son on your lap. Still more years later, you receive the glad news that the son has a child of his own. The events are like signposts along another fifty-year road.

Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

How can one forget the words of Ralph Hodgson and the English teacher who read them with such feeling, inspiring imagination and love of words? When? More than fifty years ago. He is long gone, but the words, his reading, and his personality live on.

It’s one thing to read history and discover what happened in past centuries, but it’s an entirely different matter to establish a perspective for our personal past. There’s a problem — our years get shorter. At the age of ten, one year is ten percent of your life. At the age of 20, it’s only half that amount. At 70, it has shrunk to one-seventieth of our personal existence.

During my teens, I had a way of putting all this into perspective. ’70 years before I was born’ meant something like 1865. That period was another road with signposts, several of which stood high above the others: the reign of Queen Victoria; the turn of the century in 1900; the First World War 1914–1918; the Second World War 1939–1945 which I had lived through. Here was a perspective I could grasp, helped by people around me who had lived through most of that period.

Those 70 years were my ‘olden days’. The long road went into the past, gradually getting darker, and then fading into the history we find in books.

To shape a perspective on my own 70 years of life so far, I visualise my own road with its major signposts. Those 70 years still seem shorter than the 70 years I didn’t experience, before I was born. Surrealism emerges when other people’s years seem longer than your own.

Most folk know of Salvador Dali’s painting, commonly known as ‘Melting Clocks’. Its actual title is ‘Persistence of Memory (Soft Watches)’. In it, three pocket watches droop and melt over mysterious objects in a dream landscape. Another watch has ants busy on its surface and we cannot see its face. We see life, activity, dreaming, death and mystery, and wonder what it all means. Dali’s own explanation isn’t much help, of course. He rambles on about DNA, fillets of sole, and Camembert cheese.

They say that at the moment of death your whole life flashes before your eyes. Be that as it may, but when someone dear to you is nearing death, the whole of your life together is condensed into the weeks during which you wait, and wait. Persistence of memory dominates, time melts... but there’s always another day.

Can it be true that I forget you? We haste on without heed, forgetting the flowers on the roadside hedge. Yet they breathe unaware of our forgetfulness, filling it with music. You have moved from my world, to take seat at the root of my life, and therefore is this forgetting—remembrance lost in its own depth.
Rabindranath Tagore, Lover’s Gift XLII
(Extract from Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, London, 1936/1973)

© Copyright 2006 Brian Barratt