A Murmuration Of Memories

The quiet whispers that change histories

Sometimes life feels like nothing more than a tide of stories washing over us, all the stories we’ve been told, and all the stories we continue to tell ourselves. If I’m not careful I’ll drown in this wave of stories rolling in from the past.

So I wrote this piece about listening to the trembling stillness of the world, and in that gentle silence, escaping those stories to finally be free.

Photo by Laura Rivera on Unsplash

1.

They came and went so quickly, those fleeting few years when the myths of a wild land were carved into our family history and the puzzling and enigmatic lives of our parents seemed simple and true. A time of folklore. A time of love perhaps. A time that would soon be wrenched away, retold and reworked into a new set of family gospels.

I’ve still got a dog-eared passport and some ice hockey bubblegum cards, a maple leaf lapel-badge, and a few small square Kodachrome photographs of toddlers forever frozen in delighted poses, toddling on barren beaches lapped by a serene sea. Younger, slender parents in big hats and big sunglasses, beside Volkswagen campers, laughing and tanned and brimming with adventure.

They seem like different people from another world, snapped in a family cluster, come on now, we’re taking a picture, arms wrapped around each other, posing and blissfully unaware, a family in the morning sun, holding each other as tightly as they could. But never quite tightly enough.

They look so young and intimate. I hardly recognise these people immortalised in my small fading squares, like clues in an unsolvable mystery, aching with lives lived so differently from those we came to know. Surely that family is not us. But there we are, before the dawning of our ponderous and turbulent future, standing together, unrecognisable, at ease, on the precipice.

I have carried these bygone totems for decades, and like an ageing perfume, they’ve slowly weakened, not yet completely unscented, but depleted, faint. They could be found at any garage sale, the detritus of a million lives washed up on the shores of time, discarded or lost from the most cherished and private moments. Debris, that once upon a time embodied all that was worth living for, all that was essential. Then slowly, meaning less and less to fewer and fewer. Until eventually, there is nothing left but echos of bygone lives.

Some stories are told on grand scales that change the path of history. Others are told in quiet whispers that reach only a few ears. And these small stories too, can change the path of histories, little insignificant stories that are whispered amongst the few. It is these stories that are mine. Measurable only in the lives of us, we, the family, ourselves.

They are the stories we were told, then told ourselves, then told others. Always sculpting, always embellishing, forever spinning through truth and fiction, never being certain which is which. Stories that were planted in us and grew as memories. It’s these stories that were the keepers of our hearts. And my heart has been broken by them. Then patched up. Then broken again. Made stronger, then weaker, then stronger in the never ending pulse of life.

It’s not easy to chronicle a life and write about things without the old stories elbowing their way in, demanding attention and setting themselves down in order. They’re bullies, these echoes from the past, demanding that we bow to their authenticity and impartiality even as they come dressed in bias, neglect and indulgence. Even though they were first pitched in anger, or murmured in love, or told by the youngest and most naive version of a self, told to gain a footing or prove a lie only whispered to oneself. They come like a blaze of flashing neon lights, the truth the truth the truth. But these stories are not the truth. They’re the mental henchmen that kept us in a headlock.

2.

I don’t remember the blows at all. And I don’t remember the shout. “Hey you little bastard”. I don’t remember the sudden airiness as my brother was pulled off me, startled by the gripping hands, focused as he was on punching me. “What in goddamn hell are you playing at?” I don’t remember our neighbour and I don’t remember her shouting and I don’t remember her frozen in bewilderment when it was me who leapt up from the ground, blooded as I was, shrieking like a furious reanimated road kill and pointing the finger, “Don’t you talk to my brother like that.”

This story was repeated with relish over the years. In a flash I went from battered little brother to stand-up guy. “Our kid, he gets it”, they’d say. I didn’t get it, but it didn’t matter. I was but a vessel into which we poured our pretense of loyalties and obligations, our fabricated world of family ties and clan.

Although I have no recollection of this tiny drama, after endless tellings I’ve assembled a cinematic memory, in the genre of patients on operating tables describing near death experiences, detailing themselves from above, hovering like a memory drone. I see an old picket fence and green grass and a white clapboard house with a red corrugated roof. I see a puckered face and a 70’s haircut and a flurry of arms and legs. I see a neighbour running and reaching and lifting, then recoiling like a comical gargoyle. And I see me, the hero, waving my puny fist, spitting blood and screeching in a bats voice.

This memory and so many more, cobbled together over the years, partitioned each of us into the family unconscious; You were this, he was that, you were as thick as thieves, you were never all that, the sporty one, the prodigal son, you can stand on your own two feet, you’re nothing but a little cheat, you’re the one with a sneaky side, you’re the one riddled with pride. Down they rained in a storm of blunt prophesies, unwitting cautions to stay in lane, unthinking straitjackets weaved of words, hammering each of us onto our own unique crucifix. I’ve been drowned in their power, sucked below the surface of this wave of self-fulfilling prophesies, forever kicking to stay afloat, to swim toward some, any, please, a lifeboat.

3.

Once upon a time, I imagined that if I were the chronicler, if I told my own stories, wrote a million tales and created a great vocal tapestry, I could clamber out from under the stories laid down in layers upon me. I told myself that I could escape these stories and that I could re-author all that writing on the wall. But this was just one more tale that I carefully laid like a clean fresh table cloth upon my rickety soul.

So I gave up trying to rewrite the world. And instead I stopped and listened quietly to the silence and in that stillness I heard great beauty. I heard the beating of my heart and the beating of every other heart in a chorus of life. And in that silence I remembered something I had once known but had forgotten in all the cacophony and machinations of man.

I remembered the spectacular immensity of time from the morning to evening, that daily eternity. When the rising sun drew me along the arch of the day for centuries before laying me down at night. I remembered an effortless journey of adventure and exploration. I remembered being truly aware, being fully attentive and disappearing into the flow. I remembered embracing the world, not as an enemy or a conqueror but as a mere traveller spellbound by the sheer incomprehensible beauty of it all.

And my memories, like the tremors of an earthquake, evoked the time when I could not conceive that the world would ever set out to conquer me. And I remembered love. I remembered being awash with love. I remembered being fearless with love. I remembered being invulnerable.

And it was in the quiet of the world, lost in these true memories, when all the stories floated up into the heavens and left me, like a murmuration of starlings rising and rolling in a great dark shadow, no longer in me but instead I saw them like a near-death experience and I realised that I had been torn asunder by these fragile and powerful and explosive narratives. But in a moment of quiet contemplative silence I could let the stories float away, for I saw they were not the telling of me. And I saw I could be released.

And I remembered, in that chorus of beating hearts, that even though love is a high stakes game where you can lose everything, where you can be torn asunder over and over, made raw and left naked and fearful, even though these things are true, we have no choice but to love.

And in my great recollection I remembered the three offspring of love, I remembered Forgiveness, Compassion and Grace. Those three children of love that show us how to forgive and be kind and gracious and tender. And I realised I do not need to rewrite my life. But instead forgive. And embrace. And be gracious. For none of this was my making. And then I was free.