The Long Journey to Now

Click to enlarge. On the back is pencilled “June 15th 1919 Morgan & brother officers” in my grandmother’s writing. I think Morgan is the third from the left

I’m walking through Hughenden Park, pondering the suitcase of old photos, wondering what I can tell and what I cannot. There is no point in showing the emotive or personal ones because it will be impossible to share the feelings they evoke without a volume of history and explanation. I have picked out two whose interest doesn’t depend entirely on a family connection.

Above is a tea-party of Army Officers, sitting around a portable gramophone, with what looks like barrack huts in the background. The other is mysterious but I found another copy (below) in my great-aunt’s scrapbook from 1916.

“Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about”, says Nietzsche. What I transcribe here is those thoughts from the park in which Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli must have walked too, perhaps thinking about his Queen. The past—yours and mine—is like a valley carpeted in mist, in which at a given time we may see only the steeples, factory chimneys and tops of tall trees: never the whole thing. Some say the past is a burden, but I see it as a resource, an ever-increasing granary. “Let go the past,” they say blithely, meaning by this broad generality something particular: to unburden yourself of guilt, regret and trauma. We know the past partly through memory, which populates our cavernous minds with magical images like a movie; and partly through study of how the present is constructed. For is not the present, in a sense, the debris of the past? The reconstructed past holds secrets which we can unravel and use to unlock mysteries; such as why you and I are what we are today.

I’d had the intention to borrow the photos and scan them all in a few sessions, mechanically as a simple task like washing dishes: one piece after the other, categorizing them in various ways, storing them in folders on a hard disk or memory stick. But I can’t do it. Someone else can try, in fact my cousin already has. But I get lost in reveries. These pictures help me see the vista of my life, like an unwritten version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and tell me things I never knew. When you scan a tiny photo at 1200 dots to the inch, you are transported to the scene. (In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup, the photographer paces up and down his studio, pegging up wet prints to dry, making ever more detailed enlargements. It’s so prosaic now with a computer and scanner: that’s why I need to take this walk, to find out what I think; for I’ve made discoveries just as exciting as those in Blowup, or those in Stephen Poliakoff’s television drama, Shooting the Past: it’s just that I cannot tell them here, for many reasons.)

Marc Lord is writing a book interestingly titled Who would Jesus Fuck? (click link and go through his comments): “It’s all about needing to become a better man …”. My topic could be “how I have become a better man”, not better in a moral sense but better in self-acceptance. It seems to me that the movement towards spirituality in a person’s life is no different today than it was in the Dark Ages, when men took refuge in monasteries to escape from intolerable conditions.

I don’t want to speak of those conditions, even though some of the photos remind me of them. I’d sooner speak of the blessings I’ve been able to reap from certain curses of childhood, which propelled me to take refuge in imaginary landscapes fabricated from the stuff of literature, music, nature, architecture, writings of the mystics and the purest introspection. At one time or another I dreamed of flourishing in an intellectual and creative salon as musician, author, painter, sculptor, comedian, adventurer in all terrains (mountainous, desert, maritime, aerial and feminine)—but I never realized any of those things. The collection of photos reminds me why I took that escapist route, at the risk of being labelled “absent-minded”.

So now, it’s better to stay in the present, the realm where blessings fall like April showers.