Laughter in the next room

This being the fourth volume of Osbert Sitwell’s much acclaimed autobiography, an autobiography which peters out in a fifth volume of sketches of interesting people that he had known. This fourth volume was bought in a second-hand bookshop here on the Isle of Wight – either in Ryde or St. Helen’s – which had a good selection of Sitwell, including the fifth volume which I declined. With this fourth volume being a proper edition, possibly even a first edition complete with an only slightly damaged dust jacket, to replace the book club edition I already had, and with my own Sitwell saga appearing to have started just about two years ago at reference 1.

I have been re-reading this fourth volume, and it so happened that on the day that I had been researching chain mail (reference 2) and on the day before that I was to research briar pipes (reference 3), on page 119, towards the end of chapter 2, entitled ‘The Word’, I came across some paragraphs on the life of words, starting with that well-known quotation: ‘In the beginning there was the word’. I was struck by his idea that in each of us a word has a life of its own, changing or shifting slightly each time that we use it – but a life with perhaps thousands of other lives stretching behind it, stretching back in time.

There were also some thoughts about the accessibility and longevity of works of art in the various modalities – with works of art worked with words doomed to grow moribund when their host language moves on – rather as, say, that of Chaucer has moved on – and eventually to die. The plastic arts do rather better in that respect, being able to speak to us, at least after a fashion, over the chasms of history; we can still value a truly ancient – and possibly quite crude – figurine dug out of the sands of Iraq or Afghanistan, a figurine quite possibly made by someone who could neither read nor write. Notwithstanding, Sitwell, as a poet, puts in a strong plea for the primacy of words.

Plus, the rather old fashioned idea that English, the language of the conquerors of so much of the world, was clearly top language - old fashioned, already, by the time that he wrote it down, shortly after the end of the second world war.

But it was the first idea which caught my attention, with my first association being to another book that I have been reading recently, a book about memory: ‘Pieces of Light’ by Charles Fernyhough (reference 4). The theme of this book being the theory, the fact even, that our memories are rebuilt from their (very fragmentary and scattered) raw materials each time that we use them, a corollary of this rebuilding being that a memory is slightly different each time we use it, not at all like playing a favourite track on a CD. I think the idea here is that each fragment of the memory, indeed the memory as a whole, is repainted, recoloured by the needs and context of the time of recall. And that recoloured memory becomes part of what is recalled next time, perhaps, in time, to the point of more or less totally obscuring what had been there in the first place. Perhaps the sort of drift you can get in whispers passed down the line, a game we used to hear about, if not actually play, when I was in the Cubs. And while allowing this as the general, also allowing the particular, that different people are different in this regard; that the memory of some is more plastic than that of others. Not to mention the tricks which we can play on each other – perhaps as a cognitive psychologist – or perhaps as therapist with the very best of intentions.

All of which seems very like what Sitwell was talking about in the context of words.

But as well as the parallel between the organisation and life cycle of memories and those of words, there is also the connection between words and the memories keyed to those words. Memories which might be of other words, of general knowledge or of things, events or reports of same which have figured in one’s life. The web of words does not reach into the whole of the web of memories, but it does reach into a goodly chunk of them.

Connections which are useful but not always reliable. So sometimes, when playing the animal game of reference 5, one can think of the name of an animal without having much of a clue as to what it looks like. While at other times, you can picture an animal, perhaps know quite a lot about it, but quite fail to bring its name into mind. And no name means no place in the animal game.

That said, words seem to be much better than dates. Very few people can get at memories through dates – with a rare exception being noticed at reference 6.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/a-wet-and-overcast-day.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/chain-mail.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/briar.html.

Reference 4: http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/. When I was little, it was considered very bad form for academics to be good on the box. No doubt, had personal web sites existed in those days, they would have been even worse. Perpetrators denied access to the high table at Lonsdale while Morse is Master.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/new-game.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/remainder-shelf.html.