Elephant

Last year I visited my sister in Namibia and went on a short safari. When I saw my first wild elephant, a young lone male, I burst into tears and promptly had a nosebleed. 

To those around me, it probably seemed a bit over-dramatic. To those I was travelling with, it was the natural result of the few days I had just spent at altitude in Windhoek. But it makes a good story. 

Like the elephant, I have a reputation for having a phenomenal memory, which I have mentioned before. I also have a reputation for having a brain like a sieve. I will forget to post a birthday card in time, or that I have arranged to meet someone for a coffee, or to go to the dentist. But I can bring back at a moment's recall the stories I created to capture something that at the time felt worth remembering. I am not the slightest bit unique in this: it is a quintessentially human way of navigating the world and fixing our place within it. It is why we have our myths and legends and histories: long before man first scraped animal skins to vellum, or beat plant fibres to paper-pulp, we passed on knowledge through stories that echo around us still.

Story-telling might be a wonderful way of capturing memory, but it is also deeply flawed as a way of capturing the facts as they have a tendency to shift with every re-telling. I have taken a while to come to terms with this. I knew I couldn't trust my day to day memory, but the veracity of my longer-term recall was part of my identity. If I couldn't trust my memories, then is anything true, and who or what am I? I wrestled with the idea for months, and then stopped thinking about it until I sat down today to write and found a half-written piece about elephants and memory. And as I picked it up to finish it, I realised I've made peace with my brain's unreliability. I accept that sometimes I will tell a story and someone else will say, "It wasn't like that at all." I accept that sometimes someone else will tell me a story and I will say, "I don't remember that at all." And that's OK. Those stories might be full of inaccuracies, but they preserve what is important: the lesson we took away with us and what it means to us now. And they are written, not in stone, but in the fleshy folds of our mind and as such may be adjusted to allow for the extra facts and perspectives someone else brings.

In the elephant kingdom, matriarchal groups preserve shared memories and use them to teach the young. I suppose that for young bull elephants, these memories have to be embedded well, because they are destined for a life wandering largely alone. When elephants meet, they connect or re-connect in low sounds that rumble through the air and sound like the earth shaking. So it is for us. No matter how lonely we wander, cloud-like or otherwise, when we connect with others and share our stories we may feel the world shift around us, but we also discover ourselves to be rooted and anchored after all. We find that we can move beyond the insularity of our own narratives and gain a sanity-saving sense of perspective without which all our carefully-constructed edifices will crumble and bury those we love beneath their stones. 

Whole New Worlds

Hello from Namibia! At last I have made it to long dreamed Africa, visiting my sister who is living here for a while. I am experiencing a very different life from home: my sister has children whereas I do not, and we are enjoying the school holidays together. First, a few days in the interior seeing giraffe, elephant, rhino, zebra and antelope in a brown savannah, where trees were caught in perpetual autumn under a too-hot sun.  The rains hadn’t come last winter and the sky remained empty of clouds. 

Then, we drove to the cool coast where the Atlantic breaks against the Namib desert and salt is harvested in white industrial pyramids amid cormorant and flamingo that gather on the brackish waters.

 

My opportunities to travel the world are limited, and even when I do, how deep can my immersion be? But stories, they open up the worlds and times to me I cannot travel and stay.  They challenge my assumptions, broaden my mind, develop my compassion.

I recently listened to Jaspreet Kaur's "Brown Girls Like Us" on BBC Podcasts.  As she told her story she challenged me to reflect on the times I have othered others.  She freed me from the squirming embarrassment of those recollections because I am one of those she appreciates have learned - are learning - how not to make unintended micro-aggressions.  She generously opens up her world, her experience, culture, beliefs, family, friends, childhood, her present life.  She demonstrates how much we have in common in our human experience, the silenced childhood emotions, the fears we took too long to face, the parents we took too long to understand, the joy of reaching the now and the curiosity for the years that lie ahead.

Jaspreet’s was not the first story I have immersed myself in from another culture, and it won’t be the last.  She has been added in my heart to countless others who have opened up new worlds to me, including those that have let me live in the past and in extraordinary possible futures.  They offer me a kaleidoscope of lenses through which to look and feel.  I am the left richer for it, and am ever grateful. These books, whether fiction or true-story or somewhere in between, provide doorways I can return to again and again and to all those writers I say thank you for taking the courage and time to welcome me in. 

Story Eaters

This is the book my father’s mother gave him, and nearly half a century later he gave me. A tatty old book that opened up to me bright rivers of words that sing in my mind still.

 

As a solitary teenager, I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother went back and forth to the library while I was at school to keep me fed. I scoured my parents' bookshelves and read whatever caught my eye, age appropriate or not.  Why? Because I loved stories, because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to taste existences I did not have courage or lifetime enough to inhabit.

In these habits I was just being human: we are story eaters and can never have enough.  These endless permutations of words are sand whispering along a breath that began in the beginning and never stopped.  They are waterdrops streaming through fingers that will hold their memory as long as flesh lives on the bone.  They rise from their river beds to become clouds on the dusty wind, that will fall and reassemble on the grateful earth below. They gather in pools that shiver with facsimiles of the stories they once were, and we take from them and give each other to drink. And the thirsty ground takes what is left and pushes forth green shoots that become the crops on which we feed.

I have a reputation among my friends for storing memories.  How?  Because they became stories.  Schoolfriend Helen, aged 13, wrote in her Battle of Marathon essay, "There was much death on both sides.  And in the middle."  I told this snatched delight to my family over dinner.  I'm still telling it to this day.  I make sense of life’s challenges by finding the narrative. I trace my feelings back to their origins and mix them with remembered things and those ever shifting stories are me, whether I enjoy them or not. 

I am a story eater and I can never have enough.

Life's a beach, curated.

Under Devon blue skies and the too-hot sun we have had a happy and busy week marking our first anniversary here and the launch of my new business venture.  A year ago we were in the Midlands and a long way from the sea.  Now that has all changed.  One late afternoon we went to the beach for a walk just because we could, and I walked in the breaking surf where it meets the exposed sand.

There have been conversations about how we present curated lives to the world on Facebook, Insta, Twitter and the rest.  Mostly perfect moments with a few carefully selected honesties thrown in, that may show vulnerability but rarely show us at our truly black and awful worst.  But we've always done it.  Handprints and hunting scenes drawn with ochre and spit in sacred caves.  Fearsome deeds and heady frolics in ritual dance on pots and urns.  Philosophies on parchment and diary entries on pages that fade.  Photographs taken with care so as not to waste the film.  Home movie memories with voice-overs recorded in telephone tones.  I am talking, of course, about when we take the time to capture our images, not the unguarded moments when we leak the bleakest sides of ourselves.  That is a whole other conversation.

I've collected stories since I was a child.  Even as I leafed through my paternal grandmother's black and white photographs of dogs and big houses and sunny Cornish days, I pieced together from other sources dark tales of a beloved brother lost at war, a baby sister spoilt to passivity, an arranged marriage, glorious eccentricities and petty spites, a life that ended alone in alcoholism and tears.  

So please, enjoy this perfect moment with me.  I hope it makes you smile.  But do not envy it me.  My life is exactly like yours.  There are moments like these that melt my insides to sugared liquid sunshine.  And there are moments when I just get it all wrong.  There are vicious spiked moments of self-loathing that raise my fists against me and spit nasty at those trying to care.  And there are moments when I can lift another person simply with my smile, and notice their new hair, new coat, new shoes and remember to thank them for a passing kindness.  In the midst of such inconsistency and the power of all that is dark and bad, these moments of nobility and joy and truth and compassion keep us moving on, and it is good that we pin them down.  Because from out of the bottom of the casket of evil things rises Hope triumphant, and she unfurls her vast and shining wings and is bigger and higher than all dark swarms below.  The dark cannot put out a light.  But the light will always lift the dark, however small.