intimations

from ch. 1 of an unpublished work in progress entitled anamneses: memoirs in search of a subject

CECI N'EST-PAS UNE PIPE, reads the legend under the pipe in René Magritte's famous picture. This here is not a pipe.

Nasi goreng, potato croquettes from automats, French fries - chips, I would have called them then - eaten out of paper cones with mayonnaise as the mists curled in off the North Sea. Above all, the sweet hovering fragrance, sweet as a confectionery store, of Dutch pipe tobacco.

It was a place where Jean-Paul Belmondo roomed with the Penguin Modern European Poets, a time when you were never alone with a Strand. The mists were already familiar to me from Albert Camus' The Fall which I read at sixteen, around the time I first encountered surrealist art. The fog on the Zuyderzee, muzzling against the window panes, conjured up a landscape of teenage longings. Female smells in shuttered rooms and cigarettes in corridors and cocktail smells in bars. Gordon Comstock futilely raging in George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The spy in The Ipcress File, who smoked blue Gauloises and didn't have a name. Chet Baker would have been there too only he hadn't fallen out of that Amsterdam hotel window yet, thinking he could fly. The manner of his death, two decades later, confirms all I remember about the Low Countries.

Just possibly that is why I still smoke today - out of nostalgia. I don't want to grow up screams Tom Waits.

Other tobaccos, other smells, recall other, older selves. Older, because more distant in time: a paradox, nicely caught in what was most profoundly disturbing in Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills, the adult actors dressed in children's clothes. Bondman's Number One, I think it was called, thick wads of acrid black tobacco wrapped in crinkly waxed paper in round one-ounce tins. The rack of stubby briars that Pa, my mother's grandfather, kept on the mantel shelf. The chipped mug of Oxo Pa took with fingers of dry toast and a sprinkle of white pepper at eleven o'clock every morning. A twice-weekly journey with my mother on the Central Line of the London Underground, which ceased when I was five: White City, East Acton, North Acton, Hanger Lane, Perivale, Greenford.

Bapaume - carved on a paper knife Pa hammered out of shrapnel for his only daughter Ivy, my mother's mother.

Mustard gas wafting over Flanders fields, crossing the Channel to rub its yellow back against my window panes. The miserable sprout from Brussels, as Elizabeth David once called it, which Pa showed me proudly growing in his garden. A solitary blasted tree menacing against the night sky.

His memories, mine.

I WISH TO EXPLORE - lose myself in, divert around, linger over, rummage through, savor - the thickets of memory. My memory, anybody's memory - and if we can speak of such a thing at all, collective memory.

What then, if anything, ties my five-year-old self listening to World War I reminiscences in Pa's Greenford garden to my seventeen-year-old self on his first solo trip abroad by cross-Channel ferry to Ostend and Amsterdam, imagining he is Jack Kerouac? What links either of these recollected selves to the almost fifty-year-old man writing this who smokes Camels and lives in Alberta, Canada - other than the contingent connectivity of tobacco smells and things that waft: mists and mustard gas - the entire train of thought originating in nothing more than looking once more, and for no particular reason, at René Magritte's The Treachery of Images?

Would it be the same me I am remembering had some other chance encounter (say, with Vera Lynn singing Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again) sent my mind spinning off down some other Memory Lane? Why, anyway, is that song - like the same composer's Keep the Home Fires Burning - guaranteed to bring tears to my eyes, no matter how many times I hear it, no matter, too, that I did not personally experience either of the World Wars these songs so poignantly, so exactly recall?

You might hear laughter spinning,
swinging madly across the sun,
it's not aimed at anyone,
it's just escaping on the run,
and but for the sky there are no fences facing.
And if you hear vague traces
of skipping reels of rhyme,
to your tambourine in time,
I wouldn't pay it any mind,
it's just a ragged clown behind.
They're just a shadow you're seeing
that he's chasing.

See? Bob Dylan, Hey Mister Tambourine Man; me, circa 1966. Bringing it all back home. I quote from memory, a memory jogged in this instance by my own use of the word spinning. I loved that song. Transfixed by the beauty of its poetry, the fleet-footedness of its images, I had no desire to pin down its meaning in prose. Still, it seems apt here:

Take me disappearing
through the smoke rings of my mind,
down the foggy ruins of time,
far past the frozen leaves,
the haunted, frightened trees,
out to the windy beach,
far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Do you hear it, playing in your head, as I do?

Smokes, fogs, trees, seas - things randomly connected, freely associated, just escaping on the run. Yet oh so coherent, making a consummate sense that lies beyond the bounds of logic, or, maybe, of that which is capable of being stated at all. Or so it feels.

Wittgenstein: There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.

Is there a statute of limitations on possible memories and the infinite selves they engender, kaleidoscoping the spinning fragments into ever-new patterns? Where might recollections of the Indian railways (smoke, spices, sweat, shit, sweet scalding tea drunk from the little red clay pots whose shards littered the tracks), the scent of cloves drying in the sun on the sidewalks in Zanzibar, have taken me already - these memories that are equally and unquestionably mine?

Trying to capture this ceaseless flux, Marcel Proust shut himself up for years in a cork-lined room, going out only to sample the night. What set him off was the remembered taste of a cookie.

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