Remembering: 'In Memory Of', Active Tense

The idiom, Those Who Forget The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It, is thrown around a lot. It’s an oft-banked opening to many a journal article about a commemorative date or breach, a fail-safe reprimand with matured acceptance in political speeches, and an easy conclusive point to open an undergraduate essay argument up to further implication and significance. Really, though, George Santayana’s oft-quoted statement has become something of an excuse.

The traditional commemorative dedication, In Memory Of, shares, in many instances, the same problem as Santayana’s idiom: passivity. When something is dedicated In Memory Of, it is a conclusion to that which is remembered; it says, We Have Done Our Duty and Remembered This. Countless studies draw similar conclusions from various memorial case studies, suggesting that this dedication is often a close (or attempt thereof) on discussion and an imposition of finality. An erected statue to X shows that we have remembered and cared for it for time immemorial, no further act on memory necessary. It encourages and, crucially, excuses, subsequent inaction. Santayana, by referencing the act of forgetting in absentia of its inverse, remembering, provides similar encouragement. Interestingly, Santayana dooms not the active act of forgetting, but the finality of having already forgotten. Though an implicit proviso of encouragement to inaction (and one reliant on a deliberately closed reading on my part), his prioritisation of that which is forgot over the persistent, active struggle of/with remembering allows the documented use and reuse of his statement as an excuse for its users’ failure to engage with the latter. By reprimanding the memory of others already lost, the statement’s use excuses one’s own passivity in struggling with the mess of actively remembering. 

South African Memorial at Delville Wood. Source: Author's Own

When I visit a memorial I choose one name and emphasise their story throughout my visit. Trying to picture what the person (and indeed people) behind this name went through, what they felt, what they saw, is a means of actively engaging with memory: it forces active remembering, displacing the passivity of forced silence as you will (read: kid) yourself into thinking that you won’t forget this when you leave the space of deliberately defined commemoration. At Auschwitz six years ago, it was a small religious community pictured and hanging on the walls of a nearby church; they reminded me of my own church community, placing them, and by extension myself, in the act of remembering. In the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France this summer, pillaged and destroyed on 10 June 1944 by a Nazi German Waffen-SS company, it was a 22-year-old girl named Yvonne, murdered in said pillage; she was (approximately) my age, and she forced me to picture my own life transposed in her situation. In the fields by Delville Wood commemorating its losses of WWI, also this summer, it was 22-year-old Private France; like me, in age and nationality, but what had he been forced to face here that I never would? 

The past is a foreign country

We live not only in a place, but also a time. 

I never understood, truthfully, (and despite extensively quoting it in drafts and redrafts and final drafts of essays and my undergraduate dissertation; wherever memory was concerned), David Lowenthal’s line: ‘the past is a foreign country’. Until I put time and place together as adjuncts: suddenly both were inhabited and necessary to identity, fundamental to it. You cannot abstract the past from time: history without time is absurd, nonsensical, and memory without the backbone of temporality ceases to exist. Similarly, any notion of the future without reference to time simply isn’t ‘the future’. The shared temporal reference core to both concepts is the present: the origin of the axes of time (that is: coordinates (0,0)) from which we read the graphs of past and future. As such, time, like identity itself, is a matter of alterity: that which something is defined against and is itself defined against something else, never an abstract independent. I am in the present because I am not in the past; that is the past because it is different to now, lived in the tense that is occupied; this is the future because it is different to now, vacant of experience. I am who I am because of my past and that which is my future. We are who we are because this is our past and this is our future. 

We are a country that shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be, we shall fight on the beaches and we shall never surrender. We are a county whose heritage is mining. We are a city of learning and academic excellence, the names of scholars more numerous than the faces hanging in our great halls. I am a ‘90s kid, because I understand this set of niche cultural references those born in the 2000s could never ‘get’. The various claims made on time in these examples are fundamental to the identities they list at various spatial scales, from nation to individual body.  

Monuments to everyday lives

Beyond the trope of a haunted setting for gothic characters or mauve hangout for teenagers trapped in a budget horror film replete with green slime, the graveyard is frequently a place of reflection: both of individual experience and time itself. Common to all characterisations of the graveyard aforementioned is its stasis in time and space; its atmosphere is typically one of sombre mood, a quiet setting where noise is out of the ordinary (hence its easy lend to the gothic genres), and its location removed from the surrounding urbanity of mobility and fluidity, a place seemingly dislocated from its spatial setting. Yet this stasis is actively and always undermined by movements of organic growth (lichens, moss etc.), demography (as more graves expand its space), and time (as living connections to particular graves shift with demographic cycles and Mr Smith, Loving Husband and Devoted Father, 1889-1957 shifts from an active monument visited weekly and decorated with fresh flowers to a forgotten name, half corroded to a Mr Smi glanced over on the way to more contemporary plaques). It is this contradiction of stasis and fluidity in the marriage of memory and place that makes graveyards so interesting. 

I’m driving through Paris, thinking about the Vichy regime, national memory and the Vélodrome d’hiver, when we pass a massive graveyard awkwardly slanted and slotted between two dual carriageways and a medley of roundabouts. A sea of grey plaques of varying shapes and efforts, interspersed with dying plants and ribbons. A statue to an eighteenth century figure, apparently held in place by the surrounding vines’ embrace, juts out of a wall by the road a few minutes later. I don’t catch his name or purpose worth monumentalising, and I wonder if many (any?) drivers negotiating Paris would notice him. The Eiffel tower is of course the monument one thinks of when Paris is called to mind, a psychological relation normalised by the relentless capitalisation of the monument in the sale of the city and its ideal. Trying to spot it makes me think of the Statue of Liberty, that figure that curses through the full-American blood of their constitution, and the fact that it was a present from France. What are they monuments to? 

Nostalgia is being used to steal the future

The Financial Times published an article yesterday morning arguing that ‘nostalgia has stolen the future’:

“I remember when elections were won by leaders selling visions of the future: Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology, Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or Tony Blair’s New Britain. In the new democratic disorder nostalgia has replaced optimism as a ruling emotion. Populists recognise the power of adjusted memory. America’s Donald Trump, British Brexiters, Europe’s new nationalists – they all inhabit a rose-tinted past. Nostalgia’s force lies in a human instinct to screen out the bad while recalling the good…”

Though I agree largely with Stephens’ polemic, and the questioned use of nostalgia is something I have been thinking about for a while, I would argue a more active accusation of nostalgia’s theft of the future. That is: nostalgia has not simply ‘stolen the future’, but is actively being used to do so. 

Nostalgia has a complicated etymology beyond the popular understanding of rose-tinted glasses. Borrowed from Latin, its early usage from the mid-18th century was as a medical diagnosis for homesickness, a meaning that retains contemporary use as a longing for familiar surroundings. In the early 20th century the term is de-spatialised by an emphasis on its temporal properties; nostalgia thus comes to describe a sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period in the past, especially in one’s own lifetime, or a sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past. In the 1970s it transmogrifies once more: a collective term for things that evoke a former (remembered) era. Retaining its triad of forms, nostalgia today is generally understood as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. It’s the sighed remarks of older generations about Their Day and the comparative ignorance of The Youths Today; the #throwbackthursdays shared across social media platforms in weekly longings for beaches, parties and other off-days past; the renewed (characteristic?) contemporary fascination with period dramas of vintage styles, romances and heroes. 

What is time?

I don’t think we actually know. That’s not to say that we haven’t tried to define it, containing it within the parameters of what we (think) we know. I could answer with the numbers consigned to the movement of the sun and the gradient of its light that the hands of my clock now point to: 20:23. Or the number of planetary resolutions around the Sun since the death of Christ: 2018. I could answer with a cultural polemic describing the shape of contemporary society and its difference from earlier societies. Or I could quote Shakespeare and suggest that “we are time’s subject, and time bids be gone”. I could answer that time flies; that it is lost, irretrievable, wasted. That it is short and that it is endless. That is, we can describe time and we use time itself to describe all manner of things. We cannot, however, define it. And I think that’s because we don’t, really, understand it. None of those answers are wrong, but not one of them looks you in the eye and, unflinchingly, absolves that this is all and everything that time is. 

Time at Murray Edwards College. In the changing colour of the leaves; in the fact that I am stood here where so many previous female scholars stood and future female scholars will stand, and narrate it from this particular point within the lineage of continuity; in the movement from a lecture to a supervision, their schedule interrupted by the taking of this picture.

Noun: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. 

Verb: to plan, schedule or arrange when (something) should happen or be done.  

Does time even exist? As a noun or a verb, time confounds simple ontological description. Whilst the progression of existence and events and the act of scheduling both suggest an ontology (‘progression’ or a ‘schedule’), neither are really so tangible nor definite as to refute the question of time’s existence in a satisfactory, end-of-argument way. Yet time, or whatever it is that we have so called ‘time’, irrefutably exists. It’s in the wrinkles that gradually write themselves across foreheads and the grey that slowly tinges the colour from hair. It’s in the consciousness that delineates a present from a yesterday and a tomorrow. It’s in the knowledge that two people will show up at the same place simultaneously (or, depending on punctuality, thereabouts) when they agree upon a ‘time’ to do so. In all this evidence, however, it differs. They all describe ‘time’, but the concept of a simultaneous meeting is not the same as an agent of age, nor is the concept of changing from young to old the same as understanding the distinction between what one has experienced and still hopes to experience. The differences are not to be understood as dichotomous: they overlap, blur into multiplicity, trap each other in intertextuality.