Sorry: I know I keep quoting Leonard Cohen, but he is the soundtrack to my life.
As we begin to orient ourselves to the possibility of moving house I have begun to think about organising various papers, and chucking out the stuff I no longer need. As I do so I’m writing a kind of brief narrative, to make sense of the material I will be retaining, and possibly to provide some illumination where there will otherwise be silence. To call it an “autobiography” would be to give it excessive dignity.
Among the things I consigned to the bin today are reprints and photocopies of publications I collected in connection with a book I edited in 1983. Their future is beyond question, but it did seem to be strange to be consigning to the waste paper basket things that for so long seem to have served as a badge of my identity. It is tantamount to saying, publicly, “I am no longer a sociologist”. That almost seems like apostasy. (I’m still not sure whether it is true.)
Then, as I write, I find that it is often very hard indeed to be precise about dates and the ordering of events: but as I read over the draft I realise that I have made no mention of things that at the time appeared to be so very important. Curiously, it is often the emotional tone of experiences that survives more strongly in the memory than the details of exactly when or where they happened. It all seems so very long ago.
By coincidence tonight saw the opening of another exhibition at the South Square Centre (our local arts centre). The work of the current artist (Jennie Crawford) has to do centrally with memory, both personal and collective, and it was good to have the opportunity for conversation with her. Her exhibition moves between two kinds of loss–personal bereavement and the loss of a local community when its land was taken over for a dam. I was interested in the manner in which, both at a personal and a communal level, it has been the emotions and not the chronology that have continued to define the experience. Even when these things took place so very long ago, it is the emotion that survives and continues to define the person, the community and the place.