Perhaps it's my age but I often find myself trying to piece together certain scenes from my childhood, that is trying by way of memory to recreate the sensations I experienced when I was, say eight years old. The feeling of watching television, at the time still a marvelously ingenious device, even if I had to spend sometime fiddling with the arial to get a reception; and the test-card transmission, and milk bottles with the foil caps, packets of monster-munch, the illicit thrill of Top of the Pops on a Thursday night (my Mum and Dad were young old-fogeys, they never had much time for pop music, we would go on expeditions to the Opera, an art form I have never enjoyed), roaming from newsagent to newsagent in search of the latest 8p Spiderman comic, with all those black and white reprints of Marvel madness. While deeply caught up in nostalgia/revie mode of affection for past things I realised that instead of these memories being conjured from the vapours and remaining intangible snaps of the past, that it was in fact me now that was in some strange sense the phantom in the scences I was trying to reimagine, a ghost from the future intruding on a life that is no longer accessible. I don't draw anything particularly profound from this, it was a curious slight of hand of consciousness, though to some extent I suppose it's possible to say that we don't contain memories that we can do with as we wish, so much as they contain us.
I think Bergson probabely says something about this kind of experience though I'm not absolutely sure.
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You have just GOT to have read Proust? Yes? I quote:
'It is doubtless the existence of our body, a kind of vessel in which our spirituality is contained, that leads us to suppose that all our interior possessions, our past joys, all our sufferings are perpetually in our possession....In any case, if they remain within us, it is most of the time in an unknown realm where they are of no use to us, and where even the most usual are repressed by memories which are of a different order and which excluse any simultaneity with them in consciousness.' (Sodom and Gommorrh.)
hello celia
no I haven't read Proust, I've sort of consigned Proust to the books I'll never read but who knows?
I think it's interesting and perhaps there are two explanations - either at some point I did read this as an excerpt, and completely forgot about it, but it did however leave some lasting impression on my brain, or (and I like this explanation better) because I have read alot of stuff by people who HAVE read Proust his ideas have sort of got decomposed and dispersed and swirled about, they then come back together again in my brain - either way it's interesting to think about how ideas are transmitted in culture, both alternatives show what an extraordinary thing our un/conscious processes are. I'm sure that without Proust I'd never have had this thought, although it appeared as spontaneously as it did.
and actually of course I missed the obvious that Proust was onto something true about our psychology, he mapped out the field, that we live, thrive and stumble around in as modern people, we don't need to have read him in a sense, we've already been pointed in this direction....
I've put some thoughts about Proust on my Blog, if it would be of interest. Look under Books - you must ignore all the patchwork and quilting stuff which I really must get round to putting on to a seperate Blog!
Very interested in what you say about Proust's influemce, as if his ideas and methods of exploring the human psyche had somehow entered into the collective unconsciousness of the West (in a Jungian sort of way).
Years ago I read Painter's biography of Proust but can't claim to remember it very well - have made mental note to revisit. But I'm now reading William C.Carter's Life of Marcel Proust (946 pages!), which has its faults but is a fascinating read.I've also got other,mercifully shorter and more succinct books, on the subject and what I come to realise is that trying to get to any deep understanding of Proust and his work is as impossible as trying to truly understand any individual human being. But, of course, it's the complexity, Proust's constant re-alignment of the prism, that fascinates and compels me on. And one useful thing which I believe anyone can gain from him is precisely that sense of the prismatic view of the world.
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