Near the end of The Waste Land, after wandering through a dissonant collection of allusions, memories, and thoughts, T.S. Eliot writes “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. This is what memories are to me, lost fragments sprinkled over the desert landscape of time. They are small shards stripped of context and detail that I gather and arrange in order to construct meaning, in order to shore them against the ruins of my identity. They have no meaning of their own, which is why it is so difficult to write about, to try and create a narrative for these memories of mine. I feel as Graham did in Sex, Lies, and Videotape when Ann asks him to explain why he is who he is. He replies, “Am I supposed to recount all the points in my life leading up to this moment, and just hope that it’s coherent, that it makes some sort of sense to you? It doesn’t make any sense to me and I was there”. My memories do not comprise any meaningful narrative and instead are like the glimpsed scenes of a vivid dream, unexplainable and overwhelming. And any act of writing, of storytelling is a lie, as it converts the ephemeral and nonsensical into the permanent and ordered. In recounting my memories I betray them, everything about them: their texture which is unexplainable, their context which is lost in time, and their content which is too powerful. How can Graham possibly explain himself to Ann and how can I possibly write memoirs? Any non-fiction piece about my own life is an inspired invention, a polished hallucination that I have created in order to give the reader and myself what we truly we want, what we need, that is narrative, reason, cause and effect. As Didion explained, “We tell ourselves stories to live”.
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