I Sit and Meanwhile Back

Allegro

There are things I can no longer remember, and this is what troubles me now, not in the manner of a man attempting to recover lost details for the sake of completeness, but in the way of one who has begun to suspect that forgetting itself is the principal condition of his life and that what he calls memory is only the uneven resistance of certain images to that larger erosion which proceeds without design or malice, removing first the names and then the faces and then the connections between them until at last even the sense that anything was once coherent is gone, and yet Penny Lane remains, or what I call Penny Lane because I no longer trust even the name, since names are only conveniences for calling back what otherwise would refuse to return, and I cannot explain why it is that this particular place persists when others, places far more significant by any reasonable accounting of human importance, have vanished almost entirely, so that I cannot now recall the arrangement of rooms in which my father died, nor the rattle of his breathing in the last weeks, nor even the colour of the house in which I was born, while still I can see the rain sliding down the glass of the barber shop window as though it were not something remembered but something still occurring somewhere beyond the reach of time, and I say barber shop though I cannot remember the barber’s name and am not entirely certain I ever knew it, only that he stood among those photographs which covered the walls in increasing density as the years passed, faces upon faces, men and boys and boys who would become men and men who had once been boys, all arranged in a kind of silent congregation whose order no longer mattered because the distinctions between them had begun to fail, so that the living and the dead appeared to occupy the same surface, differing only in the fading of the sepia emulsion, as with dirty jokes and rough diagrams on the walls of public urinals, and I would enter the shop, or believe I entered it, and find myself drawn in a proleptic vision toward one photograph in particular, though I cannot say now what was in it that compelled me, since I have lost the features entirely and retain only the fact of my attention, the repeated turning of my gaze toward that point on the wall as though some private gravity existed there independent of the image itself, and I was young then, or younger than I am now, which is the only measure that remains stable, though even that stability is suspect, and each time I entered I would look again without intending to look, the way one returns repeatedly to a gap in the mouth with the tongue not out of curiosity but out of necessity, until the image itself dissolved while the habit of looking remained, and I do not know whether this young man existed or whether he is the consequence of that habit (the best remedies for which, we were solemnly instructed by the priests and the Baden Powell acolytes, were fresh air and exercise to stave off any inclination toward “beastliness”), whether memory, refusing to tolerate absence, invented him as a centre around which all this otherwise incoherent persistence might arrange itself, for there are other figures I remember in the lane — the banker sitting in his motorcar in the rain as though waiting were itself a vocation, the children laughing behind him though I can no longer be certain whether it was always the same children or whether time has compressed many into one perpetual laughter, the pretty nurse beneath her shelter selling poppies from a tray while the roundabout turned endlessly around her, the fireman, who in his pocket kept a portrait of the Queen, carrying his hourglass as though time could be borne in the hand and inspected, and I cannot now separate what I saw from what I was told I saw, nor what I have repeated to myself so often that it has acquired the authority of fact, and perhaps none of it occurred as I now recall it, perhaps there was no hourglass, perhaps there was no singular banker, perhaps even the rain has been exaggerated by repetition until it fills the entire space of the memory like a clean machine, but still the barber remains, or the idea of the barber, standing among his photographs as though preserving them were an act capable of resisting the larger disappearance that is always underway, and it is this, I think, that has fixed Penny Lane within me, not its events, which were likely ordinary in every respect, but the fact of its attempted preservation, the way the photographs accumulate against the walls as memory accumulates against itself, failing always in the same direction, and I find now that I cannot think of the lane without also thinking of the young man, though I cannot remember his face, and I cannot remember his name, and I cannot even be certain there was only one, yet still I return to him as though he were the hinge upon which all the rest depends, and perhaps he is not a person at all but only the shape left behind when everything else has been removed, the remainder that memory cannot reduce further without collapsing entirely, and so I continue to search, not because I expect to find him, but because the searching itself has become indistinguishable from remembering, and Penny Lane, if it can still be said to exist anywhere except in this act, exists only there, in the pressure of that unanswered question which time has not resolved but only deepened, so that even now, after so many years, I cannot say whether I am remembering the lane or merely remembering that I cannot stop remembering it like some velveteen-collared Ted or a guitar with cello-style f-shaped sound holes sounding eternally fading Buddy Holly E’s and D’s and B7’s on the northbound railway line plummeting from Edge Hill to the Lime Street terminus and its four of fish and finger pies, wet beneath the blue suburban skies.