Writing stuff down
Nov 9th, 2008 by Anne-Marie
Helen Garner’s essay collection The feel of steel has been republished by Picador this year and it brings forth again her lovely piece “Woman in a green mantle”. Garner’s work holds appeal for archives trgaics in something like the way that Janet Malcolm’s does. Wide and acute observation is bound to bring out, somewhere along the line, insights about the records and record-creation parts of our lives.
“Woman in a green mantle” offers a lot to think about. This is where Garner quotes Philip Larkin, that “the urge to preserve is the basis of all art”. It is also where she describes her life-long diary and note-keeping habits, and the shelves of “battered old notebooks stuffed with inconsequential factoids” that have accumulated as a result. She never opens the notebooks once they are finished, but can’t bring herself to destroy them either.
The bit that leaped out to make me smile is this. Garner quotes one of Cormac McCarthy’s “enviably inarticulate modern cowboys” saying somwhere: “You write everythin down, pretty soon you don’t remember nothin.”
Compare that to master-archivist Hilary Jenkinson, who says that archives begin with “the preservation of pieces of writing as a convenient form of artificial memory.”
The cowboy has arrived at a similar insight as the besuited archivist, although there is a hint from the cowboy that he thinks that writing, ultimately, empties your head.
There could be something in that. Better write it down.
2 Responses to “Writing stuff down”
Lest we remember? The history teacher in THE HISTORY BOYS would agree that when you write something down — in his case, engrave it on a war memorial — you’re getting ready to forget it: you’ve laid the dead to rest, so to speak. I had to think of that when I saw NOT FORGOTTEN on SBS on Remembrance Day. Throughout the programme, narrator/protagonist Mark Lee (yes, that’s right, the forgotten actor from GALLIPOLI), busies himself with names: touching them with his hands on the memorial, scribbling them into his notebook, passing them on to distant relatives, dragging them out of archived newspapers etc. The programme ends with the adding of a name to a Mosman memorial, in a proper little ceremony, priest and all. After that, we can turn off the telly, pat ourselves on the back: done that, bought the poppy, said, “lest we forget”.
Note to self. I must read Mrs Garner’s essays! Perhaps I should write that down somewhere…
So, the flurry of First World War ‘memory work’ in recent years, and leading up to 2014/15, shows that we fear that we will forget; especially as the ‘last diggers’ die.
An acquaintance of mine, an elderly woman, told me recently that the name of a relative of her husband has just been added to a local war memorial in country NSW. This was 90 years after the soldier’s death. Clearly it meant quite a bit to her. Researching the names on the memorial, she told me, is ’so interesting, and so sad’. A simple thought, but so obviously true. Seeing a name added to a memorial still has significance in a personal way, for some people.