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Memory and Language

Most stories begin with an idea, an image, a moment. For my story, “A Riot,” it is a memory. 

I remember watching on a television screen in the corner of our office as people with their heads and faces covered spread out seemingly at random across London. There were enough of them to hold up the traffic and surround police cars. They waved in triumph at the cameras. We might have made jokes about it between ourselves, nervously, uncomprehending, because the implications were so strange. But still, at the end of the day, we went out as normal into the city to walk home or find a pub. This was something that was happening to other people, in other places somehow, no matter how close.

I remember looking down from the window of our flat late on that hot summer night as more and more people gathered in the road outside the block, standing together, drinking and laughing and shouting. They weren’t doing anything more than I had been earlier in the evening in the pub, and yet there was an intensity to it and an uncertainty that was new and frightening. A sense that we had been complacent and nothing might be as we had trusted.

This is all. A glimpse of something threatening just out of reach. After three or four days, the streets cleared and the nights returned to calm, even though the idea that it could happen again has, of course, remained. But several years later, I wonder if my memories of those days could be any more solid than the order that the rioting seemed set to upturn. How close could it all really have been? Did anyone in the street glance up to see the curtains moving? Was the night even so hot? The memories exist now only in the telling. And this is also the process of writing. 

It feels wonderful that experience might be changed as it is taken into language, so that it might become something new altogether. The exceptional events or ideas that can be made tangible through their handling in words. Or equally the places and ideas that might seem unremarkable at first but that we can exalt through the way we speak about them. We say what we think we have seen, and—with luck—in the mingling of language and ideas there might be overlooked, lost spaces too. Gaps to let something else that wasn’t there before, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.” These are the materials that we all have to work with, whether we are talking together, thinking, or writing. These are the things that make us. Precarious memory and sly, beautiful language.