Dust In The Wind
A week or so back, I was talking about a trio of Spike Milligan books I had found and read sometime around 1980. They were old then but they were still quite amusing. There was Puckoon, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall and another one. Fans will know there are many more but the same amount of people will also be saying ‘Who is Spike Milligan?’ Such is the way pop-culture goes in ever decreasing circles.
Anyway, my friend Martin rounded up his copies of said Milligan books and handed them over for me to re-read, which I did (or at least skirted through them) and they were OK, but that’s all they were. Once upon a time I would have told you they were funny as hell, now I’d tell you they were dated and I didn’t laugh much and I would be right on both counts.
I keep nothing. I am the worst kind of archivist of my own life. I’ve treated everything that came my way like food to be eaten and enjoyed in the moment and then wandered off in search of fresh nutrients with no need to be reminded of the meals that had crossed my path.
But some people, most people even, like reminders of where they’ve been. Books from childhood, ornaments, trinkets, postcards and photographs, albums, furniture and keepsakes. Neither is correct or incorrect, it’s nothing more than an observation.
But it does beg the question, does NOT keeping things make me feel rootless or free?
The intention is to make me feel free and I think it works. I don’t feel rootless - my roots are intact and are nailed to a particular village, river and castle where I grew up. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to stay there my whole life but if pushed, I would tell you that’s were my roots are. There’s a few things I regret along the way I guess but they’re not things I ever bought, they’re things I wrote and somehow mislaid. A whole novel called Bubblegum Hearts for one. I don’t know if it was any good but it was finished sometime in 1994 and I have no idea what happened to it. There’s some old lyric books that would be interesting to see now too along with poetry and notebooks full of ideas but somewhere along the way, I decided that none of it was of any use if it never turned into the thing I thought it should be. So, some song lyrics are just words in a book if they never got to be written into a song. An opening chapter to a good idea that was never turned into a whole book was useless to me. It’s like having potatoes in the vegetable drawer and crying over not having cottage pie for dinner.
I’m hoping it says that my creativity moves forwards rather than sits in a tea-chest full of items that could have been something. At some point, I’ve obviously tried to train myself (or punish myself) into thinking that if the thing I’ve been working on never becomes the thing I had envisioned, then what was the point? Rightly or wrongly, I seem to have conditioned myself to avoid the literary one night stand.
Which is the long way of saying, I don’t understand why so many people I know keep things. When you die, somebody like me will come along and throw it all in the trash. I’d find it exhausting to keep track of so much stuff, so to answer an earlier question, I really do find freedom in being like this.
But maybe that’s what pop-culture is. An everlasting war between the people who keep things that enable us to map the past and those of us who simply keep moving in order to find the next thing of importance (I use the term ‘importance’ very loosely here indeed).
If we take a look at where we stand right now and I’m talking about the internet here, there is hardly anything that’s not archived in some way. We are quite literally, drowning in the archives of culture, so busy reliving the past on a daily basis, that nobody is particularly interested in creating the future. Thus, consuming the meal and leaving the restaurant is surely the smart way to be in 2025. I don’t need photographs and shelves full of books and albums because I paid such close attention at the time, it’s already mapped into my DNA.
But sometimes, because I’m human, I do wish I’d kept a few things. When the inevitable day comes that I never want to think about, I’ll keep Hector’s collar but I don’t know why. We’ve spent every single day of his life together, so I’m sure not going to forget what he was like. I sometimes wish I had some of my old guitars but they weren’t as good as the guitars I have now, so that’s silly. Maybe I’d just like to look at them for five minutes?
Maybe that’s why I write. Not to be remembered, but to actually remember. To pull a thread through one day and tie it to another. The rest can rot in the attic or vanish in a skip for all I care. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done that feels like it might stand the test of time.
Then again...
