On Memory
Dry history, juicy history and sucking on a King Charles throat lozenge
Jim said that for him archaeology is an act of remembrance, even if you are remembering things you never consciously knew.
(Jim Leary reported in Time Song by Julia Blackburn, Jonathan Cape, 2019)
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I want to ensure my memories are not the objects of my unrequited love. It feels like I'm looking back into the past, yet it's all in front of me, hovering on the horizon. The mirage of memory is seductive. She shimmers hypnotically. Sometimes she's land above a lake; sometimes a deluge over dry land. She's a reference to what was, but she has her own story too. The danger is she will make me turn it all into a dream. But then a dangerous dream might be better than a safe life.
Could it be that delving into the past is simply an avoidance of the present; an elision of decline and death. Why dig into the histories of others I have only briefly or never even met? Isn't the present sufficient? The reconciliation of the conundrum is in the way the past manifests in the body. The answer as to whether history is healing lies in the aliveness and orientation of the body as it is now. Story can activate energy, open up perspective and lead to external action or internal reconciliation. At some point in these interconnected Substack essays I will write about a deadening experience of history; the numbness that comes from dry factuality. Dates when kings were killed on the battlefield. Lists of laws. Selective chronologies, selected by whom? I was taught that it was important to know the dates of the kings and queens of England, (Scotland was mentioned occasionally). King Charles the First will crop up, for reasons related to my father, but for now just to say he was enthroned in 1625 and was beheaded in 1649, following a civil war and overthrow of the monarchy by Oliver Cromwell. There was then a ten year interregnum until Charles the Second reasserted royal rule. Schoolboy history. Relatively interesting.
I was visiting a story-teller-writer friend, Dougie Strang, near Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire, and shared with him my thoughts on how history can be dry or juicy depending on presentation and narrative imagination. He proceeded to tell me about the time he visited the tiny Lochbroom Museum, in Ullapool, Scotland. He was browsing the relics, laid out with carefully hand written labels:
A fragment of sail from Nelson's ship HMS Victory; a cannon ball found on the field of Culloden; Bronze Age sickle found locally; 1821 whisky bottle; swords; sporrans; a fragment of 14th century chain mail; a scented pastille lozenge found in the coat worn by Charles I after his execution 1649.
The veracity of the claims of the provenance of these items is questionable. Though sporrans, swords and an 1821 whiskey bottle would not be for an Englishman to question. When the Lochbroom Museum closed down, I think in the 1990s, the Ullapool Museum inherited some of the items. I contacted a curator at the Ullapool Museum about the King Charles pastille lozenge. She got back to me swiftly.
Unfortunately I cannot say that we do have such an item, although it would be rather interesting if we did. We are the only museum in Ullapool, however it has been suggested in the past we have had other obscure items such as Napoleon's death mask.
We have inherited some of the old collection from the Lochbroom Museum. However, we don't have all of it, and there is a question mark over the provenance of the objects in that collection. Even the items we have, we have very little information on.
I believe we have the cannonball, however I have no evidence to suggest it was found at Culloden. We also have the chain mail, swords and a bronze age axe head that was found locally, which may be the item wrongly described as a Sickle (or the sickle hasn't been passed on to us).
Where did the pastille lozenge go? I imagine a tired curator at the old Lochbroom Museum with a sore throat. Maybe it is a blustery chilled dark winter evening. Economics has dictated the closure of this local depository of fact and fiction. 'It will become a gift shop with a cafe', they reflect. They browse the cabinets. Everything seems dusty. The handwritten labels are fading. The curator coughs, looks at the King Charles pastille, and thinks, 'why not?'. They take the mystery with them. They feel better. Only they know the scent.