What I Remember🔗

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so.

Frederic Bartlett, Remembering, 1932

An earlier version of this page (still accessible on the Web if you know where to look) discussed something that may have happened on a street in Toronto in 1986.

That story – my madeleine, if you will – led, if one clicked the right links, to various parts of a nonlinear memoir of my school days, through which one could wander at random. People seemed to like it.

Events in 2010 led me to question the accuracy of my memories, and some of the writing was fifteen years old, so I took it all down. That madeleine was a song being sung by buskers. I have the original song on my laptop and phone, and when it comes up on random shuffle, I remember that time on the street (which may not have happened), and the times before and after (which may not have happened, either).

Maybe all memory is suspect. Maybe all perception is suspect. I’ve long known that I would make a terrible legal witness (thankfully that has never been tested). But the recording of the music sounds the same (maybe slightly better, because I have better equipment now). What has changed is my reaction to it, and what perhaps faulty memories it evokes.

So I thought I might design a memoir around the music itself, which has always been important to me. There are at least three distinct levels: what was happening when it was released, how and when I first came to love it, and how I relate to it now. I might remember some phases in between. While the writing is centred on the music, I will of course talk about myself in the past, and some people I knew.

I won’t hide it away this time, so you don’t have to stumble into a secret garden. I’m pretty sure almost no one will be looking at it anyway. You have a few choices as to how to proceed. You can start with my new madeleine, not the same song but a related one. You can start at the earliest chapter. Or you can, in the spirit of the earlier memoir, wander around using any year links that you can find. It’s also formatted a little better this time.

There are no direct links to audio or video of any of the music. I don’t use streaming services; I have CD or vinyl rips of what I’m discussing. You probably have your own favourite way to listen to music, and can easily locate anything that piques your interest.