Dis-membering and re-membering - November 2011
At a Playback Theatre conference in 1992, my dear friend and mentor Tarquam McKenna took a workshop concerning the dis-membering that is repaired when we re-member. I acknowledge and thank him for this insight which I continue to carry with me and to turn over and over in my mind and heart.
Recently I attended three remembrance events in England, clustered around the 11th of November.
The first re-membering, ancient worlds 11/11/11
On that day, four of us packed into a little car and made our escape from London, through the endless caterpillars of traffic. We arrived at Stonehenge 15 minutes before it ‘opened’ though it was wide wide open to the fields and to the sky as we drove over the brow of the hill – clustered miraculously still, a conclave of wise beings beneath a grey gold sky.
After we made the procession around it, anti-clockwise as the guide encourages you to do, pausing often to notice the skylarks, rooks, movement and emptiness of that great site, we agreed that near 11 past 11, we would stop the car on our drive to Glastonbury and simply make our action of remembering wherever we found ourselves.
We slipped into one of those narrow car-stopping places where big trucks and other vehicles whipped past in the luminous morning and plunged off diagonally over a stubbly field to a copse of trees on the hilltop. A cold wind was blowing and the earth was full of flint: I bent over and found a flake and another of our party found a worked arrow head, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old.
We came to a grassy farm track and the four of us stopped there – we sang
“they’re rolling out the guns again hooroo hooroo
They’re rolling out the guns again – but they’ll never take our kids again
No they’ll never take our kids again, Johnny I’m swearing to you”
My son who was with us held out his big arm with a digital watch on his wrist – 11 – 11 on 11 – 11, we all saw the numbers click over. A long long pause. The wind whipped our hair, the world stood still. My parents and their generation were strongly with us; I mentioned the great uncle for whom my father was named, a boy of 17 who lost his life on the Somme – and my grandfather who was deranged by being a doctor in the 1914-18 war. We, now, are still part of those wars, formed by them but in the silence, all of war and peace seemed to pass around, through, before, behind us.
We sang as the moment ended of its own accord and we walked back to the car, “all we are saying is give peace a chance, all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
A second re-membering and riotous recounting, 12/11/11.
I am named for a female friendship: my first name belongs to another family and my second to my mother. On the 12th of November, we had a party – the three daughters from that family along with our little party of myself, my son and the friends who had made this occasion happen by suggesting we come to Oxford at this time, who were taking care of us and having us to stay in their wonderful working flat in Jericho, by the side of the muddy river where I heard ducks quack faintly through the double glazing at all hours of the day and night.
We walked to a tall Oxford house through the chill evening and came into a brilliant and riotous world where many of us talked non-stop at the same time for three hours. It was just as I remembered when we would drive up from Hamilton to Auckland and arrive at the big black house on the slopes of Maungakiekie – lavish and simple at the same time, beautiful and luminous, full of laughter and sometimes suddenly tears might prickle at the insides of my eyelids. We toasted the five parents of our families, all dead now, and the four siblings who were in other parts of this world. The three parents of our family and the two of theirs were fast friends and we explored all kinds of speculations and wonderings about them and their secret lives over the years. It seemed miraculous that the four of us should all be alive in this place and time, so many years afterwards.
Course succeeded sumptuous course and glass after glass of wine was savoured and all this human care and artistry added up to beauty. Misunderstandings and unhappinesses fell away. We mourned the distance of the oldest of each family, the two brothers, yet I saw vividly how happy we all would have been if either of them had walked into the room: as I said so, those two worldly men seemed to me to look into the room, I saw their faces, sceptical, resistant, tolerant, appalled, amused.
A third re-membering, wisdom of 700 years 13/11/11
Suicide has lived in my family: my mother’s first husband, is said to have killed himself at the end of the war against fascism. I can’t remember ever being told of this – his picture lived on the wall and I knew that he had killed himself because of the war. (My mother told me that for those first months, she believed he had been killed by the British Army because he was so outspoken about the shortcomings of his commanding officers, but that is another story.)
It is a slow-motion explosion, suicide; an unanswerable remark that continues to reverberate down the generations. All bear some of its weight, some bear more than others.
I looked a few years ago, at one of his schools, for his name on the war memorial board but found with a shock that he was not there. Indeed, I have never seen his name on a war memorial in New Zealand. But my friend who works at Merton College in Oxford said to me that I should think of coming there this year for the War Remembrance on the Sunday nearest the 11th November, and somehow that seemed a thing to do, since I was coming to Europe anyway in November, in this first year of my freedom from full time employment.
So I found myself, on Sunday 13th November, with my older son and this clever intuitive friend, waiting in the archway between two quadrangles, where I saw that his name appears with those who died in the 39 – 45 war. How much this says about Merton as a seven hundred year old community of thinkers!
We got there early and stood around in the sun streaming through the archway, as people arrived in dribs and drabs: the chaplain in black dress, a young man with a trumpet and music stand, the distinguished warden and his equally distinguished wife who had been deputy principal of a difficult urban school. Finally the simple service started and the boy played the trumpet, bringing other students out from their rooms to watch from near or far.
I remembered how as children we used to look for the Last Post player in the bush up behind the cenotaph in Hamilton and try to put him off – there was an urban myth that if you showed a lemon, he would be unable to play. This would have been when I was about six, in 1955. With a shock I realise that was only ten years after the war. We never thought really what it was about except when I would wake up in my narrow room that had been a sunporch, in a grey autumn dawn and hear the awful crunch crunch of the march at the Dawn Parade and feel a hand of pure horror reach out for me. I would turn over and burrow into my warm bed and try to forget whatever it was.
Now though, I let myself be with what was happening and feel what was being said; no longer resisting it or seeing it as glorifying war but simply grieving for the young people who went and never came back. A rock of pain was lodged in my throat and on my chest. I felt I might cry and never stop crying as we stood together for a long moment of silence. At the end a different trumpet call was played, one waking us up again to a world we share.
We can’t bring them back – what has happened has happened. But some of the dis-membering we may be able to repair and it seems to me we do it when communities assemble to bear pain together. We put back the pieces of ourselves and lean on one another. Time is so short yet healing is long and patient and will wait for us.
