Memory = Society

Been over to Waunfawr for a couple of hours this evening to join our old mate John Latham at the place he's rented for an extended 80th birthday this week: a pleasant two hours spent in convivial company with members of the Brummie diaspora, many of us unknown to each other but with friends in common - a complex Venn diagram mostly centred on the Kings Heath and Moseley areas of Birmingham in the late 60s and early 70s, of student flats and parties, piss-ups and communism. It never ceases to amaze me how an individual life's influence fans out exponentially into the world: butterfly-wingbeat ripples that touch and influence different and often mutually unaware social groupings that each take with them their own memories of that person into their personal histories.

Tonight I met a small group of people who all knew a once good friend of mine, Neil Burr;  now sadly gone these last few years, and who all were taken aback that I too knew the man; back when I was a teenager and a friend of his youngest brother, Pete. The common thread running through our mutual memories of Neil was what a nice bloke he was, and how annoyingly good looking he was to boot. The thing is that this is how society operates, or at least should: myriad, inter-related groupings and crossovers of people and relationships: a common heritage binding the small to the large.

Take the Brummie diaspora alone. Spread across not just the UK, but out into the wider world: like many from large cities, they all came from effectively small villages within those cities, and like villages in rural areas, each has its own cast of characters and its stories, and each will have its own Venn diagram of overlapping connections and histories that sometimes just touch and yet sometimes connect in a mutuality of direct memory. All of this is important to my generation where the power of memory is often fading; but it should be of greater importance still to those following on behind us, whose lives and relationships seem to be increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the mediation of technology.

The power of conversation in making and reinforcing memory is paramount: the repetition of commonly-held stories is still key to the survival of society: the mere sharing of memes is a rabbit-hole that leads to an alternate reality where society will ultimately discombobulate due to the lack of the connective tissue that is actual, shared, reinforced memory. In pre- and non- literate societies, common, oft-repeated stories bind them together over centuries or millennia: where we are headed in this post-literate, ultra-connected-but-not-really-connected era, the deity-of-your-choice only knows.