We Are Memory

If you Google pre-natal nostalgia, all you get in return is stuff relating to one's experience in the womb; but I came across a reference to what I would recognise the term to signify in this week's Times Literary Supplement, in a review of Darren Coffield's new book "Queen's of Bohemia", by Libby Purves. My understanding and experience of the concept of pre-natal nostalgia, is a sensation of harking back to a time and culture that predates one's own birth. A nostalgia for a time, place and context one couldn't rationally say one actually knew. But here's the thing. I actually believe in collective, innate memory: call it folk memory, ancestral or cellular memory; whatever.

We are, like all other species, programmed by the experiences of our forebears well into the distant past, and we react to triggers afforded by our environment, so deeply embedded as to be completely innate and subconscious: we react to external threat completely instinctively, for instance: our fears are largely primordial in nature. Of course, fifty years ago when I was at college, this would have been viewed as absolute heresy against the established Marxian norms then prevailing. But bollocks to that, as I was frequently at pains to state in seminars at the time. I am a socialist at heart, and I never felt then as a youth, that the prevailing intellectual debate on the left as it was, did any great service to the cause of social equality; preferring rather to discourse the glaringly obvious in terms whose abstruseness confuses me even to this day.

But my point is that I've long felt that there is another layer to life that exists in the liminal spaces between generations that is less deeply embedded than cellular memory, but nevertheless exists in the mind: I have a strong memory from childhood in the form of a recurring dream I had for two or three years when I was in infant's school, back in the 1950's. It consisted of my being in a cellar during an air-raid in WWII, more than a decade before I was born. The reason I have always felt this to be significant is that in the dream I was older - a teenager, maybe - and that, at that time, I would not have been exposed to the kind of imagery that I experienced in the dream, night after night, in my early childhood, as I had never been to see a movie, and movies were seldom seen on TV, which was minimal to say the least in those days. Where this dream emanated from in one so young is anyone's guess, 'But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy...' You only know what you know...