On memory and truth

Another four-day weekend, the last of the year. Today is Fronleichnam aka Corpus Christi. I slept in this morning until after 10am, by which time it was already 28° and very humid, so I shall stay indoors until the cool of the evening. [Updated at 18:06] there might not be any cool this evening: it clouded over and is now raining, in that slow, sparse and very deliberate way of summer rains after a too-long spell of heat and humidity: big, fat, slowly-moving, somehow oily-feeling drops.

There is a smell of honey on the air today, very odd; until I worked out that it is probably the smell of clover blooming somewhere for the first time this year. Perhaps I shall go looking sniffing for it this evening.

Dale posted a moving story on Tuesday about ... well, read it and see (please); and read the comments too, they are also very interesting. I have three times now started to write a response to that post, about my childhood, which I believe to have been eventless and happy; but have three times been stopped by doubts and half-memories. What do I really remember, and what is a story that I've heard or invented?

More to the point: are my memories, these stories, "true" in the sense that others would acknowledge them to be correct? Each sibling grows up in a different household, my sister's account would be substantially different from mine.

My favourite cousin and I talk often about this, about the way her father was perceived within and without the family; and also about our grandfather. My mother says that our grandfather was a saint, calm and peaceful and gentle. FC's mother (his daughter-in-law) says that he beat our grandmother and terrorized his children. Whose version is true?*

FC's father is another case in point: I cannot remember him other than happy, optimistic, friendly; their house was always full of visitors, of laughter and music and good food. When he was buried, on a day so cold that the gravediggers needed to drill holes and plant explosives to open a grave, four hundred people stood in the Prairie wind for his funeral. Think about that for a moment, you dwellers in warm lands: how long would you stand for whom at -50°C? So we may infer that he was well-liked and respected in the community; and a farming community does not bestow its respect lightly.

Yet FC says the same of him that her mother said of our grandfather: he beat his kids and their mother, was vindictive and cruel and - worst of all, I feel - inconsistent: his favour was as fickle as Queen Elizabeth's, and what was laughed off on Tuesday might be punishable on the weekend.

Yet again, her brother, the youngest child, saw nothing of this. His description is closer to mine: he remembers a happy and gentle man who liked to sing. (In fairness I haven't spoken with him nearly as often or as openly as with FC.)

Can this be the same man?

Perhaps what we think of as "character" is just what we believe to be the motivation underlying the behaviour we observe.

Perhaps there is no such thing as a single, fixed, definite and stable identity, and psychology is barking up the wrong dead horse.

Perhaps we are all simultaneously Mother Theresa and Genghis Khan, always choosing to express just one part of ourselves and denying the others; not unlike a father picking favourites among his children.

(On the other hand, this is mostly harmless, we aren't talking about Belgium. How many things are wrong with that picture?)



* I know whom I most believe: my mother. FC's mother is a (familyname), they have been for generations a hissing and a byword in the community, and still are. If your plough goes missing overnight, you'll find it in (familyname)'s field; if there's a drunken brawl in the tavern, you'll find a (familyname) in the thick of it.