Finding Out of the Dead Lands

Finding Out of the Dead Lands

by Conrad Kemp

 Because I can’t remember the things that I want to remember, I trust that my body might remember them for me. Ways of being and existing, internalising the paintings and lectures and conversations, the books and bits, and the moments observed as I have driven or walked through cities, towns, wherever. There is ego in my desire to quote people and tell stories with accuracy and meaning but I have learned to care less about that. My father could not remember anything by the time he died. His children, his wife, his best friend, their names, how to use a toilet, how to shave, how to speak, how to fasten a button or how to eat. His brain had forgotten how to turn food, the little that he ate, into nutrition.

 I do remember his body, late at night, clean and neat at the care facility: the crying nurse, the white cloth that kept his jaw in place, tied in a bow above the crown of his head. I also remember that I enjoyed visiting him until the day he died, surrounded by dementias and madness and stink. His greatest example to me was who he was after he developed his dementia. Eight years in which his mind lost almost everything. He was a fine father, in his underpants, shitting on the floor. I mean that. And so I thought less about memory as a measurement of facts and names and language, and more about how we remember. Where we remember. In ourselves, that is, how we are or how we try to be. The anxiety of proving a lexicon of valued memories is pointless alongside the being of a lifetime of considered conversations, experiences, observations, lessons, laid down in ourselves like the strata of the earth. Humanity, I suppose, although that word may be too laden with specificity and and too unchangeable for the accumulation I hope might happen by the time I die. What value does a memory have if it is only detail, only what is said, passed on in words alone? How easily it can be revised for no reason other than boredom or frustration.

I think about memory and memories, remembering and forgetting, a lot. And because remembering (etc.) is both within us and outside of us, ossuaries both alive and dead, born and built, these notions are infinitely complex and span time and space, subjectivity and objectivity, reliability and doubt, responsibility and recklessness, freedom and incarceration, limitation and release, erosion and accumulation, barrenness and fertility, identity. Ghosts. Transience. Multiple truths.

There was a half-life in (to?) my father’s dementia. Not a reduced life (although that is probably also as true as it is not) but a halving and halving again of his capacity to recollect and speak, the corrosion of an isotope, a shortening and breaking down of memory in time. I cannot use words like ‘collapse’ because in my remembering of him, I see hard packed earth loosened and then eroded, drip by drip, until only bedrock remained: exposed, brutal, resolute and, yes, beautiful. Human before the apple and after the fall and somehow, in some ways, better for both. 

The cards I wrote on his behalf, to my mother, on birthdays and anniversaries, I always wrote in his presence. In the beginning I would ask him what he wanted me to write and together we would cobble it together, his impulse crystal clear, but the convention increasingly unavailable. The last time I asked him what he wanted to say, he only managed the words, “I wish.” Though the wish was his, every pulse and incitement was towards my mother and his love and care for her. We often wish things for our loved ones. However, some portion of that wish is usually for ourselves, our comfort in their comfort or their benefit. My father had lost this aspect of self-awareness, the selfishness that can censor the heart, not to spare someone pain but to spare ourselves our own true selves. Sometimes it meant my father could tumble into frustration or violence. But it also meant his generosity and warmth seemed to come from the very centre of his earth. Eventually I didn’t ask him what he wanted to say. I just told him what I was doing. He sat next to me every time as I wrote. Sometimes he patted my back. Nodded. Smiled. Participated, knowing something significant was happening. His presence was necessary. His presence had more and more value, until at last the presence of his absence would have value.

Thinking about remembering is important to me. It is my finest, most reliable thread to understanding.

However, this is not why I wrote Out of the Dead Lands. I did not sit down to write about things that are important to me. That is a damning admission, no doubt, but true. When I started writing this, I did not think about what I was writing. Nor did I think I was writing a book. In 2005 Harold Pinter said, “In each case I had no further information.” I took him at his word because he was accepting a Nobel Prize. He was talking about his own plays that were engendered only by a single line. Nothing more. That is how I started writing what is now Out of the Dead Lands. Two separate moments, with no further information. The one, an image of cables slipping between roof-tiles; and the other, the name of a derelict man I had spoken to in Muizenberg, Cape Town. Nothing more than starting points for two separate writing exercises with no particular end in sight and none sought. If anything, the two pieces of writing angled themselves loosely towards an allegorical examination of humans consuming humans, economically, sexually, socially, politically. But this was idle, peripheral scratching at an unexamined theme. Collateral to practice. The simultaneity of those processes, however, drew their respective characters into a shared orbit until they collided and that collision began to reveal the central concepts that later became Out of the Dead Lands. They shared, it seemed, an unidentifiable corrosion or corruption in their worlds. They also shared stoicism although rooted in different ends. They mediated their present experiences through memories. They mediated themselves, their accrued value, through memories. They were habitual human beings - both relied on ritual - and yet both found themselves slipping from the familiar and needing to redefine their own ideas of themselves. They both felt dislocated, even in places they knew intimately. They were both encountering their own transience in, at first, insidious and, eventually, traumatic ways. And these shared things emerged without any intent on my part.

Both pieces of writing also revealed sets of imagery and symbolism that I had not consciously considered. Birds, for example, became an important barometric image, and the concept of augury, unobserved most of the time, became a repeated reference. Similarly, the ocean (and ocean-going) featured prominently, suggestions of currents and winds, of desolation and the inevitable. Stars and light, newspapers, trees and language - untranslated, imperfectly used, like my father’s aphasic communication - have all become important symbolic and narrative tools in the book, revealed to me through the process of writing. Displacement as a prominent and constant theme also emerged, as did the related theme of ‘ghostliness’.

But most tellingly, the writing and the characters, caught perhaps in my own unconscious currents steered me towards the considerations of memory and remembering, and forgetting. The symbology, the structure of the book- all rooted themselves in considerations of my father and his memory, his dismemberment, his reconstitution. But the book is not about my father. It is not a memoir nor a reflection of him. It is a novel, a work of fiction, possibly a ghost story, probably a mystery, and definitely a portrait of a time and place. Its musculature, however, is composed of considerations first encountered by me in the presence (and in the presence of the gradual and eventual absence) of my dad.

I do not know what the opposite of memory is. Perhaps it is oblivion. Perhaps there is no opposite, just a differently remembered memory, or a memory remembered in a different way. The absence of a memory is not the opposite of a memory. Just as absence is not always the opposite of presence. Being in the presence of absence, especially in a country such as South Africa, can be a powerful realisation.

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 Out of the Dead Lands is a collection of one story. Or a book with a half-life, like an isotope, like a memory. Or  it’s a field, waiting for some rain.