Memory

A theme that turned up in the election campaign was the question of who wants to go forward and who wants to go back. Each of the main parties claimed the other is more interested in going back than forward. The parties hold that 'forward' is the right choice of direction.

This is a useless discussion, since forward is the only choice we have as human beings. We can look back and relive moments in our pasts, sometimes vividly, and while this ability is often a blessing, it can also be a curse. People who cannot forget - tragedy, loss, trauma - will tell you they would give a lot to lay aside the horrors of their past lives. We can attempt to repeat experiences from the past - those that seemed powerful, happy or effective - but in practice this can disappoint. Too often, for example, we cannot repeat the joyous memories of a wonderful holiday. We go back, but the place or the people do not seem to live up to our expectations. Perhaps nostalgia is about erasing the inevitable pain in the process of memory.

So there is a shadow side to most things. And just as there is a shadow, there is also light too, even when their darkness seems almost to blot us out. People can have great memories of war time - of the comradely bubble in which they lived then, not invaded by the anarchy and chaos outside. We can remember both the good and bad, for different reasons. As we get older we can crave a return to some particular experience, environment or relationship that now seems bathed in the warm glow of a filtered light bulb. What we remember of the past is just that - a unique personal record, filtered through the moods, states of being and other experiences we had. In this sense, memory is never accurate.  It cannot be 'the real experience' - only our particular experience.

Knowing this, we still associate certain places forever with the sparkling moments of our lives. I remember one such. Finding myself in New Mexico with a few days to spare, I drove in a hired car high into the Sangre De Cristo mountains in search of the old home of D H Lawrence the writer. Lawrence's travels had taken him far from his natural home country in Nottinghamshire, across oceans and continents, but in this remote and staggeringly beautiful landscape, it seems he found a home, which for a brief time gave him the peace he craved to write. It seems as though a desire to get away from his roots, his own landscape and cloying family relationships, drove him into a bigger world with less narrow ideas, where he and Frieda could pursue their lives in whatever way seemed best to them. I could understand that because I had had experiences of my own of a similar ilk. I was there because of it - always wanting to see more, do more while there was yet time. The Lawrences hadn't much money, but a determined local culture pursuivant, Mabel Dodge Luhan, had invited them to stay in her cabin up there, and they spent 5 months in 1924. Well, she didn't so much invite them as banish them there, when their stay in her home in Taos turned sour.  But she had begged them to come to Taos, where she and others of her mind were planning the rebirth of western civilisation. It seems a rather a large project to our minds (!), but in those days, and in that place, not so much. To achieve this goal she attracted cultural icons of the likes of Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Steiglitz, Thomas Wolfe, and from further field, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Leopold Stokowski.

There is a painting by O'Keeffe called 'Under the Lawrence Tree' where he sat and wrote. During that summer, Lawrence completed his short novel 'St Mawr', in which he celebrates the special quality and landscape of the Kiowa Ranch. He also wrote his biblical drama 'David' and parts of 'The Plumed Serpent' during his last visit to the ranch in 1925. New Mexico itself figures in other essays and stories like 'The Woman Who Rode Away.'

This older photograph I unearthed gives a better impression of the place as I saw it, several decades ago, than the more upmarket version readied for the tourists in recent years. Even now it remains remarkably untouched despite everything, served by an old man who knew the three women in Lawrence's story of those days: Frieda, Mabel and Dorothy Brett, the woman who stayed with them in the adjoining small cabin. Frieda Lawrence, in her memoirs in 1939, remarked that a stream of visitors – "thousands of people" – "must want to come pretty badly" to take such a road. She may have been over optimistic. The house is isolated and high above the snow line, impassable when there are snow and ice.

Still, I soon knew what she meant - I was one of those who found how much I wanted to go! And there were not thousands that day, just me, even though the worst of the winter was already past, and I set off in pleasant spring sunshine. I drove, I remember, for what seemed like hours, further and higher as the hours passed, hoping that the place I was looking for would eventually appear just round the corner. I had soon left all signs of civilisation behind. Here, at an altitude of 8000 feet, there was nobody but the rabbits that ran across my path. Meanwhile I was passing through dark pine forests on both sides of the road, without a human being in sight, and thinking I might have set off sooner, as twilight fell early in these peaks, and the sky darkened. The silence was palpable - there did not even seem to be many birds around, though this could have been the disturbance caused by the car engine, or perhaps I could not hear their calls within the car. Once, I caught the blazing yellow eyes of a mountain lion or a coyote through the trees, but it disappeared, leaving me to my own lonely journey.

With some relief I came across a human figure in a clearing among the trees, and I stopped the car to ask him for directions in case I was on the wrong road.  He was a local farmer, it seemed, and he spoke courteously, looking me over with some curiosity, and assured me that the Lawrence place was ahead a few miles. Spring or not, the snow was piling along each side of my road, and there were wheel ruts showing that heavy vehicles had travelled that way - tractors and farming machinery I guessed. Would the road be passable up ahead, I asked him, and he grinned and said, "Oh, I guess you'll make it ok. What kind of car you go? Got wheel chains?"

To be frank I had never seen a wheel chain and wouldn't know one if I saw it.

      "It's a Ford," I said, thinking about Mrs Robinson, who was then a popular film character and about all the amazing things people had done in Fords!

     "I reckon you'll be ok with a Ford," he said, wondering no doubt what planet I came from. "It's just a few miles ahead - you'll soon get to it!"

And I did. Reassured, I set forth once more, with a little more grit in my spirit, and, in another half hour, I came across the blessed plot. It was a clearing in the middle of a wilderness, with a long, rectangular plot of garden where vegetables were growing. A ramshackle, one storey house stood to one side, with a tin roof leaning over the front entrance. I had seen plenty of these types of building on my travels from Albuquerque and through Santa Fe and Taos - often poor Mexican or American families, or Pueblo Indians, occupied them. Mabel Luhan had not been all that generous to Lawrence, I thought. Perhaps she was writer struck? The place would have limited their lives. But perhaps that was what David and Frieda had wanted - a place that demanded little of them, where they were not having to explain themselves to the press or the neighbours all the time, and where they could live a simple life and do what seemed important to them.

I parked and got out to have a look round. There was not a soul anywhere. The house was closed and there was no caretaker in situ then, and little to identify it as the place I had been looking for. I wandered around in the still light twilight, peered through shabbily curtained windows, and wondered why I had come. To the left of the house was a commemorative stone that Mabel Luhan had laid in honour of the Lawrences - a plain piece of white concrete inscribed with their names and dates. It did at least identify the place. I discovered later that Frieda had buried David's ashes in the concrete, desiring to fight off what she thought were the predatory demands of Mabel to have a piece of Lawrence's memory. I lingered a while, took a few snaps, which never came out because I later discovered a fault in my camera. Memory added its own patina to the experience.

I am still not sure why I went, but I know that day was one of the most memorable of my life. The place returns again and again, with an insistence I cannot understand. It was not as far as it seemed - perhaps 17 miles as the crow flies. But perhaps because I was a stranger it seemed a long way.  There was an element of triumph in having made it, when it seemed as though I would have to turn back. Yet that was not my main reason for persisting along the mountain road. I think it might have been partly the desire to clothe those travel essays and poems of Lawrence's in a real landscape - to find out what attracted him there. The mountain air would have suited his tuberculosis, and like Luhan, he had long had aspirations to begin a Utopian society. Frieda pinned it down this way. She says of the wilderness setting, that 'it contains something special, that doesn't seem to change, as if nothing could tame it.' (Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 379) But Lawrence himself wrote: 'It is the ghosts one misses most, the ghosts there, of the Rocky Mountains, that never go beyond the timber. I know them, they know me: we get on well together.' He seems to hint at an archetypal landscape of the same kind that has stayed in my own memory - in which, perhaps for a brief while, we live as our long-ago ancestors did, complicit in the world around us, instead of separated - and made indifferent - by our interminably present consciousness, forever reshaping our experience.

Maynard Dixon, a painter, put it this way: "You can't argue with those desert mountains - and if you lie among them - as the Indian does - you don't want to. They have something for us much more real than some imported art style."