Dispelling the Mists of Memory

During a retail stop for building materials, I spoke, distanced in a check-out line, with a young man wearing a Bob Dylan T-shirt. We exchanged notes on concert experiences. When I referenced my attendance at a Dylan concert-—with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers—at Rich Stadium, Orchard Park, NY on July 4, 1986 (a concert the young man had knowledge of), I realized that when I attended that show, he had not yet been born. 

A quote from a recent NYTs Dylan interview reminded me of that meeting.* 

“We have a tendency to live in the past, but that’s only us. Youngsters don’t have that tendency. They have no past, so all they know is what they see and hear, and they’ll believe anything. In 20 or 30 years from now, they’ll be at the forefront. When you see somebody that is 10 years old, he’s going to be in control in 20 or 30 years, and he won’t have a clue about the world we knew. Young people who are in their teens now have no memory lane to remember. So it’s probably best to get into that mind-set as soon as we can, because that’s going to be the reality.”

Still, memory is a fickle thing. Having lived a past does not, necessarily, make one a reliable narrator. Nonetheless, we have an intimacy with our personal memories that those who did not live them do not—memories that, for me, include that concert in 1986, as well as earlier memories. These include memories of the tumultuous race-related violence that took place in my hometown, and dominated the news in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The young people of today have, as Dylan stated, “no memory lane.” They do have at their disposal a plethora of information about the past (just as that young man in line knew about a concert from before his time) that they can reflect on to guide their actions today. They also have another advantage. When the segment of one’s timeline of past experience is smaller than the future (theoretically), it is easier to look forward, to think positively about the future, than when the time left is less than the memories. 

I have never been a Dylan groupie, or been fanatical about any one musician or genre of music. Rather, I like to have a wall of diverse music titles in front of me, much like a wall of names on a polished granite memorial erected to the forgotten lost. Musicians, too, have sacrificed their lives to the cause (most evident, perhaps, with musicians like Dylan, Billie Holiday, Arlo Guthrie, and John Lennon, who wove lyrical revolution from threads of experience). Like scanning for the name of a lost warrior, I stand there scanning the wall of music, reading the titles one by one, until a particular title speaks to me. Often, I can recall a time and place tied to the album. Other times it is something obscure or forgotten: perhaps an album from a past acquaintance or lover, left behind; perhaps a used record acquisition that caught my eye and was added to the collection, for a future chance encounter. 

I like the essence of physical things. As with all collectors of the past, these objects hold memories. Like the names on the walls and faded photos, they keep the mist from obscuring the things that should not be forgotten. 

As Beatrice tells Axl in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, “… With this mist upon us, any memory’s a precious thing and we’d best hold tight to it.”

D.E. Bentley
Editor, Owl Light News

*www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways.html