0 “Our job is memory” - Lily Hyde

The title is from this fascinating article from the NewYorker, which gave me much food for (rambling) thoughts about words and reality, libraries and the Internet, memories and memorials.

In it, the writer attacks the myth that what’s online stays online forever. Instead, she says, the Internet is intrinsically ephemeral. Unlike books, the Internet cannot be catalogued because it lacks the dimension of time; online, it’s always today. Academic and legal footnotes and references to books and documents (those painstaking page numbers, edition, publish date) have been replaced by web links. But what happens when those links no longer exist? The evidence disappears, the original source vanishes; anything could be true. 

Anyone who says we no longer need libraries because ‘it’s all online’ should read this article. It isn’t all online. Some of it might have been, yesterday, but that’s no guarantee that it will be today. Or it might look like what was there yesterday is still there today, but in fact it could have been completely rewritten since yesterday, and you’d never know.    

Funnily enough, I spent most of yesterday hunting for an online article about some Russian legislation, adopted in October last year, that retroactively legalises pro-Russian authorities in Crimea from February 2014 when Crimea, according to Russian law, was legally part of Ukraine. From a legal point of view, Russia rewrote history with that bit of legislation. 

The article, as far as I can see, is no longer on the Internet. It disappeared, and history is rewritten. 

I know, history is always rewritten, that’s what history is; a constant interrogation of the evidence from yesterday, viewed through the inescapable prism of today. But what if the evidence from yesterday no longer exists? What if it’s been written over, or just disappeared?

Two years ago I visited the museum of political history in St Petersburg. It used to be called the museum of the revolution (there you go, history rewritten). It’s full of fascinating exhibits, but the one that struck me most was a catalogue of exhibits that weren’t there.

It was a fat, handwritten ledger, open on a page listing all the documents and artefacts relating to Trotsky which had been removed in the late 1920s, when Trotsky was ‘rewritten’ as an enemy of the people. The museum staff had got rid of the historical evidence, yet they had kept a carefully catalogued record of the evidence that no longer existed. I really wonder why they did that. Despite orders to rewrite the past did they too believe, like the Internet librarians, that ‘our job is memory’?

Is that really what a library is – a repository of memory? As someone who uses libraries all the time as a reader and as a writer (just got my PLR statement, hurrah!) I started to wonder, do we write books, fact and fiction, because at least part of our job is memory? 

Libraries are repositories of facts and interpretations of facts to make versions of history, but they are also a storehouse for imaginary worlds and other people’s memories. We write things down so as not to forget them. We record them and we transform them through language, through fancy, through characters, into (in the best books) something unforgettable. 

Do we write (do we read) to remember, or to be remembered?

This is my last post for ABBA, for the moment anyway. Its been a privilege to contribute alongside such wonderful fellow writers, and a huge thank you to the administrators who keep it running. If you’re interested, you can follow my blog, updated mostly about Ukraine and Crimea affairs these days. Thanks for reading!   

www.lilyhyde.com

https://rambutanchik.wordpress.com             

Detail: “Our job is memory” - Lily Hyde

0 Why art matters - Lily Hyde

They can’t put on plays in the evening in Donetsk, because of the curfew. They have had to hang a sign on the theatre entrance saying ‘Please don’t bring weapons with you’ – but not everyone obeys. The stage is not just their calling anymore; it is literally home. The actors are living in the playhouse, because their houses have been destroyed by shelling or are on the frontline. 

One recent Sunday afternoon they performed Chekhov. The sound of shelling roared from the suburbs, but inside the theatre a string quartet played Bach to the pre-performance crowd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me down to lie in green pastures…  A frock-coated actor shepherded his flock into the darkened auditorium, leaving behind all the troubles and dread for two brief hours, two magical hours made of lighting and costume and make-believe – and words, words, Chekhov’s wry, witty, warmly humane war of words. That, to set against the real war outside.

Afterwards in the dressing rooms, where actors live now with their children in a world of mirrors and make-up, where jars of home-made gherkins jostle with tubes of facepaint, we drank to peace. And to art, to theatre and literature and music, all those hopelessly fragile, endlessly enduring things. 

         

 www.lilyhyde.com

 

Detail: Why art matters - Lily Hyde

0 Geopolitics: Lily Hyde

(Due to unforeseen circumstances, Lily was unable to post this month. So I've re-posted something she wrote in July. I've done this because I found this a very moving and resonant piece, and I'm glad to be able to give it another airing. Sue Purkiss)

This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow. 

They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either. 

I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains. 

The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it. 

There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway. 

Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string. 

This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to. 

This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries. 

That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.    

She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently. 

You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do? 

And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it. 

www.lilyhyde.com

                        

Detail: Geopolitics: Lily Hyde