My parents live on as consociates or contemporaries in defiance of their status as predecessors. I have in frames in my bedroom photos of them attending my wedding (back in 1972), plus an assortment of portraits of them singly or together stretching back to the 1930s. While I’ve not yet reached the stage of talking to these images – not a development that in fact I’d be particularly embarrassed about – I do occasionally catch myself wondering what they would make of this or that episode in my life, or indeed of my adult lifespan in general. This is normal enough; but how might/does this intrude on that stream of consciousness and action that characterises all we humans?
Are all parents substitute ‘superegos’? I guess so. I’m sure I’m not alone in being aware of a ‘parental gaze’ at the precise moment I ponder on some dubious decision, episode or interlude in my life. But a Foucauldian gaze neither epitomises nor does their role justice.
It is perhaps rather my parents’ former selves, their earlier lives as children in the inter-war years, as a courting couple, as young(ish) parents after migrating to Worthing, that most impact my thinking. Black and white photos speak of austere infancies in the interwar years of depression; of childhood holidays by the sea; of joint membership of a tennis club in North London; of a premarital (and unconsummated) trip to Switzerland by motorbike and sidecar; of wartime spent in service in Trinidad and South America and in trying to build a home in London; and of my early years, especially in Colebrook Close in East Worthing (detailed in previous autobiographical fragments in this series). I like to think I both pay homage and offer continuity to my parents’ lives, extending back well beyond my arrival. This is the past as my present, and now and again it surely reaches into and nudges my future.
It is not just my parents who are pertinent predecessors for my present and future. As three score and ten years are passed it becomes increasingly obvious in terms of crude chronology that one’s past is longer and therefore contains more than one’s future. More ‘significant others’ might be dead than are alive (and many another peer faded from contact and view).
Longevity, if attaining 70 can nowadays be described as such, is almost certainly associated with reminiscence, if only with a strictly personal payoff. So who and what else among dead familiars are salient?
Pace Schutz, predecessors as dead familiars might perhaps lurk in the shadows of contemporaries, in which case they too might be associated with we-, thou- or they-orientations.
Referring back to the typology ventured in the last fragment, my parents – their siblings and parents too – live on as intimates representing a we-orientation. So too do solidaries survive, that is, former close colleagues like Margot Jefferys and Terry Boswell, plus a whole army of scholars to whose labours I’m indebted.
There is an element of randomness in any selection here of deceased and now-distant acquaintances and passers-by with whom a thou-relation might be said to intrude into the present. I do indeed remember neighbours, many of whom seemed then, let alone now, to be throwbacks to a pre-babyboomer generation. They somehow characterise or ‘stand for’ the eras from which they emerged, like my parents’ neighbours in Gerald Road, Worthing: an elderly women dutifully cared for by a daughter of 50+ years who never married.
There is more latitude when referring to parties for which a they-orientation is most relevant. The generalised other, or world-at-large, and collectivities can penetrate the living present in the form of a time or space (like Margot Jefferys and George Brown’s Medical Sociology Unit in – Peto Place, Regents Park, Harley Street – in what used to be Bedford College); a way of life (in my case the would-be politicians and intellectuals in the Viennese cafes around WW1, or the existentialist café-goers in Paris in the 1940s and ‘50s); or an intellectual paradigm (like critical theory or critical realism). Peers remain vital for academics and never die. No less immortal for me are the Sussex XIs from the late 1950s onwards and England XVs from the mid-1960s. Fictional others are perhaps less salient for me than for others, but for others fictional ‘imaginaries’ can be signposts for thinking and behaviour.
All this may not amount to much more than confirming that it is a mistake to think of past, present and future, and of the people and events they contain, as separate entities. I could go on now to contextualise the future too, but that would be tedious. Sufficient to note that inseparable from my sense of my own future are my four daughters and six grandchildren. In a small, fading fashion – like a light growing dimmer as it moves away – Annette and I will live on in who they become.
But I’m not ready to bugger off for years.