“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
— Ray Bradbury
Writing memoir ought to be honest. Yet let’s be honest about that honesty. I mean, it’s easier said than done, right? Memory -in and of itself- is fluid, murky. Tainted by nostalgia as well as a schooner full of shaky convictions, our memories are designed to slip us forward unharmed in the wake of every horrible or shameful experience we’ve already lived through. Put bluntly, memory is both inspiring and undependable. And no one who disagrees with that should be allowed to remember a goddamn thing from here on out.
Yes, recollection is precious gold. Yes, considering one’s own ups and downs across a lifetime is honorable work if attempted honestly. But how the hell can we write honestly about ourselves if we don’t begin by admitting that we, as living breathing human beings, are biased and echo deaf. Our own individual story is paramount to all others because it’s the only one we’ve ever known. That’s a ton of bias for you right there. Plus, our individual past- what we strain to hear reverberating back to us from our incessant forward traveling: it must ramble back into our arms across endless foggy miles and landscapes.
The older I get the more I think that everyone’s memories lie somewhere between pretty damn inaccurate and grossly warped. Still, I’m not so sure it even matters at this point. After all, I think we can all agree that it’s a bit late in the written word game to rectify anything. Man’s urgent desire to recall and record has left us with a lot of written accounts and we are all better off for it. But faced with the notion that much of it (half of it? More than half!!??) is remembered all wrong and therefore, by definition, untrue, well, where might that leave us?
It’s not as if we might start erasing history and feel good about it, right? Because that IS NOT what I am getting at here. What I am getting at is this: as the writer of this weekly Substack, which purports to be an honest retelling of my own life’s story, I attempt, rather happily, to re-emerge my mind, time and time again, into gushing currents, pools, and eddies that have been rolling hard and fast all my life. Sweeping memories downstream long before that moment I first dunked my head in, they’ve been either running hard or drying up ever since. It just depends on the nature of things.
In that regard I have come to understand that my written response to my own peculiar world that has played out in front of me, all round me, and now- more and more-behind me, it doesn’t need to be perfectly true. And it shouldn’t be sold as such either. What I do is meditate. What I do is Ouija board. What I do is write songs about a boy. About a kid. About a young man. About him growing older. The details are important to me because I love the details when others write their own memories down. I’d often rather know what people ate for breakfast long ago than who they voted for or what baseball team they rooted for.
The team doesn’t matter to me.
Not at all.
What matters is how the summer afternoon tasted on the tip of your tongue when the ball was sailing, sailing, sailing towards the heavens and then the upper deck.
What matters to me, and what has always mattered to me, is all that sunlight on your root beer teeth, as you begged for distance, as you promised to trade your whole heart for just a single drop of all that joy teetering there on a high ledge way, way up in the sky.
If you can remember that, then I’ll believe your story.
Hell, I’ll even wrap it around me.
The Cloak of Everlasting Truth.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
