The Invented Woman - The Recreation Of A Glorious Past That Never Existed

Vicki Chalmers knew that her memory was failing from 'Now, where did I put my keys?' to 'Who’s coming to dinner?' but she put those minor inconsistencies aside and said, 'But I can remember the important things'. 

Vicki had always preferred selective, creative memory.  There was no more idyllic time, she said, than those years in Greenwich Village smoking endless unfiltered cigarettes, drinking tequila, and loving the one she was with. 

There was Emil the conceptual artist. 'We made love underneath his The Human Odyssey, looking up at Homer standing astride the whitecapped waves of the Mediterranean', none of which was even vaguely true, but when told in such dreamy-eyed romantic verse to an eager group of ladies at tea, the truth did not matter. 

 

It all could have happened.  She did live in New York at the time, although on Staten Island as an au pair, released one night a week when she took the ferry to Manhattan and wandered up from the Battery to SoHo and the East Village.  As she walked past the dive bars, smoke-filled cafes, and coffee shops, she imagined herself there, cigarette dangling from her lip, eyes squinting against the smoke, a volume of Proust's Chez Swann opened in front of her, the pages dogeared from use, stained with tears and drops of expresso, next to an artist or a poet, longhaired, distant, and mythic. 

But for a few slips of fate she might have been a student at Columbia, or halfway through a doctorate on Deconstruction at NYU and living the postmodern moment at the Cafe Nero, or...the possibilities were endless, but the closest she got to her dream was  'the forgotten borough', an afterthought of the Dutch who settled Manhattan and the legions of entrepreneurs who later made the City what it was. 

Fate was fate, she believed, and there was nothing you could do about the cards you were dealt except to make the best of them; and soon in her young life 'extension' became the operative principle. With enough imagination and empathy it was enough to be in the occasion of cool, commit to memory the confected reality, and rely on it as a foundation for future recall.

Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described memorist, said that the past and only the past defined human existence.  The present, Nabokov went on to observe is nothing more than a millisecond of existence before becoming the past. The Higgs boson once produced has a lifetime of less than one sextillionth of a second; and this is slow compared to the passage of the present to the past. The  future is only a speculative time of possibilities and impossible dreams. 

The more one remembers the past, said Nabokov, lives it through constant recollection, and curates it as a personal, existential treasure, the more one’s life has substance and meaning.  Nabokov developed techniques to fix events in his memory and devised ways to recall them from his mental archives and replay them like a movie.  The more he could remember, he said, the more complete he was as a human being.

However one chooses to define the present, it quickly becomes the past, archived in our memory, and without attention can disappear.  If we cannot remember the beach at Deauville -  the umbrellas, the silhouette of the cliffs of Dover on the English side of the Channel, the seagulls, the chill, and the dresses of young girls – then it never happened.  Even if the events of that day had subliminal effects – our preference for colored dresses or our dislike of the chill – if we cannot remember them, they have lost their meaning, integrity, and substance.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an autobiography which was written not as a historical record of the author’s life, but as a pastiche of those memories which define him.  There was no reason to order them chronologically, to link them to future events citing cause and effect, only to celebrate them for what they were – integral and indispensable parts of him.

Vicki was a creative memorist.  She saw no distinction between her imaginings, their confection into valid memory, and the actual events of her life.  Why should one be forever harnessed to a mule endlessly plowing the same furrow? No, the human spirit was made of much finer stuff than just plodding through a solitary, brutish, short, and nasty Hobbesian existence.  

Of course she did not set out to construct this alternate reality, but fell into it naturally.  As a little girl, the world around her seemed too flat and grey until she invested it with brightness and color of her own. Birds were not just birds but messengers of God.  Clouds were the meadows of angels. 

Vicki came into her own later in life when she reined in her fanciful ambitions, finished college, and moved to Washington where she found an internship at an environmentalist non-profit agency.  Although she had no particular commitment to reversing climate change or to saving the snail darter or spotted owl, the idea of saving the earth had congeniality. 

It wasn't long before she conflated her own fancy with the affairs of environmental action.  She became  a preservationist, a poet of the forest, a Rousseau and a Walt Whitman. She wove these stories and accumulating 'memories' so convincingly that her actual deskwork, endless editing of policy papers and screeds disappeared, in fact for all intents and purposes never existed.

The progressive tent is a big one with room enough to accommodate all manner of activists - climate change activists were joined by civil rights workers, transgender advocates, socialists and communists, and former farm workers.  In the heady atmosphere of social reform, all issues were conflated or subsumed within a universal anti-capitalist ethos. 

Slowly but surely, she created memories of abortion camaraderie on the National Mall, marches down the avenues of Washington with Black Lives Matter, standing tall and defiantly against the storm troopers of ICE. 

None of it was true, but it could have been, so close was she to the action in its preparatory phases in her office on U Street; and years later she spoke with confidence about those good, purposeful, righteous times. 

She didn't stop there, and as an older woman revived 'memories' of marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Woodstock, and Montgomery sit-ins. 

The remarkable thing of it was she never once considered herself an imposter, a fraud, a balmy dreamer.  Her invented memories were so real, so intimate, and so peopled with friends, lovers, and colleagues that she became a totally invented person. 

She always kept one step ahead of the truth - her stories of her halcyon years were so rooted in chronology, fact, and record that few questioned her; and her passionate retelling of them complete with love, hate, deception, dishonesty, and courage deflected any suspicion. 

Her marvelous confection was so convincing that she herself had no idea what was real and what wasn't. In a land already filled with striving, desirous, upward-reaching, credulous people whose grasp on reality or real possibility was fragile at best, Vicki fit right in.  No one really cared about the truth, veracity, or fact.  It could have been was enough for them. 

Artists like Browning, Durrell, and Kurosawa let alone trial lawyers knew that truth was evasive. Eye witness accounts of the same scene differ greatly.  Stories told around Aunt Leona's Easter dinner table about Uncle Harry and his third wife never jibed. The Ring and the Book was all about mnemonic artifact. 

So for Vicki Chalmers the niggling doubts about memory loss were insignificant.  If one memory faded, she could replace it with another, and till the end of her life she was so adept at confabulating her past that she was revered - a freedom fighter, a reformist, a progressive.  Yet, not only was she none of those things, she cared little about them.  They had been convenient, accessible realities, no more no less. 

A marvelous human invention was Vicki Chalmers, a marvel, talented creator of reality, an eye-painter, a dreamer brought to life, a unique creation.  Those who suspected that much of what she told was reverie, never called her out for dishonesty.  They, like everyone else, loved the stories, the passion, the engagement, and the vitality.  Who needed the truth?