Remembrance: Mortality and The Self

Even as a young girl and still today, I have been interested in the relationship between memory, mortality and The Self. Somewhat akin to Keats' musings about the song of the nightingale, this rhetorical pondering has fueled a lifetime of inquiry: What does it mean to live if one dies unremembered?

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Child
c 1972

Perhaps this is an existential calling -- the soul yearning to be known in a world of nearly eight billion. Or maybe it is the artist's pledge, to produce a work in such a way that its creator will be remembered by others, for the betterment of all. To leave this world a better place after one is gone: that is the memento mori of existence.

It is not personal but spiritual, a universal quest to rise above anonymity, to have strode upon the earth and be remembered.

After all, we know Geoffrey Chaucer for the tales he wrote, not for his work as Clerk of the King or as the Customs House Controller. Those latter were Chaucer's means to a living but the Canterbury Tales is a story for all time.

It is a bawdy 14th century story of pilgrims in search of a free meal, or a spiritual blessing. Those two could be synonymous but we won't know for sure until after dinner.

Chaucer as a pilgrim
Ellesmere Manuscript, c 1450
Huntington Library, San Marino, California

I have had a digital copy of Canterbury Tales open on my computer for several weeks now, the hard copy on a shelf in Canada, too ponderous to lug in my already over-stuffed suitcase. Like the pilgrims Chaucer writes about, this electronic copy of the Tales has been traveling far and wide on this, my 2018 adventure. Like Chaucer's narrator, I am a writer and a pilgrim in search of a story to tell. Now, I'm no Chaucer but surely I can aspire to spin a yarn like him.

"Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury" ... or the adventures of Monday in London, whichever suits the reader better.

Thus my morning's walk commenced with reminders. The first: that the wars which tore Europe apart during the 20th century -- wars which caused the deaths of more than 100 million humans -- are never very far away from memory. These reminders of war are everywhere in The Netherlands and Belgium: in parks, on the sides of buildings, at church. Thus it is not surprising that their ubiquity surround the mindful here in London too, a city which endured the German onslaught twice in the last one hundred years.

This idea -- of remembering and mortality-- was brought home to me as I walked past the Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street in the heart of King's Cross this morning.

Holy Cross Church
Cromer Street
World War I memorial
photo courtesy of London Remembers

There, upon a high wall, appears the crucifixion surrounded by two columns containing thirty seven names each. They are the names of sons and husbands, fathers and brothers, those who died between 1914 and 1918 in that great and terrible war everyone thought would end all others.

The men, with good English names like Walter Barnes, John Ford, Percy King, Arthur Weekes, all died for England, for the world. To remember their sacrifice is to honor their lives. The world is the way it is -- better -- partly because of these men.

This is what I mean about memory and The Self. What would it mean for Percy King to have lived if he were to have died, indeed served and died, unremembered?

And so, in true genealogical fashion, I researched him.

Percy King was born in Marlyebone, a neighborhood in London just steps away from the memorial that honors him. He joined the 13th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, probably in 1914. This regiment was known as the Pioneers because their service involved building and repairing trenches in the forward areas of Flanders. It was a new kind of warfare which required pioneering strategies on the battlefield. The men dug tramways, constructed huts, cleaned battlefields and went on wiring expeditions. Percy King's battalion was one of the workhorses of the war.

Gloucestershire Field Report
Battles of the Somme
March 1918

In March 1918 -- just over one hundred years ago today -- the Gloucestershire regiment was crushed when the Germans mounted a massive offensive near Templeux-le-Fosse, a small village in the Somme department of northern France where the men were preparing fortifications. 

Percy King died on 27 March 1918, along with 300 other Pioneers during the infamous Battles of the Somme. The field report for that day notes the men were "heavily attacked"and "practically surrounded." In the military database, Percy King's casualty is simply listed as "died" in Flanders.

The Germans might have won that battle but they definitely lost the war. Hence the memorial and our collective remembering.

Like a soldier, I pushed on through the London rain. Chaucer had it right when he wrote "When in April the sweet showers fall." I have been in London a week and it has rained every day but one. 

But the British Library -- that amazing repository of knowledge which includes 12th century illuminated manuscripts, 8th century Chinese star charts and documents chronicling the 19th century suffragette activism of Sophia Duleep Singh -- is worth it.

Hulking across from St. Pancras train station, the BL's brutalist architecture appears daunting. Yet it holds the reminders to remember. It possesses the memento mori, documents of human life that remind us that though we will die, yet we do live.

marginalia likeness of Chaucer
in Thomas Hoccleve's
Regement of Princes
c 1411
British Library

There, in the gloomy light of the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, is Chaucer pointing the way. His appearance graces a page of Thomas Hoccleve's manuscript entitled Regement of Princes, a text chronicling the House of Lancaster in the early 15th century.

Hoccleve may have known Chaucer -- there is some speculation about that among scholars. Regardless, Hoccleve inserted Chaucer's likeness into this text next to lines which, translated out of the Middle English from which they were written, read "to put other men into remembrance of his persona." Hoccleve uses Chaucer to point the way toward remembering.

A recorded reading of Hoccleve's Middle English reveals the rhythmic quality even as it shows six hundred years of linguistic evolution.

Thus concludes a day of remembering -- of a scholar and a poet, a soldier and a girl who used to ride but now who writes.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.