Cake or Death (18 page)

Although I remember quoting from
Ulysses
in a column once and I received a letter from a horrible woman accusing me of plagiarizing Tennyson. Imagine the sadness of not knowing that poetry is a common well and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s descendants aren’t due royalties and that quoting isn’t plagiarizing, I just assumed everyone would recognize some of the most famous lines in the English language not from Shakespeare.

Maybe everything is an immense misunderstanding. Layers of lies upon lies upon mistakes upon misunderstandings form over the years like a coral bed building itself up. This is what makes Google Earth so dangerous. I zoom around the planet revisiting places where I once lived. Places filled with memories perhaps best left alone.

I remember a scene from C.S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
where they sailed in the fog past a marooned man. The crew hastened to rescue him, but once on board he warned them to flee. This is the place where dreams come true, he said. Oh goody, they said.

You don’t understand, he said. Not daydreams. Dreams.

And everyone gasped and understood, hoisted the mainsail and hustled away.

Google Earth lets you travel with a terrible ease to places you left behind. Normally you would have to gird your loins, make plans, set aside money, make careful maps and then walk down the street past the house where you were abused or the alleyway where you did it standing up with a total stranger or the building where you were stuck in an elevator. That’s why you don’t go back. It isn’t worth the candle.

No rearview mirror, as S. always tells me.

But Google Earth makes it possible. You can do things like revisit everywhere in the world you ever threw up. I suppose that’s fun in a peculiar way. You can visit everywhere you ever had sex, if you can remember something resembling an address, or all the places where your girlfriends have been raped. I shudder to think of them ever coming up with this morbid idea, but then they probably feel they can leave it to me. You could visit every one of Barbra Streisand’s homes and puzzle as to why one person needs seven places, or in Ted Turner’s case, twenty-three and an airplane.

I can track down the Cambodian factory that is notorious for being the worst sweatshop on earth. It produces clothes for the British high street. It has made me very sarcastic about cheap clothes and even less likely to visit Britain, whether this is reasonable or not.

Worse, Google Earth confirmed for me that my childhood memories, unlike the gradually fuzzing memories I accumulate as an adult, are deadly accurate. On Google Earth, I revisited a city where I used to live as a child and tracked each step to school. It was the unhappiest time of
my life. I had never thought much of it, and only mentioned it in passing to a therapist once. But I used the cursor to relive that square kilometre of misery, and it was all the same, as if it had been sprayed with a fixative.

It is a wonderful thing to stop painful memories in their tracks. The human mind can accomplish that. What Google Earth is doing is allowing you to return to the dream of childhood, not the lovely bits, but the nightmares. It’s like seeing your rapist in court. I have not been raped, but I can imagine that I would never wish to see him again.

Closed-circuit television involves the same traducing of human experience. A British woman was drunk. She was raped on a train platform, her rape filmed by cameras. A man was arrested and convicted even though she fortunately had no memory of the attack. But she was forced to see the video in court and she naturally fell apart. Her life was scarred from that moment on. Before, the alcohol had protected her.

So I don’t know about technological tracking devices intruding into my own life. Everyone else is enraged by the government’s use of these devices to spy on us. But what horrifies me just as much is that given the chance, such records would allow me to spy on my own past. And we should never be allowed to do that. We should have only our own memories to rely on, dead-on, faulty, whatever. My whole life is online in pictures for the world to see, if the world cared, which it doesn’t, and if it knew what it was looking for. Again, it does not.

But I’m naked. I’m stripped and shivering out on the headland.

We move out of small towns to the anonymity of cities to escape this kind of close scrutiny. With all our footsteps on film, we’ve made the planet not a kindly village but a hideous one.

McLuhan meant us to look at other people, not to neurotically and pointlessly track ourselves.

It is wrong. It is hateful.

I’m very good at ignoring unpleasant things. I have to be; there’s always something fresh coming up.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the champion of blocking it all out.

If you really analyzed the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, there’s no doubt that she was appalling. Part of it not her fault. It was the era and the social scene into which she was born. You came out of the appropriate vagina, i.e., one linked to a moneyed penis—and if something went
wrong, such as your maternal vagina dumping the paternal penis, which is what Jackie’s mother did to her alcoholic philandering husband, you spent your youth feeling fragile. You had the name but the mansion only came on sufferance. Janet married an Auchincloss, a good name, but not terribly financially secure.

Basically, Jackie was Lily Bart, the heroine of that Edith Wharton novel that causes any woman without a job to have a mental and emotional collapse, and then go out and get a job.

So Jackie married a philanderer. Her revenge was justified overspending. She spent madly. Then she married Aristotle Onassis, an ugly man with a certain charm that vanished with old age and events such as the death of his son. Jackie spent madly to compensate for the abuse Onassis handed out.

She spent the latter part of her life with Maurice Tempelsman, who was in the diamond business. It isn’t the right business to be in if you object to hanging out with mad African dictators who flay the skin off their citizens’ backs to get the diamonds that are marketed as precious even though there is no logical reason for any decorative material to be more attractive than any other precious material. Diamonds? Screw it, I’ll take cubic zirconia. Jackie never hooked up with clean money (if such a thing exists) like that derived from winemaking or knitting little soft caps for babies. Every male-run fortune Jackie allied herself with was dirty money. If it wasn’t bootlegging, it was dodgy oil tankers or blood diamonds. Onassis was a thug. I loved the half-smile she wore at his
funeral, not to mention the leather coat. Fashionable, yes, black, yes, but leather!

All these are unpleasant truths, and Jackie ignored them. She had a lot of stuff to ignore—various deaths and scandals in the various families she was linked to—but she had one major thing to ignore. I am not convinced any human has faced this before, but it is part of the modern, filmed world. She frequently had to see her husband get his head blown off via the Zapruder film, with the attendant bits of brain and blood on her face and body and brain matter of such a size that she had to hand a chunk to a doctor in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital.

Imagine that. The Archduke Ferdinand’s family probably ran across a few paintings of the event, Princip being the Oswald of his time, but then again, that situation was dwarfed by the slaughter of millions of humans that followed.

Jackie Kennedy coped very well, aside from her chain-smoking, but I do think everyone is allowed one bad habit. Her trick was to ignore. In restaurants she would focus so intently on her guest that the sideways stares of everyone else in the room did not exist for her.

She walled it off.

The problem with Jackie, I imagine, was that she lived in New York, a city she knew by heart so every street corner had its horrible reminder albeit not bits of a husband’s cerebellum. All the walled-up stuff she had to ignore—the blood and brain, the press criticism, the slavering public hunger, the studying of every inch of her appearance, the astonishing stupidity of her son as compared to the
steadiness and wisdom of her daughter—took up more acreage than other stuff she could easily take in.

Just be thankful your life isn’t like that. Whatever happens to you isn’t rubbed into your face—Surprise! Assassination on the documentary channel! Watch a spattered Jackie chase Jack’s skull fragments!—and your brick wall is intact.

What I’m saying is that you can talk to a therapist and deal with the vile memories. Or you can steadfastly ignore certain events in your life and indeed the continents on which they took place. It’s your choice.

I do the latter and it has worked well for me. It has also encouraged a love of travel. Let’s go somewhere blank of painful memories! Of course you may build new and even more painful memories on that continent.

But then you can ignore those. Case closed.

One of my childhood memories is of a windy day somewhere in northern Canada. I can’t say how old I was or where this took place, as we lived in so many places in the north country. My mother, who loved rural walks, used to drag me out to God knows where and we’d stroll for hours. I didn’t hate it; I disliked it, but walking is easy to endure. You just plod. Eventually you end up back at the car and you go home. Another glorious afternoon in the scrub pine in the mid-twentieth-century in the hard-rock Canadian Shield.

It was, as I said, very windy that day. It was howling. The sky was grey, not a depressed grey as in a Toronto sky, or a Tupperware grey as in Vancouver, nor a hard-pavement grey as in London. It was a huge grey. Around us were pine trees, unbeautiful uncharming scrub pines in their millions. Christmas tree shapes? No, scrub pines can’t be doing with that nonsense. They just grew up wherever they could get a taste of light and air, scrapey things that would take your skin off if you ran from bears, but so thick that you wouldn’t run far.

White pines, with their long soft needles, don’t pack themselves in. They drop their needles to make a soft fragrant bed that always makes me think of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons camping out under the stars. Susan would serve hard-boiled eggs, cocoa and grog. Titty would stare at the stars and imagine things. Good times, those.