“For a Summer” or “Forgetting That Some Things Smell of Fish”
For a Summer, I walked through the passage on the Northeast side of Liverpool Street Station every weekday morning, and was never not surprised by just how strongly it smelt of fish. There was one spot in particular where I believe the water and wastage from the sushi restaurant ran out to — but this couldn’t have been the source of the smell, since it was so aggressively, distinctively fried. It was not a pleasant fried smell, mind you. It was fetid, completely inexplicable and (worst of all) seemed to bother literally nobody else. Everyone I asked could smell the smell, but insisted it was bearable. And yet for that whole Summer I recoiled at the smell of rancid, fried fish every morning, and I walked to work, and I walked back, and that was my life.
Today (28th May, 2021) was when I first realised that the fried fish smell had gone. This was also surprising for me insofar as, if I think back, I am now certain that it has been gone for a while. The thing that was once so distinctive and so metronomic — a part of the life I lived — is no longer part of this life, now, and I had not necessarily realised. Just like that, life was different for me, and the life that once was had become oil in the water; a drop in the ocean of memories that make up a person. I was left to remind myself that I was once that man, and that man was me and, with the fishy smell having gone, that we were each-other no more.
Joshua Rothman tells us that “We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves, as artists, or teachers, or tech bros… Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself”. [The New Yorker] These imagined lives are, seemingly, future fragments. The things which make up that fictional person necessarily exist in a hypothetical reality, and the human which they construct is one that has not happened yet or, simply, did not happen at all. More often than not, the imaginary life is something in the future whose non-existence is precisely because of something in the past. What if there never was a fishy smell, or if I had never got the job at The Plum Guide [the reason for my daily walking]? In a way, these questions are more interesting than confronting the reality that did exist at that time: who was I because of the rancid fish, and because of where I sat in the office? In another way, these latter questions are infinitely more important, because we must acknowledge the people that we once were and the lives we lived.
This kind of confronting the past is, for some, relentless and harrowing. According to Will Arnett’s version of Secretariat, “There’s nothing for you behind you. All that exists is what’s ahead,” [Bojack Horseman, sorry.] But Rothman’s former life was not fake, and neither was mine, or — for that matter — Secretariat’s. “Once, in another life, I was a tech founder,” says Rothman. The material difference between him and myself, therefore, is perhaps imagination; choosing to look at what might have been rather than what was and, in doing so, creating a hypothetical life that exists in the future relative to the former version of himself, rather than the real person that existed in the past.
My own fascination with this person stems most likely from an episode of Doctor Who when, facing regeneration, the eponymous Doctor confronts not the inevitability of death, but of change. In doing so, he acknowledges that change is a sort of death itself, of the people we once were:
“We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s OK, that’s good, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will always remember when The Doctor was me.” — Steven Moffat, Doctor Who
The Doctor is different not because of their ability to regenerate, but because of the clarity with which their life phases in and out. For them, they are able to neatly delineate between version eleven and twelve for themselves. They note that we are different people each day, but this doesn’t seem to be their Rosebud. In fact, most iterations of the character actively cling to the person they are when regenerating. The sense of self offered by seeing the same face in the stillness of a lake each day, by stretching the same tired legs or noting how your hair falls in the most particular of ways — these are earthly and wonderful comforts.
By admission of this fact, the seeming contradiction is also true — that precisely because our faces stay roughly the same, it is hard to distinguish when we got old, or when our back started to ache, or when we began to empathise with Prufrock when he conceded that he would wear the bottom of his trousers rolled. All of these are grey areas, not marked by the changing of an entire face (and, on multiple occasions for The Doctor, of genders too). Instead, humans have to come up with their own points of change where they became a different person, and the other person just became a person they once were.
Whilst this might be a somewhat daunting act, it’s a necessary one to ever move past the people that we are today. The only consistent resolution of the grey areas mentioned is to conclude that we are different people at every second; every hour. To quote a poem that I wrote a while ago, “Our small bodies die and die//Again each day, and at the unearthing//Of the present fact we shall never//Stop, never falter nor delay.” I wrote those lines during one of the happiest months of my life; the period in New York each Spring when winter so abruptly recedes and the world is at rights again. The sky reappears. The dusks fade to sunsets. It is both sweet and bittersweet to look back on, for it confirms that there is goodness in the world, and a time to think back to when all was well. Likewise, this kind of retrospect jolts us back to the reality that nothing will bring that person back, no matter how much we try. Nothing will bring the time back either: they are both surrendered to the past.
Of all the former Gregs I would like to meet, I would like to meet this one the most. I have thought of meeting others before. In my childhood I was arrogant and volatile — I don’t think I’d get much from the opportunity. There is a Greg I would like to meet a few months after a conversation in O1 (the room on the ground floor of our Sixth Form building in which I had maths). I would like to tell him that the conversation changed his life; that he is who I was because of what someone who cared had said to him. There is another, whose father told him in the visiting room of a Psychiatric Ward, “I always thought you would change the world” — a phrase the current me still thinks about every day. But no, I think I would like to meet me when I was sat looking out the window of the 9th floor Nussbaum lounge. I used to watch container ships pass and look at Wayne Manor on the other side of the Hudson. I used to wonder when the rooftops would be warm enough for New Yorkers to revel on them in Spring. I’d like to just make sure it was all real — that that person really was and had been me — and ask him to tell me that it will all be alright. I think he would laugh if I did. He would not have a clue what was going on.
