Published at The Orthosphere on the 28th August, 2026.
A name would not come to me. The name of a poet, Australian, Catholic, a writer of the verses of many hymns. Memory surrendered the composer of the music after a brief struggle—Richard Connolly—but the poet’s name it would not cough up.
There are times when a contest with uncooperative memory is pointless. I’m on a hiding to nothing because I have…nothing. I’m scratching around for a word or a name, and all I know is that once when I sought it in the myriad myriad of memory, its particular light would illuminate; but now only darkness. No string to tug on, no breadcrumbs to hope to follow. The only recourse in such blankness is to abandon effort, and allow it it come to mind unexpectedly in an hour or a day or never.
Mostly, though, memory serves like the most attentive and unobtrusive of handmaidens, and mostly, when it does balk, it is not with a dismaying blankness. There is the ghost of a memory, and so it was with my poet.
At one moment I feel its approach; then it recedes and may seem to have disappeared completely. But I know it is there; I can sense the shape of it, hovering and moving in some proprioceptive space of mind; I can feel its movements in there. I imagine that for a skilled and vastly experienced angler on his favourite stretch of water there is some similar proprioceptive underwater space in which he can sense the tentative approach of, say, the elusive jewfish he wants to hook.
I could cease my efforts, and the memory would probably materialise, in the sense that my ghost would assume the lineaments of recall, at some indeterminate time hence. But I have need of it now, and my work ethic demands that I close off its escape routes, and maintain a tension of intention and desire, a tension that has not merely mental, but physical expression.
And then it appears, full-fledged, instantaneous. James McAuley. Thank you, Lord.
Increasing forgetfulness is my fate, no doubt. But I will resist a habit of forgetfulness, stepping into the sensory architecture of memory to try to coax out those ghosts.
Recent discussions here brought McAuley to mind, or failed to. In particular, the hymn Help of Christians, guard this land. It’s still under copyright, I believe, but one of the verses is:
Should the pow‘rs of hell arise,
and our peace be trampled down,
in that night of blood and lies
show us still your twelve-starred crown.
Rousing stuff.
St Augustine, limpid exponent of memory and time, pray for us who grow old.