Monday 12 March 2012

The story of my misfortunes - 3

I am wondering to what degree I am getting my chronology right. During cross-examination -- and by God was she cross -- in the trial that all this stuff led to, the prosecuting council when I said that I had turned up the radio once to drown the  MW's attacks because I had said it was twice to the police; or it may have been the other way round. I could be wrong. It was twenty years ago.
What I said then was after over two years, I might have misremembered but that what I said to the police was accurate.
I kept a diary of this matter for some years. It is something that I recommended trades union members do when I was counselling them for any kind of unreasonable behaviour against them. I told them to go into detail, even if it seemed trivial. I was giving such advice to a friend only a few days ago.
One thing that came out of the exercise was an awareness of how misleading the memory can be. MW would say something had happened in a particular way and I would doubt it, often correctly, but sometimes she was absolutely right.
This was nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of what either of us was doing; but the way that the memory tells itself stories. There is a lot of research literature on the subject.
I find it relatively easy to diarise adverse events, if only I can get the energy and the time; and if I can handle saying objectively what nasty things are being done to me. Those who are not so fluent in writing are at a disadvantage.
Pleasant events, unless they're breaks in nasty events, do not interest me to write about in the same documentary way. I am relatively happy for my brain to tell itself stories with them.
In this case, I could go back to the original diary that I kept. I could dump the whole file into this blog, I suppose; but what for?
It needs editing for almost any purpose. Its evidential function seems to have ceased although I intend it should exist at least until either MW or I die; and I may include it with my version of "my papers" to let other people decide.
I don't any more want to buttonhole MW as an identifiable person to the world at large. And when she first said to me, way back in the late 1970s, you won't put me in a book, will you? the truthful answer would have been I have already, if a book can be said to exist before it exists. I had already written about her to a considerable extent; as I am already poeticising the work I did in the garden this morning and the astonishingly brightly coloured spider I found among some ivy. Everything that happens to someone who makes art is potential material. It's never bothered me when I have been with another artist; we have to trust the people we love or perhaps we do not love them.
Nor do I want to tell the story of my life.
I started writing this account because aspects of MW's lies are affecting me again and I want to blog that in a context.
The process has taught me that while I can remember most of the right notes I am a little unsure that they are in the right order; and that's interesting.
I think I shall continue and then see where I have gone wrong. In terms of MW's attempted fraud and perjury and the light it throws on official corruption I am not making mistakes.
The only other thing to say, that I can think of at the moment, is that this blog may be an inappropriate context, given its title.

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