In the name of love? Reliability of memory: idioms, Liar the (or as a) memoir and doubt.

“Every man’s memory is his private literature” – Aldous Huxley.

In the name of love? Reliability of memory: idioms, Liar the (or as a) memoir and doubt.

An idiom is supposed to maintain an understanding that extends through time and is lasting. It is figurative and can be literal. Take for example, “My marriage was on the rocks” literally, they might have got married on a cliff top and metaphorically it might have been a risk – a sink or swim event – or that some aren’t great cliff climbers and simply married for failure and knew it would happen: they can’t climb the cliff nor could they survive the fall. Even the “fall” becomes an awareness of vulnerability inherent within religious “man” and humanity. We fall and how do we manage the fall? Do we blame others for the fall, for the rocks presence or do we accept the fall and get up and try again with that knowledge?

On the rocks is a drinks order many bartenders know: with ice. Many marriages break down through drug addiction and ice is considered one of the number one destroyers of families, intimacy and financial stability. A rocking ship or horse gives the sense of instability: the horse for the child can remain in their control, a rocking ship rolling through the waves brings uncertainty about survival and this vulnerability intensifies through management and teamwork to steer that ship.

The title: Liar, a memoir written by Rob Roberge, caught my eye after reading about the unreliable evidence given in a sex abuse trial by a young woman against her parents. Roberge (2016) wrote a “darkly humorous” about mental illness, the erosion of memory, drug-fuelled experiences and rock-n-roll. The rock: his writing into memoir rocks the world of truth-telling and narratives to examine the unreliability of memory and the readers’ interest still caught by the talent: the humour and story-telling. He rocked the world and so too do sex abuse memoirs: they shift perspective and band together as a “Me too” generation begins to air their “dirty laundry” in public to gain some integrity.

Questioning integrity in story-telling is Richard Guillatt’s article “I know we’re innocent …” a wrongful convictions report. Memory and a child’s memory is unreliable. Not wanting to claim they are “liars” or manipulators, both sides in the case claim they are right and right to speak out. The doubt of course is in witnessing and evidence. The child’s evidence – a young woman – was shaky or on rocky ground: there were inconsistencies. The point to doubt, from my perspective because as I have discussed before there is doubt whether a memoir writer lived through an experience or life with their family that matched the judge’s comment that the travesty was that the parents showed “no remorse”. Like Huxley suggests, we all have fragments of knowledge about others in our lives whether they are family, close friends or passers-by that others don’t have. The institutions that maintain integrity publishing and denying questions are known. 

The buyers of the stories are unknown to me : Do they believe them or need them in a way I have questioned and this makes them angry because of discomfort and humiliating error that they feel they have been deceived and now the person that sheds light on the deception must suffer or pay? These memories are inconsistent because people buy them and need them to connect with. The me too generation has both power and life-denying forces: copycats and attention seekers do exist and once someone gets attention they claw at the limelight to cast shade on those receiving attention to gain some light on themselves whether honest or through lies. The performance is maintained through crowd expectations or group mentality.  A group memory exists: communities live through hell and experience trauma and grief together. Groups, like cults also lie and present pies to the public for attention. 

Liar written by Justine Larbalestier, 2009, was written from the perspective of a compulsive liar. There are traces of Epictetus in her writing “We are all made of broken glass. The school grinds along on grief and anger.” Epictetus suggests we accept impermanence and change as well as control the wish fulfilment, dreaming element of desiring things we cannot have. The stoic suggests that boundaries, like wishing for a fig in winter, need control for happiness as well as community. The compulsive liar doesn’t know these boundaries and like many stories that appear as truth telling (not all and this makes the credibility and integrity of some standing on shaky ground because others couldn’t accept no figs in winter approach) they seek the impossible and eternal: they wish only for public attention at the expense of private lives, like child sex offenders and stealing stories for attention.

Liar is a great title and suggests our truths are hidden or contained within those lies. The problem with casting doubt over child sex abuse claims, like Guillatt’s article, is that If the parents are innocent what were the motives of the child? As well as, if the child is speaking the truth, are the motives of the media to chastise a child who broke their system and won in court a presence: the abuser is not always disempowered by high profile paedophiles and sex offenders. Many stories through the media are written by sex offenders and their supporters – only some in public are outed as guilty and ashamed. The majority still maintain a self-righteousness to write and question crimes as well as participate in them. This is the private life of underworld criminality: the web deceives some and others simply turn a blind eye or turn away from the light that might produce the knowledge to change the way we think, feel and behave around the always present underworld.

Shame is both destructive and creative: some people shame to control and destroy creativity and others, who allude shaming, seem to hold the power to destroy as well as deserve some shame that might have – in childhood – thwarted their adult attempts to simply blankly destroy others without remorse. Love is needed for that. And a psychologist, once researching the brains of mass murders discovered that his too was similar but he didn’t turn out that way. He deduced this was because his mother loved him in a way that socialised him to marry, discuss with his family his psychopathy and they joined together to support his understanding where he felt he missed the human connection or neurobiology that others have to connect. His family life, his childhood had memories and the warmth to pull him out of the “mass murdering” brain that missed these crucial developmental events.

A marriage on the rocks – wrote someone about their memoir. When they also wrote a little known piece about walking along a Sydney beach cliff face and – quite devoid and distant from any emotional connection to land as well as event – simply swept over the event that someone died slipping down the cliff that day. The writing lacks presence and the memory of the person who fell is – I believe – still with integrity and grief within their personal, private lives where their loss will never be filled by a writer’s attempt to gain public integrity through writing. Personally, I feel the connection is theft and indicates more about the religious background of the writer than they would like to suggest. Also, because clearly I know more than the general public about their private life. Not all because I too am a fragment holding a key to the memory of them and this is disturbing. Their group has attempted to control everything and the institutions that support this control are also involved in – for some – outing frauds and identity theft like the case of the Aboriginal artists Eddie Burrup constructed by Elizabeth Durack as well as other frauds that imitate the needs of the public: that crimes will be investigated in the right way. The reliability most communities want to achieve in the integrity of institutional support and human rights, for example to seek justice, is not always fair nor shared. There are groups who miss out and groups chosen for support.

Erich Fromm, 1956 The Art of Loving:

Love requires courage: Love requires us to be brave and vulnerable. It calls us to be willing to open up and take risks, even when it feels risky and unfamiliar.

SOme liars don’t enjoy or take risks. They simply appropriate to enjoy public flattery and like high profile paedophiles they aren’t brave they are simply predators on the vulnerable and use the system because they know that memory, just as what they’ve “got” or perhaps like the psychologist never really developed or had, is unreliable. Like old theories of education, where “banking” simply put knowledge into blank heads or a tabula rasa with the belief that all the same knowledge churns out the same answers for tests. Paulo Freire teaches us to reframe and rethink knowledge, connection and living or developing through the lifespan as public and privately matched humans with integrity: to question the oppressors rather than resemble them – unfortunately the displacement of Palestinians currently is a resemblance of Nazism and Nazi Germany – the oppressed now imitating the oppressors for dominance and control.

The conversation that creates and reframes is inclusive. Simply accepting print media as the most powerful truth telling tool excludes diversity and cultures with orators, speakers, stories and oral histories. Of course the inspiration for this writing – not simply private knowledge of a story thief or, borrowing from Markus Zusak, The Book Thief narrated by Death offering perspectives of victims in WWII Nazi Germany, a book was published unquestioned about it’s truth or plagiarism (Do publishers use turn-it-in like some Universities?) – inspiration? A Norwegian TV series In the name of Love (2024) opens with an assertion that the series is based loosely on a true story. Someone’s history and life was impacted by the 1960s-70s feminist and Hippie movements that questioned objectification of women and the oppression of women who remained without enlightenment and poor therefore turning to photography to reduce themselves to being “looked at” in magazines for man’s observation of his sexual pleasure. Man observes and watches; woman acts out a sex which is not one or not her own and remains desperate for attention and man’s confirmation of her desirability as sexually desired. Clearly I have borrowed like other writers, Luce Irigaray’s title “This sex which is not one” and where others have added an extra (like in a performance the extras exist) “not” to imply the web cannot simply be undone or walked away from. In Norway this time period opened doors to discussion and like in many educated countries, to questions about pornography and freedom as well as women, education and general abuse in everyday relations. Now the doors are open to discussing women who abuse and it is not simply a male-dominated area for discussion: women abuse women and men, children and adults. So too do men. 

Sexual liberation questioned female oppression. The liar as a memoir has questioned the oppression of dominance and controlling truth in public institutions, families and general everyday lives. The 1970s held circle discussions (not always equal) and listening became a skill to question oppression and the way people have felt oppressed.

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” – Paulo Freirer

Richard Guilliatt (April, 2023) https://wrongfulconvictionsreport.org/2023/04/01/i-know-were-innocent-these-things-just-did-not-happen/

© Cate Andrews, 2024.