WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Just back from the 100^th birthday party of a remarkable man, Stanley Mathews, to whom I am distantly related. Still fully active and a lot more sprightly than some 70yr olds. He speaks several languages including Russian and has just read War and Peace in the language of Tolstoy.

Family gatherings of this kind are occasions to mix with people not of your choosing. You choose your friends, you choose which of your work colleagues to socialize with, if any. You do not choose your relations. Outside of your immediate family circle, these are people  with whom your only connection are those invisible chains, links connecting you to your parents and outward to an ever expanding array of individuals, alive and, the greater the circle becomes, mostly dead; and it is often the dead whose presence is most strongly felt at such events. It is the closest we come in this culture to ancestor worship.
The dead stare out at us from the pages of photograph albums especially brought out for the occasion. Sombre Victorians and complacent Edwardians whose unblinking eyes survey us with benign incomprehension. For we are the future, and the future is as incomprehensible to the past as the black and white world in which our ancestors moved is to us. We are strangers but for this invisible thread, for without them there would be no you.

That they danced through time as we do is a matter of record. Their days were structured to fit unnatural rhythms, filled with momentary joys, silent satisfactions, sadness and tedium.They too watched the hands of the clock moving inexorably against them as they snatched whatever happiness they could grasp within those unforgiving minutes. Eventually, after thrusting another generation into the world, they expired as we will eventually expire.
So we look toward them for answers. We establish our connections with them and hear snatches of stories. “That is David, he was a bit of a scoundrel, ran off to Canada after his shoe factory went bankrupt. Standing next to him is Lionel, he was a real ladies man, married a real society beauty, though her family never approved of him.”  We look at Lionel and David, did they have any intimation of what fate held in store for them? However they stare back blankly as indifferent to our fate as we have hitherto been to theirs.

We are all the products of chance, the accident of choices made, sometimes on a whim. If my paternal Grandfather had not enlisted in the Canadian army and returned to Ireland in 1918, if my maternal grandfather, a dispatch rider on the Western Front had just been unlucky once? And these are just two accidents of fate. How many other events were contingent upon my emerging on a cold winters night in Belfast in 1955?

So we fall back on the photographs that tell of a comforting solipsism, we are part of a grand plan, these people staring mutely back at us came into the world so that one day we too would emerge. This is Jungian individuation turned on its head as we seek to integrate with a web of others alive and dead to establish, in the words of the popular TV series, who [we think] we are.

It is surely no accident that in an age of increasing atomisation, anomie and alienation that people look to a past when the extended family was the norm and community not just an empty cliche but a living breathing reality. Ironic too that after decades of young people seeking to break with their past and strike out afresh it is now the baby boomer generation that has now become fascinated with the idea of roots? We want to belong.