Thursday, September 20, 2007
There's a curious, uncalled-for thought that comes up once in a while: when you go for a new job, or look at a flat you're considering moving into in a street that you've never visited before. Afterwards you do some ordinary, everyday thing: have a cup of coffee at a local sandwich bar, or buy an evening standard from the newsagent on the corner. And you realise that, if you get the job, that sandwich bar is where you'll buy your coffee every morning. If you take the flat, that newsagent will be part of your life: you'll know the opening hours and where the cat food's kept and the man behind the counter will reach for your paper the moment you walk in. Or else you'll never see it again as long as you live. One or the other, you just don't know.
There's an opposite thought that comes in familiar places: when you're visiting your old school, or at country funerals or when you're selling your parents' house. For years, you've dreamt about those walls, those doors, that creak on the stairs: you know each and every patch of damp and every square of carpet. Now you realise that there's no real reason ever to return. You might, of course, but you probably won't. This is it. the end: it feels as though the place itself is disappearing. Which it is - you made it your own while it was part of your life, but now that it is so no longer, it's turning back from Place into space.
Writing about the past feels like both of these. If you've spent a part of your youth convinced you were making history, and doing so (or not) in the way young people do, not in a thought-out way, but through intuition, luck and the support (or lack thereof) of friends, then that part of your life becomes the bit you don't want to revisit when you get older.
You put a mental fence around it: it's the wild garden of memory. You fear that, if you start digging it up, you'll never stop: that you'll end up spending your sleepless nights reliving the mistakes you made or wallowing in glorious moments of victory, those times you knew you'd made it, and then having all the joy of that memory sucked away forever, now that you know the mistake hidden in that glory, or the sadness that came after, or both. Or just drowning in nostalgia.
And you fear the opposite will happen: that once you've faced the past, it will dissolve, to leave you standing alone.
(adapted from Changing Stages, chpt 12: last orders on the titanic)
Posted by nayrakroarual at 10:18 PM
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