Flame and Ash

Yesterday, I received a Facebook post from a former high school classmate asking me if I could find someone I barely remember to invite them to our upcoming 50th reunion.  The posting was in response to my sharing of the lyrics to a new Over The Rhine song as posted by the duo, and my comment that I was looking forward to their upcoming album.  My former classmate seemed to think that I was referring to an album of pictures related to our high school.

The proper word for my reaction is “gobsmacked.”  I wasn’t bothered much by the fact that she clearly hadn’t read the post I shared, since I have discovered over time that folks on Facebook don’t spend the time to think about much of anything other than their petty concerns.  I was amazed that she would ask me – a complete stranger after so many years of divergent life paths – to find someone she remembers; someone I seem to think she might have dated once upon a time.  Of course, I can’t be certain about that recollection, since I haven’t heard his name in 50 years and have no clear recollection of anything about him – other than his name.

The request itself wasn’t offensive.  In fact, I spent a few minutes seeing if I could find him on Facebook more from a sense of curiosity than anything else.  Helping a friend – even one as tenuous as she – has always been a source of satisfaction.  My search produced hundreds of folks with the same name, for his family name is common.  There were far too many possibilities to open and read given my low level of curiosity, so after a few minutes of scanning the list I gave up the matter for at least the remainder of Lent, 2013 – and perhaps forever.

What did confound me was her tight focus upon our shared past.  I hadn’t reviewed her Facebook page for some time, and so I spent a few moments doing so this morning.  I discovered other clues to her intrigue with the past: her high school graduation photo; photographs from our 45th reunion; a list of friends heavily populated with our shared classmates.  In fairness, I noticed her list isn’t exclusively composed of classmates and many of her photos are of more current matters.  She, like me, has changed.  She was a gorgeous young girl, and is an attractive older woman; I was a severe young man, and am a somewhat mellowed Old Fart.

But while I cheerfully admit to Old Fart status, I refuse to spend my time looking backward.  Life in the rear view mirror isn’t interesting, except as a source for lessons or unwritten novels.  Life in the rearview mirror is important, but only because if you hadn’t lived it you wouldn’t be who you are today.  So when I investigate my past lives, it is for some reason which is important to the present or to the immediate future.

I suspect we shed past lives as easily as snakes shed skin.  Some of us may do so intentionally, but most do it without realizing the act is in process, much less completed.  Eventually, our dominant personality traits metamorphose into a materially different, but related, variant.  And if we live long enough, our metamorphosis may be into a new creature altogether, even if the path of our ascent (or descent, perhaps) can be traced, by means of memory and the occasional fact, to the formative source of self.

If this sounds Darwinian, mea culpa.  At various times of my life I have pondered writing messages to my future self to remind him of something I then thought important.  But while the temptation existed, I never took up the task believing, instead, that my future self would incorporate important life lessons into his corpus and continue to evolve.  I did not want to become stuck in time and he wouldn’t need the reminder, for the important matter’s essence would be part of his consciousness and, therefore, woven into whomever tomorrow’s volatile melange of circumstance, experience, thought, and conscience might produce at any given moment.

For my faith is always in the future, never in the past.  In the future lie new challenges and more evolution of self; in the past lie only the ashes of experience.

William Carlos Williams summed up my belief best in Paterson, Book Three, Part II:

“Fire burns, that is the first law.
When a wind fans it the flames

are carried abroad. Talk
fans the flames.  They have

manoeuvred it so that to write
is a fire and not only of the blood.

The writing is nothing, the being
in a position to write (that’s

where they get you) is nine tenths
of the difficulty: seduction

or strong arm stuff. The writing
should be a relief,

relief from the conditions
which as we advance become – a fire,

a destroying fire. For the writing
is also an attack and means must be

found to scorch it – at the root
if possible.  So that

to write, nine tenths of the problem
is to live.  They see

to it, not by intellection but
by sub-intellection (to want to be

blind as a pretext for
saying, We’re so proud of you!

A wonderful gift! How do
you find the time for it in

your busy life?  It must be a great
thing to have such a pastime.

But you were always a strange
boy. How’s your mother?)

– the cyclonic fury, the fire
the leaden flood and finally
the cost –

Your father was such a nice man.
I remember him well.

Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it’s all right
but what the hell does it mean?
*  *  *  *
We read: not the flames
but the ruin left
by the conflagration

Not the enormous burning
but the dead (the books
remaining). Let us read

and digest: the surface
glistens, only the surface.
Dig in – and you have

a nothing, surrounded by
a surface, an inverted
bell resounding, a

white-hot man become
a book, the emptiness of
a cavern resounding”

Williams had a lot more to say on the subject, for, being a doctor by trade, he was always struggling to deal with the present – and someone else’s future – as he found it, using skills learned in the past to do so.  He remained enamored of life until his was lived in full, and all that was left were the wonderful ashes of his poetry.   And he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.  Nor do I.

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