March 10, 2003

In addition to my ability imaginatively project myself into forests and snow fields, I'm trying to develop a similar, temporal ability. Not to project myself into the future--we all do that, every second of every hour of every day. No, I'm trying to reach back into the past. My past, specifically.

Music--like scent--is a powerful conjurer of memory. Some of the music that I listen to I've been listening to for a long time, and some of it dates from my freaky early twenties, when I was insane. Well, not insane insane, that's far too dramatic, but I was a little, shall we say, "touched" in a way not entirely in keeping with the long-standing tradition of youthful flakiness. I was a maniacal melancholic. There were more than a few instances of the deepe blacke depression, the sort of fathomless mood that resulted in bizarre behavior. Sitting naked wrapped in a thin blanket during parties, that sort of thing. For I was an artiste! Do not attempt to understand my madness, it is my muse! I would laugh at your conventionality, but I am too wrapped with despair...it goes well with this shirt, don't you think? That sort of thing.

In addition to the oh-what-an-old-soul-I've-got routine, I also enjoyed a wunnerful magickal Head. I'm not quite sure, now, what that entailed exactly, because my sense of it has has faded as I've gotten older. But the magickal Head had something to do with possibility...a boundless sense of what-may-be that, I have recently noticed, has faded as I enter my third decade. Although I've recently done a bunch of Very New Things (moving in with Peapartner, buying a house, et cetera), I feel very much in a rut. All of my focus has been inward...and I'm starting to run out of things to look at.

Then again, it could just be the last vestiges of my Wintermind, which I never seem to notice until shortly before Spring. The landscape of my home has been white, with bursts of muddy brown and gravelly black, since late December, and the tendency has been to stay indoors and keep quiet. Nevertheless, when snippets of the twenty-something Head flash through the thirty-something Head, I've taken to grabbing them, holding them up for close examination like a piece of multicolored gauze fluttering by in the wind. What is the Head doing, back there in time? What is it feeling? What makes that Head so different from this Head? And, most importantly: what do I like about that Head?

I've long since come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that the Amazing Converting Christ! experience works so well for some people is because they cannot escape the clawing tendrils of their past. Like Augustine, obsessed by the stolen pears of his youth, they are unable to escape the terrible weight of conscience, not just for sins committed now, but for all sins they may have ever committed. They are unable to cut their past selves some slack. So, when the man with the bulletproof hair, the shiny suit and the Big Big Book tells them with authority that Christ heals all wounds...well, for some folks that's a pretty good offer. And for some folks, it even works. For me, the experience is not so much one of sin and guilt as it is...well, embarrassment, for want of a better word. It took me a long time to tell myself: well, look, you were young, and foolish, and doing too many drugs, and so the fact that you couldn't be bothered to put clothes on for the party--or got far too drunk at those weddings...or shaved your head when you were out of your head on those nifty pills--doesn't really have much to do with who you are now. This is because, for a long time, the recollections of other people were to be feared: what construct of my past self do they carry with them? What must they think of me? Now, I don't care so much about that.

Unfortunately, one of the ways I've managed to not care so much about that is by greatly reducing the number of people around me. After all, this "embarrassment" is a social function, by and large, so the equation works: reducing social contact equals a reduction in the chances for observable regrettable antics. But that equation ignores some important variables. It's simple math when something a bit more sophisticated and nonlinear is called for.

So now, when the gauzy snippets of my past float by, I try not to let them drift away, but take hold of them and stare into them, as though they were scrying mirrors. I forgive myself for whatever foolishness they depict, and try to inhabit the Head of the past, peering around from within the emerging personality. Sometimes, if I'm in the right mental place in the present, I can feel a ghostly touch of my past self: the burgeoning thought, the mania, the unresolved issues. But beneath that all are some of the things I've left behind: wonder, openness, magic.

And sometimes...if I'm very, very, careful...if I'm honest...I can bring small caresses of those things, the good things, back to the now with me.