The Past May Not Be Past

The Past May Not Be Past

Here’s the challenge in revisiting old poems and short stories. Life is, to state the obvious, always in flux. The day we wake to is one in which we appear, nearly unchanged from yesterday. But old photos reveal ruthlessly that the years have eroded and rearranged once familiar features. Where did that extra skin come from, anyway? Like those shifting images, what we have set down in all sincerity many years ago reflect a person who used to be you. The words came from some part of an earlier brain that inhabited your every thought. Can they be put aside or dismissed as irrelevant to today’s manifestation of yourself? Is there value, albeit sentimental, in re-birthing them, as one would old pictures from your past; mom and dad at a picnic with you at 20-something holding your two year old daughter next to a pregnant wife. Looking at the young man that was me is tricky business for my current state of mind. Most of the people who are vital to my life now were either unborn or unknown at the moment captured in the picture. Half of those who made the picture are gone for good. I wonder what was in my head at that distant place and moment. How much was I yet to learn about the path I was on. The pregnant wife, Jan, is gone; dead at 47. The baby is my son Peter whose life travel and work has placed him far from my everyday life for decades. The cute blond sitting on my lap, Cheryl, lives close by and we often breakfast together in a cafe that became the theme of my first book. How much of that book was already forming as I sat smiling vacuously at the unknown photographer?

So it is with this yellowing trove of stories and poems. Do they deserve to see the light of day? Their voice is vaguely familiar to me. The speaker,then, was a stranger to tragedy and the staggering loss of loved ones. He suffered from limited exposure, you might say. But the stories and poems are telling, even when they are unlike his current voice. Certainly the passion was there and a certain boldness that the current voice lacks. Is it helpful to admit that his creations often lacked subtlety and suffered from a limited vocabulary? This is true enough, though seeds of his future voice were becoming evident, even then. He was in the grip of powerful authors, whose writing were blasting quarries in his searching brain. D.H. Lawrence was creeping into every crevice of his written expression. Did the new writer know he had been hijacked by some long dead Brit? The writer’s voice was New York metro but appeared on the page vaguely accented towards Great Britain. There were many English writers that infiltrated his mind and language. Auden, Shakespeare,the New Testament, with all its Elizabethan flourishes, and, of course the anglicized American, T.S. Eliot.  He was being shaped into someone who had not yet discovered his own voice, so he borrowed, even stole, from the best. It is, after all, the way we all grow into our own misshapen skins.

So the question at the moment is: discard that which no longer looks or sounds much like you and focus on the voice and man I have become, or present the old as a documentary of an evolving writer, husband, friend and sometime philosopher? Do the old pictures and voices teach us anything worth saving? In my coaching, after all, I guide folks through a process designed to uncover our old stories and the patterns that are embedded in them and to decide what’s still serving us well and what can be left behind. What, indeed?