The damaged past, artfully reused
That last video wasn’t meant to imply that I spent yesterday procrastinating on a project. Far from — I spent the day getting ready for the next few months, which, if you care to see it that way, will be a project in itself. Because I have this vision of how I want to live for the next while, which involves early rising and healthy eating and lots of exercise, lots of long walks and violin practice, frugality from day to day but weekly splurging on time out with friends, a lot of staying in at night, not too much booze, not too much coffee, plenty of water, enjoying my job, saving money. And of course plenty of writing. Plenty of reading and movies and plenty of blogging about both.
So I cleaned the office and cleared my desk, and dealt with my email and my bills. It feels so liberating to have an empty inbox. No demands you haven’t met, no debts or obligations owed to anyone in the world. I listened to Adrian Sherwood and then Ljova. I went online and bought six new T-shirts and six desperately-needed pairs of socks, and an army-brown cotton hoodie. I made rice and beans and ate some of the tamales we made the other day, drank two glasses of wine and two glasses of water and two cups of coffee (not in that order) and caught up on back issues of the New Yorker. The trivial things you do to prepare yourself for the week and the month ahead that aren’t actually trivial at all.
And I sat down at my desk to do some writing, yesterday’s blog post. My desk is a pine dressing table that belonged to Torrey’s grandmother, Maxine. I never met her but I think about her all the time because of this desk. It has a drawer to the left, and next to it, in front of me, there’s a deep compartment with an open front. There’s no evidence there was ever a drawer to put there. Inside the compartment I store a ream of blank writing paper and my current notebook. It’s where I do almost everything when I spend the day at home. The corner is conducive to writing and reading and watching movies, and conducive to writing about reading and watching movies. Torrey calls it Command Central because of my dual-monitor setup.
And now I’m thinking about this writing project I’m back to working on. It’s a story superficially about a long-past breakup, the scene revisited by the guy in present time. I was going to get feedback on it from two different friends, but before I could do so they started going through their own messy breakups and I didn’t want to impose on them. August is breakup season in San Francisco, as everyone knows, so I really should have known better. But anyway that’s just the surface movement. What it’s really about is the work of uncovering the past — or not so much recovering memories as going back to the scene of an event to create a mental version of the past that seems richer, more true somehow, though it’s probably just as false to the past, in its way, as your original impressions. We all do this whenever we visit a place we lived for a few months, or a year. It looks different but it reminds you of things you’d also forgotten, and you create a different narrative on the spot.
Paul Collins writes about how Richard Booth scorns the people who come into Hay, buy up local properties and renovate them:
A visitor like me sees nothing but quaintness in Hay, and a certain stark beauty in ruins; but a longtime resident sees … well, ruin. And yet to harangue against their renovation seems hopeless too. Decay might be the best growth industry left in Wales. The damaged past, artfully reused, is all most of us ever have to work with anyway.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at in this story, how we artfully reuse the damaged past — not just writers, but everybody. And I’m not sure I’m getting there, quite. But the only thing I can do is my best.
posted: 10 August 17
under: Open Folio