There are certain events from my past that really stand out, and I can recall quite a bit about them. Again, with the accumulation of time and layering of memories, a lot has dulled, but going through old journals (particularly the really detailed ones from my undergrad years) can bring a lot back. Occasionally, I would even go into a reverie where I would almost imagine myself back there. This doesn't happen as much anymore. Sometimes a relatively small prod is all I need to bring back strong memories. I found this particularly true of theatre performances. Some I had completely forgotten, but seeing the playbill brought back a little bit, and with concentration I could recall a fair bit of the play. Other times, even knowing I saw the play, I still can't recall anything. I think this happens either when I was really underwhelmed by the performance or if it was in a month when I saw a lot of shows and my memory banks just were close to overflowing already and couldn't take anything more in. (Another weird situation is where you can't directly remember an event, but you can remember the last time you tried to or partially remembered the event, and that is what is stuck in memory. This is the case for some things from my very early childhood where I remember as a pre-teen remembering a handful of things from when I was around 3 or 4 (a playgroup, a yard sale before we moved) and slightly more from 1st grade through 3rd grade, but they are all indirect memories now.)
Still, it is interesting how vivid a handful of theatre performances are, even from 20 years ago. I may never forget aspects of Hamletmachine, which I saw around 1990, or a great performance of Genet's The Balcony at Chicago's Around the Rhinoceros* from 1996. Both were dark, edgy performance, but they weren't about drugs or drug-related violence that marks so many typical "edgy" and topical plays. (Frankly, I've seen all the plays on those subjects that I ever need to see, and despite my general interest in Lanford Wilson, I'm going to be passing on an upcoming performance of Balm in Gilead because I have no interest in watching another play with drug dealers providing the climax.)
Given how much on the move I have been lately, I simply haven't had much time to engage in (or perhaps more accurately indulge in) nostalgia, though I was really hit hard last July (a one-two punch of the late 80s setting of subUrbia and an intense re-engagement with Paul Simon's Graceland) and I emerged from it feeling really old and worn out. Not fun.
There is a real downside in focusing so intently on the past that it crowds out the present.** One time I nearly got wrapped up in second-hand nostalgia -- somewhat was describing how many memories Toronto had for her, and it was almost like a ghost city. In the end, I have a lot of memories of Toronto, but most of them are my own true memories. Toronto is a place that has changed pretty dramatically over the past 15 years, and if I do relocate there, it will be interesting how my memories of the place will be impacted by the fact that so many of the places I used to go have closed or been torn down (even the St. George Graduate Student residences are gone!). I may have mentioned that while I did like the AGO expansion, I was definitely not happy with the changes that ROM had made, and I probably would go less frequently as a result. Anyway, in this case, I am willing to go back and make a new set of memories to overlay (and eventually supplant) the original, core memories.
More recently I am finding a new issue or problem, that I am living so far in advance that five years down the road seems just as real to me as today. There are some advantages to being forward-thinking and future-oriented -- it makes it easier to buckle down and commit to a degree program for example. But it certainly makes it harder to stay rooted in the present. In the next blog entry (on being a rolling stone), the strong likelihood that I am going to be moving on from any particular place in 2-5 years, and this forward-orientation (and residual waves of nostalgia), really leaves me pretty detached from my current life/situation. In a lot of ways, I identify with the Dr. Manhattan character from Watchmen, though I don't live in simultaneous timespaces. And I am not literally blue, though it might be argued that I am figuratively blue most of the time...
I guess in general, I have stopped waiting for my real life to start -- and then I will start paying attention. (That's what I used to tell myself.) I am always going to be unsettled at heart and more than a little discontented with life (mine specifically, which is not bad on the whole, and even more so the "state of the world," which is bad and getting much worse).
People that are backwards-looking almost always become more conservative over time. I'm not sure I have become more politically conservative, though I am far more aware of the fiscal costs of liberal approaches, and somewhat more mindful of unintended consequences of them (and certainly more forgiving than the general public of some of the trade-offs like free-rider issues than come from following any particular approach). I would say that on the cultural front, I have largely rejected any pop music made after 2000 and I just don't care for Millennials and their lame approach to life. (And while this is a gross generalization, the cultural snobbery and rejection of the present seems far more widespread in European circles.) But what probably keeps me from being completely closed off (and only interested in the past) is this weird feeling that I really can see and plan for events five years into the future. That doesn't make me any happier or more optimistic (often the reverse), but I think it does prevent me from staying inside my own self-contained bubble.
* I think this was a one-year deal where the Rhinoceros Festival tried to piggy-back off of Wicker Park's Around the Coyote. Or maybe I am completely misremembering that, though I definitely did see The Balcony at a special midnight performance (and have the playbill to prove it). Speaking of things in Chicago generally getting worse, the folks in charge of Around the Coyote moved it away from Wicker Park/Bucktown and, in doing so, gutted it and made it completely irrelevant. I simply stopped going and would just go to events in the Flat Iron Building even though they no longer could call it Around the Coyote. They didn't have quite the same draw, but it wasn't too bad, all things considered. As for the Around the Coyote organizing committee, they closed down permanently in 2010. Another equally frustrating (and unnecessary) self-inflicted demise that comes to mind is the Hot House in Chicago's South Loop. I still shake my head at how that all went down and think fondly of some great shows that I saw there -- and regret there will be no more (even if I am no longer there in attendance).
** While this is only tangentially-related, I wonder if I would like the almost claustrophobic inhabiting of the past found in Proust's Remembrance of Lost Time. I have been meaning to read this for the longest time, and actually hope to tackle it in the second half of 2013. For better or worse, I will go with the Moncrief translation that was the common one when I was in undergrad, and not the more recent translation by Lydia Davis or the updated edition?! of Moncrief.
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