by I have always said we blog to record the truth and over the last week, I’ve been paging through the truths of my life over the past 15 years as we move old Go Inside Magazine articles from a static page format to new, dynamic, WordPress.com publishing.
It’s a pretty amazing experience to be forced to look back and read what you wrote in 1996 — and before! — and test to see if what you said in the past still has a vibrating, human, harmonic that still sounds within you today.
1998’s “The Isherwood Indictment” still stings:
This experience with my biological father has taught me that sometimes it’s best to let the past stay buried and that’s why I never tried to contact him before he called me. Unearthing scars back into bloody scabs can do more harm than good. Moving up and on have psychological and emotional advantages as long as you can come to terms with the past — even if that coming to terms means accepting you were unwanted and dismissed from memory.
“Unnatural Selection” — from 1983 — still works today:
I was kneeling, pulling dandelions
when I heard it.
There, under the mock black cherry tree
a young rabbit flat on its back
limp,
a broken toothpick spine.
The wail
describes an
underside ripped clean of fur
oozing red
exposing a pink
diaphragm.
Even in June of 1996 I was writing about “Anonymous Cowards” — before there even was such a term — in my analysis of, “The Golden Age of the Web:”
Right now on the Web you are who you want to be. If you’re strong and confident, you use your real name and you stand behind what you say. If you’re a coward, you can hide your true identity and mail bomb folks anonymously and post newsgroup flames under a silly comic book name. You can also dig for information without leaving a trail. You can research your enemies without being seen, find the best deal, and be up to the moment on any topic without ever having to prove your identity or leave home.
Rifling back through the roots of your life in print on the web is an emotional and intellectual purging of what you thought you knew then pitched against what you know now and, so far, the self-inspection required in this pecking back is providing more mountainous reminders of who I am now than the pesky pebbles of who I hoped to become then.
Great thoughts, David. I too have been reminiscing on the last 10 years of my life as I move over GO Inside articles. Sometimes I shake my head reading over an article and think, “Wow, I really phoned that one in.” Other times I giggle at the thought process I was having at the point in time of my life and how I have changed since then!
It’s definitely a strange echo to look back, Gordon. You change, but the original work is in stasis.
Yeah, I felt the same thing, too, reading my old articles. It reminds you where you were and how far you have grown in thoughts and getting things done.
It is certainly like looking at yourself in a reverse magnifying glass! The farther away you are, the closer you look.
I am imagine it must be strange to have to go back and actually read what was written a long time ago. The internet won’t let you forget.
It’s a nostalgic and melancholy head spinner, Anne — especially for those writers who have died. Reading their words keeps them alive, but you sure do miss them in death.