Soul Boat (2019)
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
–Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays (1983)
I have never had any interest in returning to the past, even those times that are sugar-coated and glorified in my memory. The past is where it belongs, behind us. But, as the recently deceased Wendell Berry wrote above, it defines us as we are now, in the present time. We are the living result of our past, often one which we had little, if any, control over.
There’s good reason to want to escape our past. It can be a great weight to bear, filled as it with traumas and griefs, progressions and regressions. that can;t be denied.
But here we stand, bewildered and trapped by a past already written with undeniable facts.
And unless we change our present, we will remain so going into the future. Berry writes that we can only escape our past through this change, by adding something better.
That begs the question: What can I add that makes it better?
That’s a hard question for any of us. For me, I would like to say that my work adds something better.
But I don’t really know how much that changes anything for the better in any meaningful, lasting way.
Maybe our additions need not be grand in scale. Maybe even small things in the present serve to lessen the impact of our past on our future.
Maybe even slightly better moves the dial?
I don’t know but I tend to believe that.
Not sure where this came from this morning. Maybe it is the painting I am working on, a large Red Tree piece. As I have worked on it over the past couple of days, I have taken to calling it Ozymandias after the poem by P.B. Shelley. I first read the poem in third grade in a book of poems from Scholastic Books. This poem and many others in that book made a huge impact on my young mind.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I see this new unfinished painting as a symbol of my own hubris in thinking that my work will be around long after I am gone. But will it instead suffer the fate of its namesake?
Not for me to say. Out of my hands. Like any of us, I can only try to do better in some small way.
That might be enough.
Here’s a Jethro Tull song that I shared here about six years back. Felt like it worked for today’s post but what do I know? This is Living in the Past from 1969.
Contrary to Berry, I’ve never believed we can escape our past. I find Faulkner’s view, from his Requiem for a Nun, to be somewhat more on point:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
Change ‘escape’ to ‘reshape the meaning of’ and I’m on board.
I was just going to comment that I agreed with Faulkner’s words and respond that perhaps we can’t escape our pasts– you can’t escape something that is already part of you– but can instead use those pasts as something to either avoid or employ in building our future. Then I saw your second comment with ‘reshape’ which succinctly captured what I was thinking. I, too, am on board with that.
I remember ordering books from Scholastic Books but I never thought to order a book of poems. My bad.
The cover of this book had a photo depicting the soldiers on horse from Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. I think I still have that book bouncing around here somewhere. My favorite school days were when the teacher brought out the boxes of Scholastic Books we’d ordered. That new book smell coming out of the box was the best!
I remembered that feeling. It was the best!
For someone who has spent years researching my family’s history and reading far more actual history books than I ever did in school (for perspective of the periods they lived in), I’d say it is less of an escape, but a continued journey and hopefully not making mistakes of any of our forebearers.
I think we can all recall saying … I’m not going to do that or be like that when I grow up only to find out you did on occasion make the same wrong turns.
Great song choice. A definite blast from the past.