July 26: "Winter at Herring Cove," Retrospective Falsification, 1980s

Mary Oliver and a remembrance of seals . . . 

Winter at Herring Cove

by:  Mary Oliver

Years ago,

in the bottle-green light

of the cold January sea,

two seals 

suddenly appeared together

in a single uplifting wave--

each in exactly the same relaxed position--

each, like a large, black comma,

upright and staring;

it was like a painting

done twice

and, twice, tenderly.

The wave hung, then it broke apart;

its lip was lightning;

its floor was the blow of sand

over which the seals rose and twirled and were gone.

Of all the reasons for gladness,

what could be foremost of this one,

that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!

Now the seals are no more than the salt of the sea.

If they live, they're most distant than Greenland.

But here's the kingdom we call remembrance

with its thousand iron doors

through which I pass so easily,

switching on the old lights as I go--

while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds,

the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.

Memory is a tricky thing.  Oliver's recollection of these two seals could be completely factual.  Or not.  She acknowledges the slipperiness of the mind.  Every experience is both instant and memory.  The moment something happens, it becomes remembrance, and that remembrance is tinged with retrospective falsification, where the brain filters out the negative, leaving only the warm and fuzzy.  Retrospective falsification is the reason why women will endure childbirth more than once.  The pain and suffering of labor is erased by the joy of holding a newborn child.

Looking back on "the good old days" is something we all do.  I was a child of the 1980s.  That means the soundtrack of my youth was Michael Jackson, Madonna, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Simple Minds, among others.  Big hair, parachute pants, ripped jeans, and Miami Vice pastels.  E. T. the Extraterrestrial, Dead Poets Society, and The Breakfast Club.  In my nostalgic mind, it was a great decade to grow up in.

Of course, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States.  The AIDS epidemic killed millions.  The space shuttle Challenger exploded.  John Lennon was assassinated.  People were in a satanic panic.  And Betamax cassettes came and went.  So, not everything was sequins and moonwalking.  Retrospective falsification is hard at work.

I don't want to go back to the 1980s.  Being a teenager kind of sucked in all of its painful awkwardness.  I remember the constant feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.  My inability to ask the person I was crushing on to go to a movie.  I was a mess in a quiet, straight-A-student kind of way.  I didn't even get truly black-out drunk until my senior year of high school.

Tonight, when I got home from the library, it was around 9 p.m.  The houses in the neighborhood were bathed in a kind of golden summer light that appears only around dusk in July or early August.  I took my puppy for a trot around the backyard, and she flushed a rabbit out of the lilac bushes.  I could smell barbecue--someone had grilled some hot dogs.

I love this time of the year, when the hullaballoo of Independence Day subsides and what's left are long days of sun and blue, blue sky.  Is the world a perfect place tonight?  No, but it's really not about perfection.  It's about being content.  That's what I am tonight, Donald Trump and Canadian forest fires notwithstanding.

In short, for Saint Marty, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times.  Right here.  Right now.