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.

April 13, 14, 15, 16: Grace of Those Days, Class of 2020, Senior Pictures

Merton indulges in some serious nostalgia . . .

In the last moments in which I had an opportunity to do so, I tasted the ferocious delights of exultant gloating over the companions I was about to leave.  They stood around me in the sun, with their hands hanging at their sides, wearing their black smocks and their berets, and laughing and sharing my excitement, not without envy.

And then I was riding down the quiet street in a carriage, with my luggage beside me, and Father talking about what we were going to do.  How lightly the cab-horse's hoofs rang out in the hard, white dirt of the street!  How gaily they echoed along the pale smug walls of the dusty houses!  "Liberty!" they said, "liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty," all down the street.

We passed the big polygonal barn of a post-office, covered with the tatters of ancient posters, and entered under the dappled shadow of the plane trees.  I looked ahead, up the long street to Villenouvelle station, where I had taken the train so many times in the small hours of the morning, on my way home to spend the Sunday in St. Antonin.

When we got on the little train, and traveled the way we had first come to the Aveyron alley, I did indeed feel my heart tighten at the loss of my thirteenth century:  but oh, it had long ceased to belong to us.  We had not been able to hold on, for very long, to the St. Antonin of the first year:  and the bitter lyre of the Lycee had burned all its goodness out of me again, and I was cauterized against it, and had become somewhat insensitive to it:  not so much so, however, that I did not feel a little sad leaving it for ever.

It is sad, too, that we never lived in the house that Father built.  But never mind!  The grace of those days has not been altogether lost, by any means.

I think this sheltering in place makes everyone feel the way young Merton feels here--sad for the things we had or might have had.  I'm sure the high school seniors are experiencing this melancholy in a much different way than most.  In the blink of an executive order, they lost the last three months of their time together.  Prom, gone.  Senior skip day, gone.  Graduation ceremony, gone.  All night grad party, gone.  All those last laughs, last classes, last moments of shared irony.  Gone.

On Facebook right now, I've noticed a particular movement--posting your senior pictures in honor of the Class of 2020.  While I understand the sentiment behind it, I'm not sure if displaying my 1980s clothes and haircut necessarily makes today's high school seniors feel consoled or better in any way.  I think it's simply a way for middle-aged people to post embarrassing pictures of themselves to make fun of.  And I hate to say it, but I don't think the impulse to do this is truly motivated by thoughts of these young people who've lost so much.  It's more about nostalgia than anything else.

Don't get me wrong.  I've laughed at many of those senior pictures that have come through my Facebook feed.  Enjoyed the bad hairstyles and unfortunate outfits that were cool once.  They have brought good memories back for me.  But my point is that I HAVE those memories.  I can recall the warm June night I paraded out of my high school for the last time.  I can hear the songs that were played at the all night grad party (to this day, hearing Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)" will immediately take me back to the Elks Club at 2 a.m. in the mid-80s.)  I was able to say goodbye to that part of my life in a profound and meaningful way.

The seniors of 2020 will never have the opportunity to be nostalgic about their last year of high school.  How can you be nostalgic about isolating in your home for months?  Or face masks?  Or economic recession/depression?  Death counts?  That's the stuff of a Stephen King novel, not your senior yearbook.  My heart breaks for these young people, because this time in their lives ended with a fever instead of "Pomp and Circumstance."

So, I will not be posting my senior picture on Facebook in support of the Class of 2020.  (Nobody wants to see that anyway.).  While, for me, that photo is a reminder of everything I had back then, for the graduating class of 2020, it's reminder of everything they have lost right now.

Instead, Saint Marty will post a picture of his puppy, because a cute puppy is more of a consolation to high school seniors right now than mullets and parachute pants.