looking back – Malcolm's Round Table

“When I look back at my life, I think about what a wonderful, happy, satisfying life I’ve had. It’s so funny. It’s like living through things is a nightmare. The present of things is a nightmare—the not being gratified by things in the moment is a nightmare. But then when you look back at the decades of your life, like in your twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, you go, “Wow, it was so great living through that and gosh I got so much out of that, and gosh this and gosh that.” And yet living through it is never as satisfying.”

Source: Isaac Mizrahi on a Love of Old Things, and Surviving the Nightmare of the Present | Literary Hub

I have often felt this way. At the time, life was just life. Fortune was always slinging it’s outrageous arrows. Guardian angels were slinging miracles like hash house oatmeal. Yet later, all these “gosh this” things turn into our stories and our inflated tall tales and remember whens.

Some people tell these stories to their children and whoever else risks visiting them on the front porch or the nursing home. Some people put put their stories into memoirs that read like (and probably are) fiction. And some people put their stories into fiction that read like (and just might be) a bit of truth wearing a mask to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

Click on the link for a few minutes of potent thought that will–depending on your age and current state of mind–remain with you only as long as you’re reading the article or for the rest of your life. (though you may not know that until later).

–Malcolm

Incidentally, if you live in the U.S. and hang out on the GoodReads site, you have a chance to win a paperback copy of my new novel Eulalie and Washerwoman in a November 6-14 give-away,

Yesterday tugs at me
like undertow.

Beach bums say
(from birds’ first cries at break of day
to sweet whispers of sunsets and red sails)
that I better watch out
or I’ll be fetched far from the happy shore
along with childhoods, daisies, favorite books,
meaningful looks, old fishermen’s shoes and folktales,
and hauled downward below the continental shelf
where everything that ever happened
is stored for safekeeping
in Davy Jones’ locker.

Titanic is there,
with Lusitania, Edmund Fitzgerald, Empress of Ireland,
assorted sea monsters, sirens and songs, silenced now,
except in dream remnants flying like prayer flags
while their dreamers ceaselessly seek their future.
Yesterday caresses my feet like undertow
and the lifeguards say
I better watch out
or I’ll be ripped from an uncertain littoral
strewn with shells where long-gone creatures once lived
downward below the surface of known thought
where everything that ever happened
is locked away with ghost stories.

Yesterday whispers to me
like undertow
and the philosophers say
that I better watch out
or I’ll be come and gone with fleeting gestalts,
sunny afternoon dust motes, twilight inklings,
eye-blink gods and lives without faults
left out of history’s footnotes
that are kissed and missed forever
by all that has been borne
into the sleep of the deep.

Ceaselessly,
beach bums, life guards and philosophers
warn me with each red sky of morning
and every menacing grey twilight of gales
that yesterday is made of mirrors and smoke,
merely a mirage of dreams and lights across the bay.
Nonetheless, tomorrow or sooner than tomorrow,
I will ignore those fading cries of reason
because I’m watching less out than in,
aging upon the new season like spirits in oak.

Tomorrow, then, when yesterday calls me
with the words of wondrous once-upon-a-times,
turtle doves and lonely lost loves,
she will promise me many worlds, quantum leaps,
vision quests, and cave shadows in perfect pantomimes,
and like all I lack,
I’ll be borne back.

Malcolm's Round Table

Tag: looking back

Isaac Mizrahi on a Love of Old Things, and Surviving the Nightmare of the Present

Borne back ceaselessly into the past