It’s dry and it’s hot and it’s arid and I’m surrounded by limestone and an ocean that stretches into the horizon. I’m covered in gold and silk and have just been gifted a sentimental manuscript from 1820 as a surprise, having being taken on an island hopping trip where my only duties are to look beautiful and make the atmosphere relaxed. I’m laid down on a sun bed under a small grove of trees, around me spawns a garden of pomegranate, figs, olives, grapevines, hibiscus, oleander, lavender, rosemary, sage, lemons, limes and a full vegetable patch. I’ve blown through my reading of White Nights and Bobok by Dostoyevsky, and have pilfered a copy of Eroticism by George Bataille. There is nothing to do but reflect.
In the heat and the dry wind I find a younger version of myself. Like a spectre she moves through streets and paths towards the beach, lined with asbestos ridden beach shacks bleached even paler than their original cream by the relentless sun. A beaten up family sedan pushes past in a wave of petrol fumes. There’s a dead lizard next to the footpath, being meticulously dissected by a diligent hoard of ants. There is no notion of culture. There is barely any notion of wealth beyond subsistence, or maybe a new truck (bought on credit of course) and one of those newly built McMansions in those endless new developments that have pervaded the shrubbery. She’s dressed how she thinks people in the big cities do: a juvenile but earnest attempt at cosmopolitan style in black and white. It’s nowhere near, but she won’t know that for some time. A pair of shoplifted Prada sunglasses are perched on her nose. There’s silence except for the odd bit of traffic and the screaming of cicadas. Her only companion is a second-hand gold iPhone 6, and a pair of cheap headphones (shoplifted too, of course). She is surrounded by void. Trapped in place until circumstance and drive allowed her to muscle her way out of the murk and begin to explore, for now all she can do is dream in a drought plagued rural / suburban purgatory. She dreams of me, of who I am and what I do and where I will be. She is me, and I am her.
In the mad rush of daily life I often lose perspective of just how far I’ve dragged myself in this short life. The daily routine becomes myopic, and just as times relentless arrow marches forward so do I. But as someone who is always thinking of the next step, or dreaming of the future, there’s a lot of benefit to be had in stopping in place for a bit, if only to look over your shoulder and appreciate the progress you’ve made. Perspective is all too easy to lose. If you lose grasp of it you’ll find yourself agitated and unsettled, wondering why you never seem to be as far ahead as you think you are.
There’s a certain photographer who takes urban and rural landscape shots of my old home place (which is crazy because no one is from my old home place), and I can pretty accurately track my sporadic but cyclical mental breakdowns because if I spent hours pouring over his works on the verge of tears then yeah, that’s probably the lowest point of the spiral. I find his work speaks to me because he never allows human figures to appear in his frame, and so the void becomes apparent. I can smell his images, I can hear them, I can feel my skin blistering slowly again. What you probably don’t realise is how there is no where else on earth that does street utilities the same way they did where you grew up. The curbing (if present), the materials and manufacture of the street lights (if present), of the traffic lights, of the storm drains, of the plant life that finds it way along the sides. Nobody really consciously takes note of those small details, until they’re forcibly reminded of them when looking at pictures of places they haven’t been to in years. And when you do, the sight of that curbing might just feel like a gut punch, which is as strange physically as it is psychologically I can tell you.
Back when I lived in purgatory, I dreamed of the life I would lead in the future. And without a shadow of doubt in my heart, I can say that I have not only succeeded at all the things younger version of me dreamed of, but gone much further and in a much shorter time frame as well. She got everything she wanted, plus a little extra on the side. However, my success has a tinge of bittersweet. She never would have imagined, or even wanted, that successful future version of herself to be looking back at her with wistfulness. But I am.
The self I am now was born of frenetic work ethic, doggedness, and not a small degree of spite for where I came from and those who populated it. Perhaps most confusingly, I created my current self out of spite for my past / old current self. Nowadays I find it kind of funny that the am I was created to be was supposed to hate the younger me who created her. That was her reason for my creation. But now I am, I cannot find any of that hatred. But without that presupposed future hatred, I wouldn’t be here to not hate. I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this with words but I hope you can pick up on the cyclical chaos.
But in an idiom I’ve just created for the purpose of this article, spite is a great pre-workout but is not a full meal substitute. As my current self in the process of creating my new future self, I can’t find it in me to do it out of spite. Nor can I imagine my future self creating her new-new future self out of spite.
We never truly grow out of the old versions of ourselves. Far from leaving them behind like an old carapace, they stay inside of us. We become a babushka doll of our own bad habits, our dreams and wants and plans. When I first started looking in to and practicing Jungian inner child work, I cracked at how cruelly I used to regard myself, how much harshness could reside within such a young body. In a way, I’d internalised the environment I grew up in, becoming equally as inhospitable to life. I was dry and brazen and lonely.
I reckon that someone’s ability to resonate with Dostoyevsky is a very good read as to whether they were a loner in highschool or not. The nameless narrator of White Nights introduces himself as a dreamer, forever wandering the streets of the city lost in thought, a “capricious and sundry bad tempered gentleman”. I see a lot of myself in him. I suppose that says a lot about me.
I came from a place that had embalmed itself into a quasi-death in the perpetual heat. But I don’t like the idea of dying before my time, so the solution was simple: get out. Survive. Grow. And so I did, and I flourished more than I could have imagined. But I look at those photos of the arid wasteland I fought so hard to remove myself from, to pry myself from it’s desiccated fingers, and there’s this ugly, inconsolable urge to return there, if only for a short time, just to make peace with it all. In a rare moment of woo-woo, I think I owe some kind of blood debt to that land. Who knows, it stays in drought for half the year or more, it’ll probably take any kind of liquid it can get.
Music turns on and I fade out of the screaming cicadas and heat that the younger me existed in, into the different screaming cicadas and heat I am in. The pair of long ago shoplifted Prada sunglasses rest on the small table next to me. I’m dressed in my silks and my gold. Above, the oleander tree twitches in the afternoon sea breeze, and I take another swig of the local wine (it has hints of rosemary and a kind of herbaceousness I haven’t encountered before) before wandering back up the path to the villa. The younger me drifts behind my body, always her spectral self, and I’m acutely aware of her presence more than ever. My perpetual slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.