The Rose-Covered Past.
(Looking Back In Time ft. Wisdom/A Letter from Poet Rainer Maria Rilke)
My offering this week is a personal essay. But I know the themes of nostalgia, melancholy, love had and love lost, anxiety and disillusionment are as universal to the human experience as themes of love, joy, faith, triumph and belonging. I know that winter is as true as summer. I know that in a way, the past helps us to determine what is important to us, and what is not, in our navigation forward. It is true that we wouldn’t know what was true and beautiful without knowing the opposite. This is not a story about pain, it’s a story about Time and the arcs of a life.
I wasn’t sure about sharing it at all, personal as it is, until I was reading a letter from Rainer Maria Rilke in the book “Letters To A Young Poet” this morning. It spoke directly to me in this current season and week that has felt particularly anguished. Which means it might also speak directly to someone else, too. This book is a great solace to anyone undergoing a long season of solitude and wintering. It is a great friend to any young poet or writer, or anybody interested in touching a deeper layer of existence than the surface status quo of our society. As for my own essay, perhaps it resonates with you, dear reader, or perhaps it doesn’t.
I guess that’s none of my business. :)
- 35mm film photo by me. Wellington, 2017.
The Rose-Covered Past.
I wake from a tumbling series of dreams that make no logical sense - one is vaguely Harry Potter-themed (I have just begun re-watching the film series as a comfort to my inner child), one I am on a beach alone, simply walking, (I think it was the beach where I would spend a few weeks of my childhood summers), another I am watching people paint (I have been itching to get my paint trunk out of the garage and organise it in my tiny cabin so I can paint again). Another from my consciousness is part-dream and part-memory.
I am 21 again, in my second year of university, living in Wellington, New Zealand. In the scene/the memory/the dream - I am dressed in a sequinned black velvet long-sleeved minidress, with a 1920s flapper-girl headband over my bob. My lips are painted a perfect red. My eyes are winged with jet-black eyeliner. Back then, my vision was sharp. I knew what I wanted. Or what I thought I wanted. And I worked to get what I wanted. My targets were all in focus. I had a kind of unbridled confidence that is only found in that age group, or within the ones like me, who weren’t so self-aware of their innermost insecurities yet. In the dream/the memory, my boyfriend at the time is beside me, dressed up in a shirt and tie (as he was in memory).
He is tall, dark, handsome, smart, funny, charismatic, and still the loveliest boy I have ever met. He was a catch at university - I’m sure he still is. We met in a first-year Pols Sci tutorial for a paper called Political Ideologies. We swapped Bernie Sanders memes back when he still had a chance in the 2016 US election (before Trump got elected) and flirted via our shared love of socialism and critical theory as well as our silly sense of humour and love for impersonation. I think I printed Slavoj Zizek’s face on a T-shirt for his 21st birthday as a private joke - we were both enamoured with the famed Marxist-Slovenian philosopher at the time. As the nerds we were.
This boy was my first serious boyfriend, and it happened easily - without games and in sweetness. He was the boyfriend I had probably dreamed of in High School from films I’d watched - one that did not exist in my hometown. He was not only brilliant and kind and funny, (and good-looking), but he was also sensitive and the most emotionally evolved boy for his age whom I had ever met - especially in Kiwi bloke culture (I was never attracted to “lads”). His father had raised him well - he had no macho facade and nothing to prove. At the time, he was more emotionally open and able to be vulnerable than I was, and I regret that - but I had spent most of my life living in a protective shell around my true sensitivity - a survival mechanism within the context of my family system.
We lived in different student residencies and would never have met - had we not been placed in the same Pols Sci tutorial. I recall it was near the end of our first year when we first met. Despite both being social people generally, we were both shy and innocent in our approach to romance. In NZ, casual hook-up culture had become the norm, especially at university. Commitment and romance felt rare back then and feel even more so now - with dating apps and our modern perception of endless choice. I had only ever been in half-defined flings, with immature communication. He had already been in love once in High School, in a committed relationship. He never seemed afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve and loving wholly, something I have tried to do since.
Our courting process was as nerdy as our personas - his flirting, beyond sending me political memes, was to start a conversation around the next essay we had due for the paper. I missed the subtle flirtation at the time and it took my blunt girlfriends pointing it out, as we messaged back and forth for weeks. My crush grew and grew. Before his shy move, I had semi-consciously noted that he was tall and gorgeous and would always contribute intelligently to the tutorial conversations in class. But to be honest, I sat at a far more obnoxiously rowdy table and was always busy swapping political banter with some other lads.
As aforementioned, back then I appeared confident - I was a social butterfly in my student residency and was never afraid of conversation or debate in tutorials, or talking to lecturers around classes. But my flirting was resigned to alcohol-infused student parties, like most young Kiwis. And clubbing. After several study dates, it took an alcohol-infused Halloween for us to finally kiss and declare the obvious mutual attraction (in classic Kiwi fashion, I say with embarrassment).
But after that, things were fairly straightforward - we were dating. We met each other’s close friends. There was no cat and mouse chase, no anxiety - perhaps because of the rareness of the occasion, I now realise - where two people are equally attracted to each other and want to be together. At the end of this decade, I now appreciate the simplicity of this story more than ever, after so many dating attempts that have been the opposite of straight-forward, or completely mutual.
I have now chased a fair few frankly emotionally unavailable people who put up an award-winning facade of being both romantics and available, and I have also been in the position where I just did not feel as strongly about the other as they did about me. Or perhaps I was the one unavailable, or travelling. I therefore remember this first serious relationship for its ease and mutuality, at least at the start. Our attachment styles would play out later in the relationship. But for that period, it was an innocent and mutual romance.
By the summer holidays, I went and stayed at his family home (in the same region of the country as my own) and he asked me officially if I wanted to “go out”, or be his girlfriend. There were no games, and we were young enough that there was also no fear or baggage yet. Nobody’s trust had been betrayed bitterly. Nobody was aware of their deep abandonment wounds. In truth, my wiring was for hyper-independence, and I didn’t know how to be in an intimate relationship back then. I also feel like a completely different human now, from the inside out. But I will always remember that Spring and that first Summer and period of my life with this boyfriend.
In the dream/memory, we enter a party. It is an unofficial “Ball”, hosted by a flat of friends of ours and everybody is dressed to the nines. Friends call out as we enter. People swarm around every room, drinks in hand, chatting, flirting, dancing in beautiful dresses and suits. We know at least half the party. I didn’t know then how much I would miss those days, where life contained a lot less question marks. It still had its future question marks as well as existential ones, but the foundations were set - what I was doing, where I was living, who were my community, and perhaps even where I was going.
I was lucky in that I never found the transition of moving far away from home and studying in a new city difficult - I loved it. I was never attached to my small, conservative hometown, and never wanted to stay there. Wellington felt like a ticket to the wider world and to people who cared about the wider world. What I miss from this time period is more than my first love. I miss the sense of community - of living within walking distance of friends and university in a small city that I loved. My life was governed by friends, community and learning. After the first year living with 400 people on campus, I lived in shared houses or what we call flats, with other students and friends.
I walked to university every day and I walked up a giant hill to my part-time nanny job around that. I walked down the hill to my boyfriend’s flat and back up the hill to my own. There was a gym on campus, we played social netball, I first began attending yoga classes semi-regularly. I attended all sorts of interesting talks at government and university for leadership programmes by politicians, diplomats and all kinds of other fascinating people. I attended talks and rallies from and run by activists and social movements all over the city, with equally interested and passionate friends. I could run to the coast and around it, lining the city. I could walk into the CBD and did so every Sunday to get cheap fruit and vegetables from the markets downtown with flatmates.
My whole life fit into a small, vibrant, multicultural and liberal city, filled with people I knew and loved. My days were consumed by studying and learning - what I love. It was heartbreaking (to study the horrors of the world) but it also felt important. I was learning about the world and its complexities, its atrocities, its history and its systems. I was studying other cultures - and other ways of seeing things. I was studying philosophy and new theories or frameworks or ways of looking at - life. My world was expanding. I was expanding.
This was a bubble and a moment in time, of course. Nothing lasts forever. I left a city I adored to finish my degree on exchange overseas on a scholarship - not because I didn’t love my life there - but because I have always been drawn to what is outside of my comfort zone. Latin America was a dream. It was terrifying and it turned out to be one of the greatest choices I have ever made. To my own surprise, upon my return to the motherland, I never moved back to the capital city. I was broke (and heartbroken) and needed to work back in my hometown and live at home for a while. I was anxious and lost after a yearlong high of living, studying and dancing in Mexico but I never tried to return to my old life afterwards.
My adult home, the city I had chosen to live and study in my late teens and early twenties was suddenly filled with ghosts of my past life. People had moved or were moving. That glorious period of being in the same boat or life phase (university, for example) with so many people had ended, as all things do. I had since formed deep connections with friends overseas who were scattered all over the globe, a privilege and blessing and also a strange scattering of a heart.
I have never felt too loyal to my homeland, and I think that this has a lot to do with being a descendant of Europeans who colonised a far-flung land just a few centuries ago, around my obvious geographical passport privilege - that I can travel at all. Whiteness as a concept has not only harmed all peoples of colour in the world, but it has also homogenised and diluted cultures within white folk. I do not have the strong ties to culture and land/place that my Indigenous friends have. Whiteness, like the concept of Westernisation, has robbed the world of colour, diversity, and difference - and nuanced ways of seeing life, in my opinion.
Back to the central point - the past as rose-coloured. Because everything makes sense only in hindsight. My twenties have been scattered - mini-lives in places with people I love and then transition. No job, career, place or relationship has stuck. I have commitment issues with the country, apparently. The gift of this curiosity is a collection of experiences, stories and lessons, I suppose. A diversity of experience. And friends all over the world. The cost is the constant missing of everyone you love and a lack of grounded belonging - to place and community. Felt especially and acutely in the fallow seasons.
I miss everything about that chapter in my dream because of the overarching themes of purpose, connection, community, learning and the sheer joy I found in all of it. I didn’t want to be anywhere else - I think I was quite present. I didn’t miss High School or the past. I was excited to be a young adult who was independent, and free. The future felt exciting and expansive, and there were people around who believed in my success. I believed in it. More importantly, there was a solid community around for the best and worst of days. We all need that.
I think the marker of my late twenties has been, and is, a bitter taste of disillusionment. Back then, my energy was boundless and I had only broken down once, with Shingles and my first depression at age 20 (this was a forewarning of breakdowns that would worsen when I continually did not learn my lesson to slow down). So I guess my energy wasn’t actually boundless. I was eager to prove myself to the world and to achieve a lot. This overambitious streak, fuelled by anxiety, has been my undoing.
I have not felt like a garden in bloom these years, more like a compost heap. The world wasn’t as easy to save as I once thought. Money and (student) debt have become bigger and bigger burdens. Relationships weren’t so easy to keep, love isn’t so simple. Physical and mental health are also not a given, and have crumpled enough times that I can never take either for granted (although they are the same thing, I now realise). Some people I thought I couldn’t live without have become strangers, and I still mourn them in my dreams. Grief is a near-constant companion.
Regrets haunt, along with “what-ifs” and “if-onlys”, as well as envy, for people who seem to have everything I have ever wanted, or everything they want, without so much pain. To be honest. But I know that comparison is as futile as regret, and what is, just is. The past becomes rose-coloured when the present is difficult and arduous, I am aware, or when we are deprived of certain needs. The past doesn’t haunt us when we are in love with our present, fully in the Here and Now. I know this from chapters where I have been so effortlessly present and extremely fulfilled.
I don’t have much wisdom to offer here. I am perpetually attempting to make peace with my present, currently. To endure a dark season. To learn something. To realise that this is life - the ups and the downs downs. My seasons in particular have been lived in extremes. A yearlong breakdown of internal winter is perhaps particularly painful when compared to seasons of peak summer - where everything felt possible. But no Summer is eternal. The laws of nature are clear.
Only a world, or society, that has deluded us into thinking that life can involve endless expansion, growth and consumption; promotes an endless Summer or an eternal happiness. The culture and society sells us this idea - one that we must buy and consume - as we have been taught to. But I know that our society was not built to respect the natural world, it was built to try to conquer it. It is not natural to try to live in an endless summer, in ceaseless productivity, or in eternal optimism, even. Perhaps our sorrows and sadness have plenty to teach us, after all. As does winter.
These lessons are being carved into me, at least.
Meanwhile, the world continues to spin with all of it's horrors and it’s beauty. The past crashes into the present and forms our future and perhaps we will never know what was conscious choice or free will and what was fated.
- 35mm film photo by me, Wellington, 2017.
This morning, I read a letter from Rainer Maria Rilke in the book “Letters To A Young Poet” that felt as if it was addressed to me on this particular week.
These excerpts are from his letter from Sweden, on August 12, 1904.
“…You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you, But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven’t gone right through you? Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
If only it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown, our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are not alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us, because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
This is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into our innermost chamber and is no longer even there,- is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our most innermost being…
And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clear and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this act as if it were not true. This is all. But how much better is it to recognise that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realisation. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far…
This is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary, many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us…
…Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
…We have no reason to harbour any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.
And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?
Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.
Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice.
One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offence that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the “great thing” that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real.
Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the “great thing”? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke.
- My beloved Wellington, 35mm film, 2016.
Thank you for reading or listening, and for being here. Your attention and energy are appreciated.
I adore it. Thank you for your writing.