On Golden Ages
Essay 51
Recently at a talk, I sat and I said, on camera, that I was a progressive, and then felt for days a shame I found was over my lie. Surprised, I stayed up and paced as is my habit, up and down and in a circle in my home, musing why this felt so bold-faced, such a big lie. I tend to call the others Lost Atlantis folks, the unmoving, the clinging to the past, the remorseful and the nostalgic, those who dream back and then sigh. Not me, that can’t be, that’s not me because all I do is look ahead, because the past like everyone agrees was bad; I sat there at that talk and that is what I said—but, really, do I?
When asked, I explain my own drive as a boring head, my thoughts will ram unstoppably forward, I pick up only what flows on, what plows me on. But as I was now pacing I did have to admit my boring too, this feverish push, was in the direction of restoration, a recreation of something thought lost, tracing vague visions of what good was, of golden ages of shorn pasts, copycat trails to mourn never-been vistas, a redoing of snapped seams, a frayed winning of some war fought at some epic beginning, an axiom of how restoring redeems—build back better but what’s better than what is?—; I stayed up and saw our wish weaving sunk myths, mapped unhurt selves, of shelves still teeming with treasures, a buried premise of peace and of lust, of overheard goals of people we knew and knew not, the blurred trunks under beds heaving with pleasures we wish they’d packed amid funs that never ended.
I paced on and back and found a stunned distrust for hero’s journeys for they return to the start. Isn’t every love, every child a plan toward recourse—the source—, a coil; is every human toil a conservation of the never-seen; is that after all what renders us what we are, this instinct to undo the fall, the flight back to where what’s yours surrenders to what you hope will never die? I walked, I walked, and I found all this grieving for the ‘50s, the ‘80s—so unreal—, even last night; each of us on some atonal reverse quest, trying without rest to reinstall what is gone, our legacy losses thrust out there as life, cleaving into futures like they’re new. We stand with our Edens trapped, and still, it’s true, carried around upon us like a seal.