Before And After
One of my favorite authors has lately been telling her life as a kind of “before and after” story. This is probably fairly common in the wake of a traumatic event; life is seen as merely the innocence (before) and the suffering (after) which surround the Happening.
I can totally identify with this, as I have experienced the same thing. But I’ve also noticed: once that before-time innocence is destroyed, ensuing events in life have a much taller order to fill in becoming a Happening of equal import, even if, on paper, they are roughly equivalent in expected emotional impact.
It’s a Nietzschean whatever-does-not-kill-me kind of deal. It works. I touched on the issue in an old poem called “Blackjack Politics“, which likely makes no sense. But the image of the weighted doll is that Nietzschean phenom I am talking about.
This post probably doesn’t make any sense either. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to this uplifting photo of me with our Christmas tree from 2006.
on June 18th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Before the war and after the war are two entirely different people. Before is dead, and the intent now is to get in touch with the memories of that person so as to remold my life to be more like him. In the end, though, it’s just an exercise in the motions.