Purging induces nostalgia. Stalin must have occasionally sat back, sipped his vodka and thought fondly back on the days when he was Koba. Perhaps, as he starved millions of Ukrainians, he’d gaze at some laughing picture of Lenin and him, everyone else erased as the current policy demanded, and wonder how he’d gone from a lowlife bankrobber to the highlife Steel Man. Seems like a lifetime ago, he might have reflected. Catch another wistful tear in his mustache. Salt and vodka. More meat than steel.
Unlike Stalin, I’m clean-shaven but, almost exactly like him, I’m having a purge.
It’s not the first time. I usually target some specific area of life much in the same manner that he would target ethnicities or geographic regions. I’d clean out a single room like he’d clean out the North Caucuas, attack and dump a specific thing just as he would go after the Jews during his anti-semitic phase. This time, however, it’s a general purge. Everything must go. Furniture, objects, appliances, art and shoes. Even books, those sacred cows of my every purge, have been bagged and dumped. Good bye books. Go poison someone else’s mind.
Like in my imaginary Stalin, this has created a bit of nostalgia.
Going through all your stuff takes you to rarely visited nooks and crannies to find things you forgot even existed. The old notebooks, novels and books I once read; the photographs, sketches and birthday cards; the put aside for further use, the kept for fear of offence and the relics of religious, drug frenzies all combine into an image of my past. It’s a collage of a stranger’s face.
And I should know this stranger. He’s me.
But I don’t know him. He’s him.
I’m not sure how much stock you (or I) put in that personality test stuff but like many people I took the tests when I first got the internet. I always came up as INTP, which is the architect and much of that portrait certainly rang true with myself and the people who knew me. I only mention it here to segue-way into my next point while lending it a degree of (questionable) authority.
It seems that this type –and myself– will often state their ideas as if they are blunt, incontestable facts with little regard for whether or not anyone understands them. Many people find this trait off-putting. Yet the trait does not arise from the belief that my opinions are true. Nor does it mean that these opinions are rigid objects in spacetime that I just blurted out; sprung fully formed from my head like Athena from the skull of Zeus. They are open for question and they have been thought about. I might share my conclusions but almost never show my work.
Sometimes, it seems, not even to myself.
Looking through my old stuff, finding things I had forgot, I am faced with all that work. All those ideas that led me down false avenues, all those notions I could have done without, all those mistakes made and all of shit that I put myself through pursuing things that either never existed and/or would not be worth having if they did. It’s funny that such a thing would make me nostalgic. I’ve never been happier in my own skin or my situation than I am today and yet, looking back, I feel a sort of need to return. Like the the past is buried but has a ghost that shows up every once in a while for a couple of hours –as per ghost union regulations– and shakes its chains. I want to go back, not to live there but to exorcise it.
I often feel alienated from my past. Indeed, most of my life has been a series of rebellions against my own history. Was a weakling, became a bully. Lived in a village, moved to the city. Loved drinking and quit. So looking back is a funhouse mirror. I can sort of see myself but mainly its distortions. Like all of history, it was written by the victor.
Or will be.
Like I sometimes do on this blog when I feel the need to write something out of me, I’m tentatively thinking of doing a theme week. If you haven’t endured one of these before, they sometimes last a week, sometimes much less and there’s no schedule to them. They can be even more self indulgent and personal than normal. To be honest, I don’t know why I call them theme weeks nor do I know why I even do them. They seem like a good idea to start and never end feeling that way. Every time I finish one I tell myself never again and yet here we are.
What can I say – It is what it it is. For the next week, some of it will be as it was.
