Always Coming Home

I recently moved across the country to join a new band. I left behind my friends and family, all my connections, the town that I had been living in for the last eight years and the state that I had grown up in. I've been feeling nostalgic lately, thinking back on images and people that I've left behind and almost consciously trying to create some kind of sense of longing for what is back in Colorado.
I've realized though that nostalgia is something I have to work at. I genuinely miss my friends and my mountains, but I have to labor to create that sense of need. I have to have leisure to dwell on these images to make them become potent enough so that I can actually feel nostalgic. I've come to realize that nostalgia is something that I retreat to when I'm unhappy with the present. I don't really want to move back to Colorado, I don't want to leave behind what I've built for myself here on the West Coast, but sometimes that old life seems safer and more sane. It becomes an object of nostalgia because I'm trying to either avoid or reconcile myself to something that's happening around me right now. I know now that the nostalgia that I create for myself allows me to rose-tint the past and throw myself back into a slightly mythologized personal past that's more welcoming than my present. Past relationships, former nighttime hang-outs, favorite restaurants, hikes or camp sites, all these things have left behind their empirical and historical personal meaning and have become subtly different psychological images, speaking more to my insecurity in my new home than any authentic longing to return to my home state.

Memory

Milan Kundera wrote that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Citing the public and often obvious alteration of documents, photographs and history that took place in his home country of Czechslovakia during the Communist regime, Kundera makes the argument that reality and memory are malleable, capable of being changed irrevocably by those in power. His example is the elimination of the Czech Communist leader Clementis from a very public and historic photograph. While this story is placed within the context of a piece of fiction it is in fact based upon an actual event in history. The photograph of Clementis and Gottwald, with Gottwald wearing Clementis' fur cap, is a piece of historic fact. Also true is that, after his fall from grace, the Communist government cut Clementis from the photograph and denied that he had ever been in the photo, despite the hundreds of thousands of copies that had flooded the country several years before.
This terrifying power to change the nature of reality and memory lies within the grasp of any autocratic nation. Based solely on their control over the collective social consciousness, any government with the will can enforce their view of events of ideology upon the populace. During the Communist regime, Clementis stopped existing because the Communist government said it was so. Were it not for the memories of individual citizens who witnessed Clementis on the balcony with Gottwald, and the incontrovertible proof offered by undoctored photographs, history would have been changed, forced into line with the ruling government's concerns and goals.
In this sense, history is not an unbiased or empirical record of the past, but something that is shaped by those in power, something that can be formed and altered by those with the power to do so. The actions of social and political power within history are those of forgetfulness, striving to force the populace to selectively forget or incorrectly remember objectionable facts and events. Clementis was no longer in favor, he therefore had no place in either the current government or it's history.
Perhaps the most subversive act in a repressive society is the act of remembrance, the will to remember the truth and to speak that truth publically. It is the actions and memories of individuals that corrode the ability of those in power to alter the course of history to suit their needs.

Growing Up

I became an adult rather quickly, or at least it felt like it. What was in all reality a slow process of maturation, both personal and physical, was condensed into one single moment when a friend asked me "When did you start thinking of yourself as an adult?" My immediate response was I hadn't yet, that I still thought of myself as essentially the same person that I had always been and that person was not an adult, perhaps not a child any longer but certainly not an adult. Adults were those older people who had jobs, real jobs, had gone to college, thought about getting married or had taken the plunge, bought homes and had become boring. My parents were adults. My grandparents were certainly adults. And yet here I was. Twenty five years old, a recent recipient of an MA in history, a handful of serious relationships under my belt, with more married friends every year and an increasingly stable social and personal life. No career yet, but I could feel it looming in the near future. Was I an adult? I certainly looked like one at a casual glance. My friend maintained that he started thinking of himself as an adult the day he had to start paying his own bills. That's certainly true, that's a rather boring fact of adult life, but it seems anti-climatic, like there should be some more meaningful gateway into adulthood than the shouldering of your own personal load of credit card debt. My problem stems from a notion of self-definition. I had never thought of myself as an adult, I had never stepped into that persona in my personal life and so, at least in my own eyes, I was not an adult. What the rest of the world thought when they saw me was of no real concern. I was simply me, the same person I had always been, and I refused to place any kind of artificial label or marker on my life that declared "Here marks the day upon which I entered into the life of an adult, with all its various rights and responsibilities." This was fine until recently. Many of my co-workers are younger than me. It was my mistake to discover how much younger than me they really were. I was surrounded by eighteen and nineteen year olds, some recent graduates from high school, some still finishing their senior year. Suddenly I went from "just one of the guys" to the older guy, the adult, the one with the college degrees and the grey hairs in his sideburns, the one who was eight years older than the rest of them, the one who was closer to thirty than to twenty, and who suddenly felt worn out and defeated by his hard won life experiences. I couldn't help it. I was an adult. I was one of them, I had joined the other team and there was nothing I could do about it. My sudden maturity and adult status took me by surprise. I couldn't help asking myself if this is how other people saw me, if they thought of me as an adult, as a grown up, as someone who was as boring as I assumed all of the adults that had always surrounded me were. It's an ongoing process of personal reconciliation with my new adult nature. I'm still not completely OK with the idea of not being a youth, or even a young adult any more. I suppose that everyone, eventually, has to grow up and we can't spend all of our lives trapped in the shelter and innocence of childhood. However, I do wish that it had come upon me easier, that I had been given time to come to terms with the fact that adulthood was fast approaching as opposed to being generation gapped by my co-workers and left reeling with the knowledge of my experiential and temporal separation from them.

My Hometown

I miss the mountains that stood to the west of my hometown. I grew up immediately outside Boulder, Colorado, and the Flatirons, huge slabs of sandstone and granite, create a dramatic backdrop for the city. All throughout my childhood the mountains had been something that simply was, they weren't anything special or something to comment on. They were just the mountains and they towered over Boulder Valley, showing tan and red in the bright Colorado sun. As a child I used to imagine you could see the shape of a sleeping Indian in the profile of the Flatirons against the sky, something I can still see to this day. I still know all of the local landmarks. There's the third Flatiron, the largest one, affectionately called "the Slab" by my family, that you can hike to the bottom of, and climb if you have the equipment. One summer some college students thought it would be a brilliant idea to use the winch of their jeep to pull themselves up the face of the mountain. They ended up getting stranded on top of the Slab, waiting for a rescue helicopter and lots of very angry city open space officials to rescue them and bring their jeep down off of the mountain. If you stand in the southern part of Boulder you can see the Devil's Thumb, a thumb-shaped rock formation the sticks out of the top of one of the smaller Flatirons. If you head north and leave from Chataqua park you can hike to a natural arch that's tucked away behind one of the northern faces. There's Seal Rock, a flatiron that looks like a barking seal, Bear Canyon, Shadow Canyon, Mount Sanitas, the Mesa Trail, Mallory Cave, where endangered bats nest every summer, and the Continental Divide standing even further to the west with permanently snow dusted peaks. I live in the San Francisco Bay now, and my mountains are fond memories, something I look forward to seeing every time I go back to Colorado. They sneak into my dreams sometimes as I relive camping trips or particularly memorable hikes. I can see Longs Peak or the Mummy Range or the summit of Loveland Pass in my minds eye without effort. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity or perhaps it's just a function of living somewhere else, but I can't help but think that I didn't appreciate my hometown and what it offered when I was there. Only in retrospect do I realize what a perfect setting it was for me, how wonderful and beautiful and rare an environment like that is. When I was living there they were simply the mountains. Now that I live far away from them they've been transformed into something that calls me home.

Azir Nafisi and the Root of Evil

Azir Nafisi wrote in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran that the best and worst among us can be evil since evil is nothing more than the inability or unwillingness to see or empathize with those around us. Evil then is the lack of understanding, conscious or unconscious, in regards to the viewpoints of and concerns of others. A corollary to this lack of empathy is a willingness to force ideas or choices upon others. This stems from the perceived inability of the "evil" person to sense why these actions may be inappropriate.
But somehow this seems to simplistic. Is the root of all evil really the the lack of empathy? Was Adolf Hitler's first and most damning crime an inability to to sense, or a disregard for, the lives, hopes and dreams of the millions that he sent to their deaths? Were his further crimes merely an extension of this inability to sense the hurt and damage around him, this lack of empathy leading him to force others down the path of his choosing? If this is true how do we explain the millions of German citizens who willing went where he led?
There is a part of me that wants to revile the evildoer, hate them and believe that their choices were conscious, and consciously inflicted upon their victims. It seems too neat to ascribe their actions to what is essentially self-interest. This is essentially admitting that the "evil" person is more willing to disregard the causes and effects of their actions as they move through the world, casting people out of their way.

Music

Music is destined to be my first and longest lasting love. When everything else in my life has faded away, when my friends have moved on, when I'm frail and the lights have gone dim, music will speak to me still, will still move me and heal me, will provide shelter and understanding and a place for my spirit to rest. I can't even describe what it does to me, how the opening notes of Miles Davis' "So What" can raise such intense emotion in me, cause me to anticipate every single note even though I memorized every one of them long ago. It's a high that can't be replicated, and never loses its immediacy and power. Music, to me, is an eternally captured moment, a mood or an emotion set on tape permanently so that we can relive it time and again. There are moments in my life that are set to music, to the song that was playing when they occurred or the song I found after the fact that expressed what i was feeling at the time. Individual songs become mile markers in my life that allow me to track my journeys and my thoughts. Certain albums are evocative of periods in my life. I can't listen to Sublime's "40 oz. to Freedom" without thinking about high school. I can't listen to Billie Holiday without my first serious relationship running through my head. There are so many more than that. My life is annotated with the music and work of the many artists that I've been privileged to hear. When I listen to music I can't help but feel that I'm sharing in something, something bigger than myself, that I'm participating in a larger collaborative dialog between the artist and the audience. Like all art it gives me the privilege of leaving myself and partaking in someone else's vision for a time. For one vast, intimate moment we can lose ourselves in song and the rest of the world is left dimly behind us.