Memory is a funny thing—you think the things you digest and then consciously cast away are forgotten forever—but they’re not. They’re stewing in the pools deep in your subconscious…making your every move..
My mom still lives in the house I grew up in, so when I’m home for the holidays, I often poke around my room and sift through nostalgia from my childhood.
Having just finished the book, I thought it was no coincidence that I found the following artifacts….
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The Smoking Gun book
When I started making blackout poems, I was ignorant of Tom Phillips’ A Humument or found poetry—I was thinking about John Lennon’s FBI files and the de-classified documents on the Smoking Gun website: the way magic-marker-redacted and photocopied documents turn to pure black and white. But I had totally forgotten about this book, which I purchased in high school:
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Green Day’s Nimrod liner notes
My stepmom actually found this left in a dresser drawer at my dad’s house. 1997—I was 14. It wouldn’t be the first time Green Day album art influenced me…
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Tristan Tzara’s “How To Make A Dadaist Poem“
This one truly shocked me. I include Tzara’s manifesto in the book, but I found it only after reading William Burroughs’ The Third Mind. Turns out I’d read it in high school, and even tried out the cut-up method for one of my high school english classes. (Please: no wisecracks about the embarrassing writing and the use of the word “society”.)
Funny thing is, that paragraph is almost identical (in idea) to what I wrote in the introduction to the book!
(Cut-up lyrics to The Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light”)
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Any artifacts from your childhood that seemed insignificant at the time that you now consider conscious or unconscious influences?
Brains are very strange.
When I went home for Thanksgiving, I found a journal entry from age 16. In it, I thought about what I thought life would be like when I was 24 (the age I am now), and I had what I thought at the time were very lofty goals. There was an entire page of them.
Despite the fact that I immediately forgot this entry and these goals, I’ve shaped my life to fit that vision pretty exactly. Obviously the goals of “own lots of oversized mugs”, “make a living with my art”, “drink tea daily”, “subscribe to National Geographic” and “buy bath toys” remained important to me, even though I didn’t remember them.
When hanging out with my best friend of 15 years over the holiday, I wondered aloud at what our 13-year-old selves would think of us: staying home on new year’s, with wives, mortgages…but then I realized: holy crap, we’re still doing what we love to do!
I’m much closer to the person I wanted to be when I was 10 than when I was 20. I think that’s a good thing.
Heeeeeey! It’s true! They used to punish me that way!
Oh, well… At least now it’s a pleasure to write =D.
It’s true our minds have that much power. My life is very much what I imagined it would be.. great post