Looking back to see forward.
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme. What can we learn from who we were and what we came from?
To see forward, look backward.
Bearing in mind, to look is not the same as to see.
We cannot determine what the future will be like. We cannot predict who we will be and what the shape of our lives might be like. And even if we are very boring and averse to growth, life is not.
All you need to do is google what the movie releases were 15 years ago, or what the billboard top 20 songs were from that time. Or watch how daft the politicians rhetoric was from that era, three election cycles ago, and recall what you believed about love, life, leadership, success, status, forgiveness, ambition when you wore that face.
To get some idea of how much change is in store for the human race, let’s say 50 years from now, look back 50 years and reflect on how much change there has been. The same goes for a business, or a product, or any all important manager, slogan, initiative, promise a company makes or any threat that hangs over you.
Who you were seven years ago, and what life looked like will tell you nothing of who you will be in seven years from now and what life will look like then.
But it will tell you something about life’s capacity for change.
And yours for growth.
It will tell you about life’s infinite capacity for irony, how your promises and convictions you are so certain of today will seem so immature then.
This moment is already dying. That which holds on to the way we came, becomes what holds us back.
This moment is already dying. That which holds on to the way we came, becomes what holds us back.
History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. We are who we repeatedly Choose to be. Every wave we ride, becomes a wave we make. Stance is everything.
I leave you with this sobering piece touching both our collective capacity for nostalgia and how the precession of generations, renders each generation redundant in time; how we arrive into childhood like stowaways of our own uncertain future and end up as the vestiges of our own past, so estranged from the younger generation and their status as native citizens of a future we cannot follow them into.
OF MUSEUMS AND MEMES
i was inspired
and so reflected back one day
remembering
as a small child
being taken to a museum
and asked
to wander vast halls
asked to traverse grand stairwells
with limbs too short to find the comfort of the balustrade
and a timid stride too meek to ignore the yawning void of the distant ground
reaching out from below my feet between each cautious step.
asked to pay no attention to the ceilings
so impossibly high
but rather to an endless gallery of cases and displays
vestiges of an antique past
which i had not journeyed,
being myself still a stowaway of my own uncertain future.
at these artefacts and statues
locked in the amber of a dusty silence
touched no longer, not even by the wind,
which spoke nothing of their truths
but awoke something to an already frightened mind.
now i reflect back
on how our gathered eyes
once revered and celebrated grand works,
on the now ancient wonders
from the giant guardian at rhodes
whose titan presence cast its impossible reflection
on the moving waters,
and its shadow
not into the past, of the city state at its feet,
but into a future,
so that the eyes of that time,
could lift their gazes from the feet of clay
and from the pedestal,
and even from the low horizon,
and could look in wonder
and believe
that such an icon of fortitude and solemn power
speaking of both welcome and of warning,
would surely last all time.
to the lands of the first cradle
and the hanging gardens
whose wonders and perfumed scents
would drift on the winds of time until,
up from musty pages
would they rise,
to delight the imagination of soft men
reading poems in stately parlours;
a nightingale song
opening windows to a jasmine fragranced evening
of another half-imagined life.
it has been so long since the exodus from egypt
and now the plagues have returned
and the people again speak in pictures
but unlike that timeliness land of kings
whose pictures endured
and carried so much more meaning
than our scratchings of letters and rules,
and which still endure today,
the surface meanings only half-understood
and the deep meanings
carved deeper into the psyches
of the people from the sea
whose faces turned towards the sun,
than a chisel could cleave to stone
to last a thousand years.
and then of our memes,
which carry depth of meaning
of satire and delight
curiously striking their quickly fading gongs
in the shallow chambers of our hearts
not a foot beneath the congested streets of our hurried minds,
and so they last,
not for more than the passing of a single day,
and all the rapid chimes are lost
amidst the clamour of our unslaked groping hunger for meaning.
the old, now, not the young,
are the new stowaways,
left to face the void of an unsure future
yawing beneath them, beneath us,
trying to snatch glimpses of the reassuring certainty of a ground below
between the quick moving steps of meaning,
which the young, so sure-footed traverse,
clutching, the comfort of our out-dated balustrades
our once sure strides, now made unsure,
by the redundancy of our relics
and our slow recline
into the amber trap
of a generation
whose time is passing
and will not come again.
© Rocco Jarman
June 2020
This piece is part of a greater collection of poetry, about the seasonal, tidal nature, of time: The Ratchet and the Pendulum and our project of searching for meaning in that ebb and flow.
Early Morning Walk Up the Hill. Photographer: © 2023 Mark Vogt, Porirua, New Zealand