Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1: The World of Er

“The memories of childhood have a strange, shuttling quality,

and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night,

illuminating fixed scenes from the surrounding darkness.”

-Carson McCullers, “The Orphanage”

“Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose:

while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine,

one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections.

For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten.”

-James Champagne, “The Fire Sermon”

The World of Er

“Welcome to the world of Er. Here are bakers, plumbers, and butchers. To be a member of Er, you must be a member of the Er club. You must join a baker, and make a cake to become a member of the world of Er. If you come from the Less world, you are useless, and can’t be a member.”

The above treatise is written on an old and wrinkled piece of white lined paper, in a child’s clumsy attempt to write in cursive, and remains untitled save for the date on which it was written, this date being January 26th, 1990. I was in the 4th grade at the time, and nine years of age, for my tenth birthday was in June of that year. No doubt this was a school creative writing assignment of some sort, and in all likelihood I probably forgot all about it a day or so after its composition. I know that as an adult I had completely forgotten about it, and it wasn’t until I stumbled across it on July 23rd, 2017, that I read it again, after all these years. Despite its childhood inanity, I now see what I wrote all those years ago as oddly (and accidentally) profound, in much the same manner that the sayings of young children are often unintentionally profound.

I found this old creative writing assignment (and many others like it) while going through a box full of my old grade school papers that my parents had kept in the basement of their home for years now (and it’s amazing to me how much of my old school papers were preserved: in this box I even came across old speech progress reports, as back in those days I had a slight stutter that required speech therapy). Also in this box were various drawings and illustrations I had done in those years, and reports I had written for assorted school science fairs, dealing with subjects such as the digestive processes of earthworms and examinations of theories related to the disappearance of the dinosaurs (for even in those days of old I had had an obsession with extinction events, an obsession that remains to this day). No doubt one day when I am gone all of these mementos from my childhood will face an extinction event of their own, and the thought of strangers disposing them as if they were nothing is a thought I find intolerable. That’s the tragedy of materialism; sooner or later it’ll always break your heart. But I shall now do my best to memorialize at least a few of these documents of juvenilia. I see these recollections as sort of literary Noah’s Ark, a barge of words constructed to rescue various childhood trinkets from the oblivion of Time.

And yet, there’s also a part of me that feels hesitant about looking back into my own past, for I suspect that my own childhood, like the childhood of the majority of the human race, is something that is both beautiful and dangerous at the same time, like a stained glass window depicting satyrs instead of saints. This window shines a light onto my childhood memories, but it is a twisted light from a twisted window.

I find it amusing that, when people look back at photographs of me from the 1980’s, they commented on what a happy child I seemed to be. Hell, sometimes even I look back at those photographs and think the same thing. But I’m just deceiving myself and falling for my youthful beautiful disguise. Truth is, fear and anxiety have been my perpetual handmaidens. And yet, as a child I was obsessed with the very things that terrify the majority of the human race: bugs, creepy crawlies, sharks, monsters, vampires, saurian abominations (or, to use the common vernacular, dinosaurs). It was almost as if, by trying to associate myself with such creatures, I was trying to keep fear itself away. And was it not Arthur Rimbaud who once stated, “But the problem is to make the soul into a monster?”

But to get back to the world of Er. At the time in which I first wrote about that fanciful world, I had no idea that I myself would one day become a member of it myself, in the form of a writer. Because back in that time of my life I belonged (or fancied I belonged) to other neighboring worlds, which is to say the world of Or (in that I desired to be a film director when I came of age) and possibly also the world of Ist (in that I also saw myself as an artist). But that's another tale for another day.