Out of Our Past Lives

I would like to think that I am a modern Scheherazade, not one spinning her tales to entertain a powerful, threatening ruler and save her life. Still, I have other, inclusive reasons for putting this book together. My collection, I like to think, has been made with many, possibly equally, positive motives. These books, now three including this one, are intended for all of us to be doorways into inner, private rooms decorated by every writer and shared by all who care to enter. Here are memories we have lived with for, if I want to understand who I am today, I need to know who I was in the past.

Recollection provides identity, discovery, not comparison or even a report of reality. What it brings is an orderly reconstruction of the past, something requiring negotiation, not a microcopy, that is so individual that we may never know which part of it is true or which part of it is false. Sometimes when the writer sits down to record a personal history it comes out rushing like a commercial truck on a superhighway. We must halt the rush and select questions to ask the driver such as, should only what is praising or profitable be shared with others? What about the frightening, penetrating events that have shaped our way of thinking? Of behaving? Some happenings are subject to abandonment like an unwanted orphan child but they are part of the richness we own.

Is this type of neglect the outcome of faulty memory or deliberate distortion? Do records of the self have to be entirely true? Can they be? Is it possible for the person to select out what he or she would like to remember? Images in the mind come accompanied by captions learned in the social world. They supply the need for order, continuity, and consistency. The best recollections are both ambiguous and confusing and therefore open to interpretation by the person who has them. In short, perhaps that which is remembered needs to be authentic, but not necessarily accurate.