In one of my first times hanging out with Aoi, I tried to introduce her to some of the music that I love. Of course, this included the Beatles classic In My Life. Because English isn’t her first language, we talked about it a lot and we tried to really get into the lyrics. She can’t “skim” over the meaning very well. She either gets it, or she doesn’t get it. So, when we hit against the lyrics, “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people or friends who came before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them, in my life, I love you more,” she really wanted to stop and go over what exactly that meant. And it’s the kind of lyric that you can appreciate based on the sound of it, whether the assonance of the words or the general sentiment of the feeling, pretty easily without thinking about it very deeply. But, when I had to talk about it with Aoi, when I had to be specific and clear and plain about what I meant, I had to say something that is probably very true. And as such, felt very uncomfortable.
Our ability, our capacity, to love is contingent upon everything that came before the moment of that love’s fruition. There’s no separation of loving a person from any other event in your life. The modern love is contingent on every past love and experience. And it hurts me, it burns me, to say this. But I think it’s true. (And maybe if I’d realized this at 18, my life would have been very different).
It’s a beautiful sentiment in a beautiful song that I think earns its place in the hallowed halls of modern classical music. It holds true and it is beautiful. And the sentiment that is a part of all of this pervades a lot of the Beatles’ music of the period. It’s an ethos. Or, it feels like one, and it’s something that, while I’ve struggled with it, is true.
Let It Be is my least favorite Beatles album. And one of the songs in it, Don’t Let Me Down, strikes me as so indicative of how I viewed so much in life.
I’m in love for the first time. Don’t you know it’s gonna last. It’s a love that lasts forever. It’s a love that has no past.
It’s exactly what I always wanted. And I believe, on some level, that it’s what John believed was true at the time. He wanted to burn away the past. To disconnect. To make something true. To raise his anchor and sail into the future with nothing holding him back down into the old world he was leaving behind.
But you don’t get to do that.
And you can’t.
There’s no “now” that isn’t part of “then”. And there’s certainly no future that isn’t derived from “now”. We’re not blank slates and we never were. And even if we had been, you can’t erase without leaving streaks. And while you can make the words illegible with enough rubbing, you’ll never get rid of the chalk that works its way into the tiny gaps in slate that you didn’t even know where there.
There’s no “me” to go back to. Because that me is gone. At the same time, there’s no “me” that exists without him. He’s real. As real as I am. But he’s an impossibility. There’s no erasing him or removing him or going on without him. He’s a part of me. But he’s not me. And he’s not a person I can return to. I can’t have an idealized notion of “self”. I can’t have some perfected version of myself typing away on an old Gateway in the 2000s and also have a perfected version of myself as I could have/should have/ought to have been. Then or now.
There’s no love that has no past.
There’s no anything that has no past. The question is, how do we live with our pasts? Because we can’t love, we can’t live, without them. There is no way of being without one.
I think that I finally understand the metaphor of being born again. It’s not something that I ever felt the pull of until this moment. I realize that there are so many people who would give anything for that freshness. For that fresh start. For that start from a new, and better, starting place. And while I have regrets, more regrets than most people, I’m happy to start from where I’m at. I’m happy to love on top of all of the affection that I have for everyone and everything that went before. I don’t think I want to love in another way, and I don’t think it’d be healthy even if it were possible.
I don’t want to go back. In my weakness I’m sure that I’ll want to again. And again. And again. But, really, when I’m at my best, I know that I don’t want to go back. Even if I went back, I’d only want to do if I could be me that goes back. I wouldn’t want to do it all again unless I were me, and I wouldn’t know what to do any differently if I weren’t in some way myself. The self that only exists now, at this moment, and who only exists because of all of the people and things that went before.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.
That was the line. There we go. I knew I was missing something. Maybe this was the line in question.
It just brings everything all together.
When people try to discredit the past with the present, they cheapen themselves. And their presents. And they rob their futures. They cheapen everything in order to make a moment more bearable in that moment. Or to try to rob the past for meaning in order to decorate the present. Trying to borrow things from the old days in order to add some luster to a life grown dull.
My life feels dull. I’ll admit it. But I believe it’s because I’ve failed to polish the treasures that I’ve stocked up, and I’ve stopped searching for new ones. I’ve failed, fundamentally failed, in gratitude. And for that ingratitude, I’ve been severely punished. I hope I’ve learned something worth the cost of the lesson.
A love that “has no past” is ingratitude. It’s a lie. It’s self delusion. It’s vanity.
We have to carry that weight.
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