Why we write

It occurs to me this morning that I've turned a crucial corner in my academic career that I did not ever imagine possible: I understand.  Think of the actual weight of a word like "understand" and suddenly that is not a simple thing anymore.  In the first year I spent in the doctoral program at DU, I found myself continually at odds with what I didn't comprehend, and I felt perpetually aware of what was a mystery.  In my neurotic coping way, I simply avoided every single thing that felt uncomfortable (to the degree possible) and went on my way doing that which I liked and shunning the rest.  There is a point in any engagement with academe that this must happen because we cannot know all there is to know and you either accept this, form it into elitist snobbery, or go entirely mad.  At any rate, I'm taking a fiction theory course this term and I continually stun myself with the sudden effortless ability to do what needs doing.  I almost always fret about class presentations because the expectation is high and I seem to always find myself in new terrain which makes it all the more difficult to do.  But this weekend, I sat down with Henry James, read the theory, scanned the novel, and in a flash created a presentation for this afternoon that I have even impressed myself with.  How did this happen?

I have been reading (gasp!) the French Structuralists and I understand them for the first time perhaps ever.  The real power in understanding is that the bullshit parts become abundantly clear and that which is useful becomes so.  For example, I read Todorov and while he - like all theorists - intensely loves the look of as many words as possible on the page regardless of point made, I find the general premise of his work fascinating.  It seems obvious, too, that readers necessarily construct the story, that we naturally and almost always feel the need to fill empty space in a story with the one we've made up, and that characters exist in a real space somewhere and we often fill in those blanks too.  Where did this person go after the story ends?  I ask my students such questions all the time, and they always have answers and they are always remarkably different.  That's a cool thing to think about, even when we do it all the time and never think about it.  It makes me hyper-aware of what I do when I write and read now in an entirely new way.

I have then become obsessed with the concept of construction in a more general sense and how it defines human existence.  How all things are only construction of reality; that we are only ever a construction of the infinity of moments that occur leading up to any given moment.  That we are different people at every single second of every single day.  Todorov would say that when you read a novel, you can only construct the story out of your own reading/life experience; if this is true, it might explain why reading a book over and over can be a different experience each time: we are different people each time we read a text.  Hmmm.  

I know it's Monday morning with the sun shining and the promise of a warm day (finally), and I should not be philosophizing (or trying at any rate) this early and this under-caffeinated.  But last night I was listening to the radio in the car, and heard The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" on an "80's Flashback" weekend show, and the radio DJ commented about this song as being representative, as being one of those reminiscence-inspiring tunes for all of those in my general age group.  I listen to these shows all the time, but it never occurred to me that even though this show reflects MY 80's experience, mine was hardly representative.  In fact, I cannot think of a single time when The Cure was considered cool by anyone except my friends and people of our general ilk.  The radio played shit like Milli Vanilli, hair metal ballads, and only the mainstream version of New Wave at any given time.  The sole exception is KTCL when they were independent and before they sold their souls to Satan (er, Clear Channel communications).  But nobody listened to KTCL - and by nobody I mean the average teenager at my high school.  I was a nothing in high school: invisible, average, silent, shy, malleable.  My friends were more outgoing, and I certainly associated with those who listened to The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Violent Femmes, etc.  We wore Doc Martens, they dyed their hair strange colors and wore black and mohawks and leather jackets and Sid Vicious dog chains with padlocks around their necks.  None of these people, nor myself, were ever cool, popular, or even worth registering on most radar screens.

So what the fuck is this Cure song doing on popular 80's weekend radio shows?  Because after Nirvana, "alternative" became "mainstream" and suddenly it was all cool to listen to.  Call it revolution; call it a sell-out of punk ideology.  Whatever.  What bothers me is that this ideal 1980's that never existed has been constructed by what became cool in the 90's.  How can people who were creating "mall bangs" with AquaNet, matching their neon tee shirt to their socks, and listening to Poison remember the 80's as being all about "Just Like Heaven"?  How is it that a little band called the Violent Femmes that no one ever heard about and certainly never got popular radio play, can now be so ubiquitously associated with the 80's that it's a fucking Wendy's or Burger King commercial?  I am positively incensed that Alice radio plays "Blister in the Sun" with such regularity I am sick of hearing it.  

If we can reconstruct the past into something ideal, something we long for, in a way that it never was, it makes me put all other past eras into serious question.  I questioned them before, and from the time I was very young, of course, but now I feel certain that the past doesn't even really exist.  If memory is flawed, minds are fallible and finicky, and people choose to define themselves after the fact, what is history?