Chaotic Past = Fiction of the Present
I've been working a lot on writing about the past. I want to be careful to not get into one of those modes like Fellini or Kurosawa after they got older they started doing a lot of memory films. Hell, even Wordsworth, he got tripped out into his past and memory, the whole "emotions recollected in tranquility"shit. You have to be careful because everything gets nostalgic. But, for me, writing about the past is a way to liberate the current self from the burden of the past - by recalling details and stories of the past, then shaping this into a new story and form, then your own past takes its proper form - a fictional structure. Of course, everything other than Right Now is the past and is a damn fiction, but when we have significant, powerful, emotional, chaotic, or just weird experiences that affect us, they still affect us until we do something with them in the present, like bring them to the level of waking consciousness. Emotions don't just go away. They need a channel. The chaos of the past can become the fiction of the present.
A lot of this is not my own theory, but I was reading Piaget how he talks about children, and when they have powerful emotional experiences, or even violent ones, these affect the personality in a way that in some manner of speaking controls their life if they don't some to terms with the experience, because the emotional experience has shaped their emotions. Yet a true awareness/cognizance of the experience has not been brought up into the personality. I.e., they have not integrated this experiences, "made sense" of it, and so this drama lurks around in their psyche and influences their behavior on a very physical level - their behavior is shaped by these past experiences because they have not come to some understanding of it and integrated is into their sense of who they are (self, i.e.). Coming to an understanding means becomeing aware of and understanding what has happened, acknowledging it, and accepting it.
For example, a woman grows up with a domineering father, who may have beat her, abused her in some way shape or form, or maybe just was a totalitarian, an authoritarian tyrant. Perhaps she had a few big blow outs with him as a young girl and broke down, felt her whole sense of self be damaged, or ruined, reduced to tears and rubble of anger and despair. So, as an adult she seeks out men who are like this, perhaps because it's the only way she makes sense of who she is, her body and mind are trying to understand this experience, and so by repeating these experiences she is gaining some level of control, yet the experience from the past and the psychological dynamic it engenders still keeps replaying itself, like some old rerun on TV. Same old shit on TV, as usual.
The past lurks around like some hidden demon driving irrational behavior.
So for me, I find great value and liberation in rediscovering my past and bringing is up to the level of my current self and impose some structure and order on the crazy little me who experienced those things. Me and everyone else becomes characters and I gain a great sense of control. I think the mythic analogy is the descent into Hell, like Dante, or Ulysses in the Odyssey, or Aeneas does in the Aeneid - it's a way to confront all the demons or shades of the past and understand them for who and what they are, shades, characters, signs, symbols, all within the realm of our control. It all begins with writing it all down.
