Long Day's Journey into the Past
 
 
I am still kind of tripping and feeling apprehensive about my High School Reunion (21 year), but I suppose it's an important rite of passage. Why the hell does that one place in time have to have so much of an influence upon a person's entire life?? Those years and the memories of them lurk around, hover and brood like some rough beast in the back of the mind, trying forever to influence my identity - grand mal delusions of a partying, rock star, drug taking hedonist, a la wanna be Lizard King. In truth, I was more like a white trash, low rent idealistic infant with tendencies toward anarchy and nihilism. Was it the desert itself? The bleak hot landscape and open skies and dirt and partying and desperate hormones driving me towards self annihilation? Everything so melodramatic and maudlin, so out of proportion, every day so vivid and meaningful and serious and exaggerated.
 
It's like they say, when we are super young, maybe two or so, much of the personality is formed by the earliest of impressions: the parents, the room you lay in with your crib, the food, the sound your parents make, the relative calm and attention (or lack of) they give you, the quality of life and care and attention, etc. This forms the little mind, the little babe's ego, sense of self, personality. I believe High School is the second major Ego crucible, where upon this budding consciousness busts out its own mother-father cocoon and finally sees itself, and for the first time realize we are on a stage, strutting and fretting our stuff, realizing we indeed inhabit a character and a role and it's fun and wild, though often a little embarrassing.
 
So, this reunion,this revisiting of the past is the Journey Into Hell myth, like Odysseus and Aeneas did (and to an extent, Orpheus too, thought slightly different): you go back to the past (Hell) and make peace with all the shades and phantasms (memories) and put them to rest because you realize how much they were intruding upon the present, as if - as if - these memories of who you were were actually real. Maybe then the Ego can go 'pop' a second time and adulthood can finally settle in. A new self can emerge, and the self from childhood slip down into Hell where it belongs.  The child dies off, and the larger Self burgeons.  Maybe the child is the father to man, but it's a child only in memory, long gone away.