"Down the passage which we did not take"

Writers: is there something unique about our relationship with our pasts?

“Juno” by Angela Farquharson

I have always wondered if there is something unique about my past - especially the ‘unlived’ past. Or perhaps more accurately, my relationship to it. Many years after the events themselves I can still vividly recall moments when decisions were taken or not taken, things said or not said, when I turned left rather than right.

But then I assume we all can. (One can never truly know, of course.)

I wonder if that was what Eliot was getting at:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened

from ‘Burnt Norton’, in The Four Quartets, T.S.Eliot

The relationship with personal history is a complex one. In my case it is almost as if I am able (via some kind of delicious irony!) to regard those critical past events as rehearsal because I now know that the opportunity exists to return to them, to re-live them, to take the un-taken passage, open the un-opened door. Essentially to find out what would have happened and answer all those ‘what if?’ questions.

Which is plainly ridiculous isn’t it? Life isn’t like some Hollywood time-travelling fantasy; there is no ‘Back to the Future’, no ‘Big’, no ‘Groundhog Day’. Time is relentlessly linear. We don’t get a second go.

“You didn’t take that passage or open that door? Get over it!”

Being a writer (or probably any kind of artist, come to that) perhaps endows us with a kind of ‘super-power’ - which is the ability to time-travel, to go back and examine. To ‘re-live’, if you like. Through our words, our stories, we have the opportunity to re-assess, to explore all those what-might-have-beens. We are prime source material for our work. I’m not talking about merely replaying (which is memoir, of course) but manipulation, exploration, supposition. And we have the most wonderful toolset for doing so: a vast supply of words which we can deploy in an infinite number of ways.

Perhaps all of that contributes to the reason why I am fascinated by personal history; less the bare bones of it - i.e. what actually happened - but rather with how past events influence the now and the future. In my long-form fiction most of my characters have something from their past they are still trying to process, to come to terms with, to resolve. Some of that will inevitably be based on my own experience (how can it not be?! “Write what you know” - Mark Twain), and the rest stolen from others’ lives. Or the imagined lives of imagined characters.

That’s a kind of re-living isn’t it?

Which is all well and good - but you could argue it’s nothing if not self-indulgent. If you are writing for yourself, undertaking a kind of personal exorcism, then fair enough; but what if you are also writing for ‘a readership’? I see no reason why anyone should give a damn as to what might have happened if I’d actually had the gumption to ask that Italian girl with the long hair back to my place all those years ago! A different life, inevitably.

The choice, therefore, is either to write explicitly for ourselves - privately, as it were - or to find a way to make our experience (or our re-experiencing) somehow universal, to give it an applicability, a hook onto which others can hang an experience of their own i.e. to make it relevant.

And this is where I think perhaps too many writers (particularly poets) fall down. I have read too many collections where the poems are little more than therapy; poem after poem examining the same situation, the same experience - a ‘history’ - which is so narrow, so emotionally specific and individual, that it is impossible for a reader to gain a foothold.

How much do we really care about someone else’s experiences? Beyond a desire to be merely entertained, isn’t “make it relevant to me!” the unspoken cry of most readers?

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What is your relationship to your past?

Do you use it as a source for your work?

And would you really ‘go back’ if you could…?

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