I occasionally have these strange moments of connection with past selves. Not like past lives, but past versions of myself in this life. Sometimes it's situational, like a few weeks back when I realized I was listening to the same music I loved at 19 (in this case 10,000 Maniacs' Our Time in Eden) with headphones, dressed in one of the long skirts I wore perpetually at that age, writing a poem and thinking about submissions. Granted, I was at my work desk and not the floor of my parent's living room, but it was long after midnight when I am most creative, then and now, and for a second the woman I am now waved across time to that girl. For a moment, time slipped and a link was formed, almost like hypertext in the narrative.
Last night, I spent the evening listening to TS's new release of Speak Now (not something from all that far in the past) and making some of the collages that will eventually accompany the GRANATA poems in their final form. Again, it was long after midnight, and while maybe no connection was formed there, this morning as I brewed coffee I got to work on making a reel of the first of them for IG, which I put to one of my favorite Hole songs, "Petals," which I remember listening to incessantly when I lived back in Rockford briefly in 1999. I'd often listen to it in the living room where the bigger stereo was, where I could play Celebrity Skin loud enough to vibrate in my bones when no one else was home. Over the past two decades, I've gone back and forth on which Hole album I like best , Live Through This or the later one. It really depends on the day.
There was something about the song, even then. that seemed to echo what I wanted to write one day, what I wanted to imagine, the world I wanted to create, though I didn't know what that looked like. 25-year-old me certainly did not know that one day, long off, nearly another 25 years, I would create the exactly right set of images and words that spoke the same language as the song somehow, that inhabited the same world. That I would even be making visual art at all. Certainly wouldn't have believed in the technological innovations that would even make the combo I created today possible. I listen to a lot of music now, new and old, but I feel like so much of my aesthetics were formed by the music of women during the 90s when my brain was still forming the matter and priming the well. It explains quite a lot about how some people never listen to new music past a certain point in adulthood and prefer the songs of their youth to anything now. Or how dementia patients still respond to music as familiar when faces and details are not.
For a second this morning, the middle-aged me waved across time to the younger me, who was only beginning to find something like a voice in her writing, and certainly never imagined she'd be an artist, or even write as many poems as she has. Who certainly never imagined she'd create the exact perfect collages for a song she loved decades ago, and how link in the narrative of both lives could be formed.
