How much does the past matter?

Being a perfectionist, I want everything as squared away as possible - bed made, bills paid, teeth brushed - even my past. Well, I wish I could square it away. The blunt truth is, as it is for everyone else on the planet, as interesting as I would like to think my past is - you know, travel, friends, adventures - it is marked by misteps, ackward pauses, and a few tumbles. I've also had plenty of good times, good memories and successes too, thankfully.

The past manifests in different forms and on different levels of course. First, there is our ancestoral past - our hopefully proud heritage. I am descended mostly from German and Irish immigrants with a tiny dash of Dutch, French, English, and Scottish. Pretty much sterotypical anglo-saxon. Literally: my grandfather is a quarter Saxon, being his great-grandfather was from the Harz Mountains in what is known as the state of Saxon-Anhalt in Germany.

My great-grandmother in wedding gown

Inside the context of graduate studies, the ancestoral/historical past is part of what is sometimes called "memory" studies. People are obviously attached to their own social history because it forms part of their personal idenity, it provides safety in its abilty to define oneself. It is useful.

But the past that presents more of a problem for me is that of my personal history. I tend to cling to memories especially the negative ones. It's like a mini Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome except that many of the events or experiences I remember, the one coupled with negative emotions like anger, sadness, embarrassment aren't really that traumatic in their true context. This leads me to believe that clinging to these memories represent more of a need of mine to "clean up" because I love to do so reather than the intrinstic pertinence, big picture speaking, of the memory.

It doesn't help that western culture, and really most cultures, documents its past so throroughly and revisits it so often and with such vigor. Mostly, in the context of the arts (i.e. movies, visual art, literature, theatre, etc...), the past is more than naught an apparatus for framing a more contemporary issue. A good example is the book "Atonement" by Ian McKewen. The book/movie takes place in the 1930s both before and during WW II with the last chapter taken place in the 90s or thereabouts. But the book isn't about WW II. It's about finding redemption, but also poses grand questions about the substance of children, the role of social dictates. In other contexts, the fixation on history present in Western Culture in its social sciences, in journalism, and in the arts, really is a reguritation of events that were pivotal, profoundly meanful, that need to be revisited in order for our collective psyches to deal with what had happened once ago, to prevent it from happening again.

Atonement, wartime scene

But the societal past, or the ancestoral past, perhaps has a different signigicance to individuals than does an individual's own past. I think our personal memories manifest in as many occassions or in as many ways as are fit with our individual characters, i.e, a happy-go-lucky person touches on sad memories very rarely whereas a melancholy person touches on them quite a bit; this is because a melancholy person needs melancholy substance on which to subsist. Sometimes, I recall a bittersweet memory because something I have seen has triggered the memory, and being sensitive, I may remember the emotional context of the memory more acutely. Other times, I think that more negative events in my past have just forged a deeper groove than then more postive ones, but I also recognize that I have a compulsion to tidy every thing up, even my past, and that I am often too hard on myself, even in terms of the past. It's only now, that I've gotten older, do I more clearly recognize that no one is immune from an imperfect past. No one.