Old Friends

Oct 29 2019

Old friends

you haven't seen in years

surprise you, how fast they've aged.

But still, there is no mistaking them.

The human brain is uncanny at this,

the flash of recognition

that maps the space between the eyes

those sternly narrowed lips

that nose you couldn't miss.

The trajectory of life

once set in motion

propels you further and further apart,

but just a minute's reminiscing

and you are rocketed swiftly back

to the youthful shenanigans

the two of you once shared.

Odd, though, how memories diverge.

How the past

is neither singular, nor fixed

but repeatedly transformed,

the alchemy of forgetting

selective recall,

those convenient truths

our unconscious concocts.

In a few more minutes

the two old friends will part.

You, shaking your head

at how the years have aged him,

at the thing that seemed so meaningful

he somehow completely forgot.

Wondering

did it really happen that way

even happen at all?

How slippery is the past

how pointless rumination.

The rose-coloured glow of nostalgia,

the long accustomed weight

that persists in dragging you down.

You look in a mirror

and a familiar face looks back,

the younger man

you can still discern

in its fleshiness and jowls

that see-saw keloid scar.

Because you never forget

a face

even if you can't quite place him,

or wonder just how well

you really knew the man.

This poem started with a vague notion to write about facial recognition: that brilliant unconscious process that is one of the great triumphs of the human brain. Not just the brain's facility at processing complicated information, but what the resources it devotes to facial recognition tell us about ourselves as social animals. I'm terrible at names, embarrassingly so; but I seem to always remember a face.

But from that starting point, my approach was very different. First, writing directly on the keyboard, instead of my usual cheap Bic pen on blank white paper. And second, writing in an almost stream of consciousness fashion that felt even more than usual like automatic writing, or taking dictation. That is, not thinking ahead, not planning. And, to lead me to the next line, not so much following the train of thought as surrendering to the sound and cadence of the language. So I'm very pleased not only that it came out so coherently, but at the relatively prosaic conversational tone of the piece: which, oddly, is something I always strive for, but very rarely achieve.

So it ended up being a poem about imperfect remembering, the toxic impulse of nostalgia, the angst of growing old, and the complexity of who we become with age; that is, the interplay and superposition of all our past selves.