January 23, 2008: Bonfire of the Vanities

As many of you know, I keep a large archive of "important" files in both hardcopy and digital formats, including tens of thousands of photos, letters, e-mail messages, postcards, high school and college papers, report cards, scrap story and essay fragments, partial novels, and other totems of the past.

I keep these for three reasons:

• Worried about my own oddly fading memory, I hope this archive can serve someday as an auxiliary brain.
• Hopeful that I'll one day be of interest to others beyond myself, I retain these snapshot records of my development for the reference of scholars, psychologists, and law enforcement investigators.
• Melancholy and guilty about much of my past, I keep evidence of my better and worse days so I never forget what I've done and how I could have done it better or more wisely or less harmfully.

Unfortunately, I've realized recently that living amid one's entire past makes it all the harder to live in the present, not to mention the future. Though they're part of who I am now, all of those tentative ideas and embarrassing missteps aren't a fair representation of all I've worked to achieve either emotionally, intellectually, or creatively.

I'm drowning in my own past, struggling to swim past waves of bad stories, bad papers, and bad decisions to make better ones.

So I burned them all last night with Scott and Aimee. We also ate waffles, but that was emotionally unrelated to the bonfire.

This wasn't something bitter or reproachful. I wanted to respectfully put the past to rest much like one does with an American flag that touches the ground: only something as dramatic as fire gives it the proper weight for reflection.

As a writer, I'd prefer to leave behind only my best work. Necessary as all of that bad work is, I see no reason to wallow in it, judging myself by its lack of merit even as I work hard to do better. Besides, you're not a writer until you learn the only words that matter are the ones you choose to keep with your intelligence, taste, and judgment: all the others are disposable.

So posterity can do its own work to figure out what made me what I am. Good luck with that.

As a human being, I needed some closure on several horrendous emotional disasters, two of my own doing and several others not. Either way, continuing to dwell on them hasn't made them better or healed anyone or affected the stream of time...except negatively moving forward.

So foom! Up they went!

(By the way, it takes about two and a half hours to burn all that paper, and it makes a terrible mess. Which is probably as it should be, right?)

Along with the bonfire, I deleted some twenty thousand e-mail messages, a few hundred terrible story and essay fragments, and lots of other digital detritus.

Yes, I still have what Matt Warner calls "the football" containing lots of other documents. But they're a step or two removed from actively haunting me.

I feel lighter today. I smell smokier, though.

(Here's the Flickr gallery, you pyros.)

Posted by Will Ludwigsen on January 23, 2008 9:59 AM | Permalink