Taylor’s Version
Once she’d redone all she’d ever done,
Taylor Swift, still at a loss,
Set upon redoing
Everything, by all of us.
By chance, my doings were the first
She started to redo,
And now she’s redone all I did
Up to age thirty-two.
It’s hard to see them done again,
Every triumph, every failure;
And hard that people like them so much more
Now that they’re Taylor’s.
Hello,
I mentioned I’m currently preparing myself to remount all ten of my solo comedy shows at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in a solipsistic project I’m calling “John-Luke-A-Palooza.” (You can get tickets here.) This poem about Taylor Swift is, I think, secretly actually about me. Me, me, me.
To prepare, I’ve been rewatching recordings of the shows, and reading through old notebooks, and performing material that I haven’t, in some cases, spoken for over ten years. Practically, and technically, I’m feeling good about it - I think it’s doable, and I’m on track. Now, psychically and emotionally… it’s tough. I think healthy, but tough.
Joan Didion writes in her essay on keeping a notebook:
“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
When I originally launched into this project, I thought this was me keeping on nodding terms with my former selves, but I’ve come to see it’s actually me banging on my former selves’ doors at 4 a.m. of a bad night, and waking them up. I’m having dreams filled with people from my life of fourteen-years-ago and people from my life of two years ago, all mixed up and turning into each other.
As I’m relearning the lines from old shows, I find that those neural pathways are still there, waiting to be woken up. And I’ve found that my actual memory memories, of my actual life, or lives, are being woken up with them: Here’s me drinking a beer with friends in Edinburgh after my first solo show, here’s me having a panic attack as my spouse tells me over the phone that they’re leaving, here’s me waking up my grandparents’ cottage to an overnight blanketing of snow, here’s the smell of my dad’s hospital room.
And the question keeps raising its head: why am I doing this now? I think I’m getting some way towards answering it. The particular life that I thought I was embarking on turned out, of a sudden, to be not to be. And I’m forcing myself to take stock - to look back, perhaps to learn lessons… but actually that’s not the whole thing. I feel like when something ends for me, I have an urge to move on completely, and to try to forget about that other life. But, that life was mine. At its most pointful, this act of reacquainting myself with my former selves is actually an act of reminding myself that they are still me; of mapping my continuity.
Yours, Solipsistickle-me-Elmo
(Luke)
Mapping your own continuity sounds fascinating John. I really relate to what you say about moving on completely from past lives/selves. Looking back, my life has been quite compartmentalised into different stages of myself, and they don't really talk to each other. I don't have journals, but occasionally some little piece of writing or memory will pop up and I end up thinking - was I really like that?! Was that really me?! I am forced to conclude that it was! But I really don't like the answer. Not being a pro-creative, I think my version of your project is to maintain and occasionally resurrect age-old friendships from different times in my life, in the hope that if those people still want to be friends with me, then despite my own narrative, I must've been a good person back then after all. I wonder, if I asked them about my last self, if I could map my own continuity, and connect the dots between all the people I have been.
Thank you for the inspiration. Good luck, take care, Tom