Collaborating With Myself

Bridging the Generations of ME

These days, in my writing, I’m often collaborating with myself – not just drawing on memories of my past, as all writers do, but bringing that writer I used to be – his words, phrases, paragraphs – onto the blank pages of my present day.

Over the decades I’ve cranked out reams of word-covered paper. It was mostly typing on paper back then, before “word processing.” Recently I’ve found it useful, as well as sentimentally interesting, to take some of those pages out of the file folders they’ve slept mutely in for decades, to see if they have anything to say worth hearing now. Sometimes, with a little help from time, experience and wisdom (what hubris to posit wisdom!), they seem to.

A line written 50 years ago, even though I wrote it, is a line written by someone else. How many times have all the cells died and been replaced since then? How many crises have loomed and disappeared – or never appeared at all; how many delights and disappointments have overwritten each other how many times; how many acquaintances, friends, lovers have come and gone – too often, it seems, with an emphasis on the gone?

Most days that other me and I get along pretty well as we write together. There’s occasionally a little wariness, a little exasperation on both sides: He was so naïve, so foolish (especially when it came to love), so YOUNG; He is so jaded, so stodgy (especially when it comes to modern life), so OLD. The writing sessions can be a verbal wrestling match, with lots of circling and sizing up, followed by grappling and clinches that may impinge a little too closely on sensitive parts for comfort for either one. (No, I’m not hinting even vaguely at anything off-color, tasteless; speaking purely metaphorically.)

It's a bridging of generations in which the common thread is ME. In a way, I’m my own grandfather, my own grandson. That middle generation, the one that saw career, marriage, the cutting-down-to-size of dreams and aspirations (it happens to most all of us – it’s called grownup life), we both gloss over, overlook. In that middle life, we’re not so interested – not then, not now. Like grandparents and grandchildren, we share a special bond that leaves out all the grownup things, in preference for the more interesting stuff that happens at the beginning and the end. We’re two-in-one, different while the same, like Janus, only turned so that we’re looking toward each other instead of looking away.

What do we see? What do we see that’s worth either of our time in seeing? How do we help each other see it? The old me looks back on a dimly, selectively remembered time full of possibility, but full of uncertainty, doubt, and heartache too. The young me looks forward to a then unimaginable time of semi-contentment, reconciliation with the as is, and wistful nostalgia. Writing with the same words, at times it’s as though we’re writing in different languages – languages for which there is no Google Translate to help us understand each other. And so sometimes the translations are faulty. Sometimes we mislead each other about what’s important, even what’s real.

But sometimes, magic happens. Sometimes we understand each other perfectly – at least understand that each of us has a point of view worth considering. And sometimes we’re both amazed at the resemblance we see, looking at each other. It’s almost as though we’re the same person, even though we both know that 50 years separate us. You’ve had that feeling, haven’t you, looking at old family photos. (Well, actually, only one of us knows that. For one of us, 50 years was an inconceivable eternity, maybe glimpsed while looking at those photos, while the other knows it’s a flash in time).

Still, as we negotiate the phrases and the images and the scenes, in our back and forth over 50 years, we’re developing something that maybe is respect for each other. It wasn’t all callow and foolish being young, and trying to write about it. It’s not all dreary and dull being old, and still trying to write about it.

Which isn’t to say that either of us – grandson, grandfather – has anything profound to write. Or that even the two of us writing together do. But that’s not the point. It’s not just profound things that get written – and read. The point is that we’re finding something new and valuable in each other, as we write together to say whatever it is we need to say, and can. This is the golden time when we’re both able to join in the work. Like Kander and Ebb or the two Curies, we both have our special bits to contribute. Not that we didn’t, haven’t, couldn’t write happily (or not) on our own. But doing it together, collaborating, makes it seem a lot less lonely. And, to boot, it’s great spending so much quality grandson-grandfather time with ourselves.