Protentions and Retentions

Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl thought that our lives were lived in moments of protentions and retentions. That is, in the present, the mind is either looking back to make sense of what has happened, or looking forward guessing what is going to come next. Or both. He built this from centuries of time theory, including St. Augustine, Plato and Aristotle. Derrida ran with this, suggesting that, with the advent of archives, and cheap archiving technology like camcorders and photography, the mind no longer looks backward, but instead conceptualizes the present as a future memory. In other words, we take pictures imagining how this moment will be remembered later. We are, in essence, living our lives in a series of future memories.

The one holiday that jars the mind from the present and forces these protentions, retentions and archival tendencies to the front of consciousness is New Year's Eve. Here, people quite literally turn the page from one chapter to the next. People use this holiday as a time to make changes, reflect on what has happened, and start to imagine what the future holds.

A lot has happened this year. For those familiar with my relationship to Erika, New Year's Eve was a particularly important milestone in our relationship. It was on that day that we both decided to give the relationship a try. A year later, and she broke off the engagement, and no longer speaks to me (which, as she told me, was for my benefit; an idea that I take a lot of issue with).

As the initial shock of the moment is wearing off, my mind has taken to making sense of the series of moments that lead to this, and frankly, I should have seen this coming. Erika was immediately on board with the plan that we laid out early in our relationship. In fact, within a few weeks of deciding to give our relationship a chance, she started thinking about how she could get over to Wales. This is not the first major life plan she has made, though. There were other ventures (independent sources of income, a house, etc.) that she started, and then later backed out of. My Mom told me that she even backed out of most of her responsibilities for my 30th Birthday Party, which was her idea. All the great ideas were either dropped last minute, or passed off onto my sister (who came through like a champ). I don't know why I thought my relationship with her would be different.

But. It is important, here, to remember that my life with her was not horrible. I genuinely loved her, very deeply, and I was ready to commit to her. We had a lot of fun either staying home or going out. She gelled with my family very well, and I with her's. There were a lot of tender moments, between us, and when she wanted to be, she could be very sweet. If I remember her as just the recent actions, it paints me in a bad light. After all, if she was this irresponsible and flaky, why did I ask her to marry me? Truth be told: things with her were really great. Or at least I thought they were. All the things I had to do to make the relationship work did not seem like work, or problems. I was happy to do them because I genuinely liked to make Erika happy.

And that, there, is what hurts the most: I would do anything to make her happy, and she wouldn't.

But #2. There has been a lot of looking back. What New Year's Eve also allows is for looking forward. Resolutions to be made and so forth. While I am not a big fan of saying what I will and will not do in the next year, I have thought about what the next year will hold. Honestly, it's a little dizzying. The changes in my life are made even more prominent by the fact that I in one location, and will be going to a different one. I am quite literally leaving all of this behind me. Some of that come tinging in sadness: I leave behind my family, and a lot of good friends. But more exciting, and terrifying, is that I don't really know what comes next for me. I could come home for the whole summer, stay at my Mom's house, traveling around to see my friends. Or I could stay in Aberystwyth, finding cheap lodging, flying home for Buddy's wedding in June and possibly Comic-Con.

Then after the summer...

There are a lot of exciting things that I could be doing for the next few years. Once I am done, I have even more options: I could take a few post-doc assignments in English speaking programs. One in Helsinki I saw earlier looks pretty sexy. I could look for temporary or permanent positions in English speaking countries: America, Canada, UK or Australia, as well as English departments in larger cities like Berlin, Paris and so forth. I could push the editorial angle, looking for work with some comic publishers (or any publishers, really). Really, there are a lot of pretty exciting things to look forward to.

And, hopefully, a new love interest, which is also exciting. Someone who was as much fun, if not more so, than Erika, but with the ability to follow through on her decisions. Really, the future looks bright, terrifyingly so, but bright nonetheless.