Paul Staley: The Past Isn't Past

William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” And Paul Staley heartily agrees.

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, to get her husband to stop moping and get on with things, tells him “What’s done cannot be undone.”

But is the past ever really over?  Her advice may be technically true, but we don’t act that way.

We are never done with the past. We are always tinkering with it. There is so much of it that we have to curate it like a museum collection, moving some events into storage while others are on full display. As the recent controversies over statues and school names indicate, there will always be revisions to the list of who gets honored and who gets tossed.

We ask the past to do things it doesn’t do well, like predict the future.  After all, the raw material for any forecast about what will happen is usually the record of what has already happened.

But the more interesting question is whether the past is done with us. First off, it’s gaining on us. Every day we make more of it, and as we age our personal ledgers of the past and the future tip more and more to that sliver of human history in which we have a proprietary interest, the span of time we call our “lived experience.”  It governs how we see the world.

In the public realm, proposals for reparations are based on the idea that the past has left us bills we need to pay.

And the current debate over what to teach our children is—to some extent—an argument over whether the past is over and done, or the architect of the world in which we live. The idea that we can ignore how the past affects our lives today has the flavor of that moment in the Wizard of Oz when the wizard says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Nothing to see hear folks, just keep moving.

So, in the end, Lady Macbeth’s advice should be expanded: the past cannot be undone, it cannot be erased, it cannot be denied, and ultimately it must be understood.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.