Thoughts on Nostalgia
I believe one is always trying to get at the source. Everyone looks back some time or another. Some look back more than others. I include myself in this category. I look back too much. I trip over my shoes. I’ve got spacey eyes on the subway because I can reconstruct a time and place that I want to be right down to the dimensions of the room. People ask me what’s wrong. They don’t know that I’m in the past. I tell them I’m thinking about something at work. Meanwhile I’m picturing the face of the first sweetheart I ever made love to. I am the willing DJ in the basement of memory.
They form an imprint, these extreme sensations. You never remember filling out your tax return unless you stubbed your toe doing it. Perhaps that explains why some of us are trying to collect extreme sensations like bank robbers stuffing dollar bills in a gunny sack. These are always the people that are proud to claim they have no relation to the past. They say they have not a single nostalgic bone in their body. They dismiss their personal history like a mark of shame. They are constantly pursuing the new, the future. I am picturing the rock climber who loses his arm in a crevice, saws it off and then talks about how the mountain taught him something. I am thinking about the cocaine addict who turns to God afterwards for the same reasons. These people are also out to stake out extreme experiences. But what are these experiences if not for the recent past? I say they’re still interested in reconstructing no matter how much they talk about the next ride, the next jump, the next thrill. I’ll tell you something else. Movie stars watch their old movies late at night when no one is watching. They do.
Rewind is my favourite setting on all of my media devices. My favourite key function on my keyboard is “undo”. Sometimes I undo so many times on a project that I actually forget what I was trying to accomplish in the first place. I am aware of how potentially unhealthy this is. But the truth is we do sometimes get a do over. There are not an infinite amount of second chances but there are a few. For example: maybe someone can get back together with their ex wife. It seems oddly improbable but I bet I can list a thousand cases in the history of the world where it has happened. Thus life is a delicate balance between the undo function up to a point. Afterwards though, there is no more undo, there is just death. Unless you believe in reincarnation in which case we are constantly pressing the undo and redo function without knowing that we are doing it. Or maybe we do realize we are doing it but go softly insane or end up teaching lifestyle decisions via a bestseller.
Some people call being nostalgic destructive. I believe too much of anything is destructive but I refuse to dismiss nostalgia. It keeps things in perspective, does it not? Some of my enemies call this “crying in your beer”. Granted, there are several behavioural quirks linked to nostalgic reminiscing that often result in embarrassment, and at the worst, broken friendships and madness. These are, in no particular order: drink dialling, drunk texting, peering in windows of old residences, visiting old primary schools unannounced, taking a weird and often intrusive interest in talking to young people about their current love life and finally a more recent phenomenon: informing the world of my love for it through my various social networking sites. All of these traits tend to be construed by society at large to be destructive, borderline psychotic behaviour. But surely this is not the only outcome of nostalgic trips.
I recently looked up a girl I was crazy about in fifth grade. I found to my great interest that she was nowhere near as pretty as she used to be. In fact she looked older than my aunt and uncle combined and seemed as though she were squeeking out a living selling moonshine in a trailer park. Which leads me to the most important probing question: I have judged this poor person based on my own expectations for her. I believed she would have possessed a “Facebook” profile that showed her as a sexy single with a Mediterranean tan, naked to the torso, with the fine delicate skin of a sixth grader, a radiant smile, facing forward, her features caught glowing from the sunrise. This was not a person I was imagining. This was the base of a person that I was actually reimagining.
To state the obvious: nostalgia is not a neutral state. Nostalgia does not exist on its own like Munster Cheese, Nostalgia comes mixed with other more confusing emotions like: dread, regret, tenderness, anger, frustration, murder. But where is the positive argument? Personal history can be something positive can it not if looked on with the right temperament. Can it not be looked on as putting yourself in context with the outside world? And is that not a healthy thing? Is this not the general shape of wisdom? Neigh, let’s go one further. Can nostalgia effect positive change in peoples’ lives? Surely we cannot always abandon it in the ghetto of creepiness. If nostalgia is a fond deluded look at the past, isn’t human history sometimes the same thing?
The U.S. and Europe. Most would argue that U.S. could be considered a forward looking nation. Both the cultural revolution and the new economic miracle give evidence to this. The cliché about Europe is that it tends to be backward thinking or caught in the contemplation of history while other nations are out earning the daily bread. Europe is me. Sometimes stalking old girlfriends, occasionally swept away by nineties music playing on the supermarket address system. The U.S. is someone else. This person is constantly on the lookout for new experiences and never thinks of his past. Then, one night, he goes out and ends up shacking up with the same woman that he dated years ago while not remembering that he promised he would never make that mistake again. I would have never made that same mistake because I have been using nostalgia to properly learn and interpret my follies. I have processed my own history. I may make exactly the same mistakes, but atleast I thought about it first. The United States might be doing the same dumb things over and over again without knowing it. The U..S. perhaps would have never invaded Iraq again if it could remember Vietnam. Then again on the positive side, as a man lost in the revelry of my own experiences I might not end up doing anything ever again. Again, I find this naïve summary slightly unfair, namely because of the fact that I consider a nation that has no memory of its history, psychotic robots at best and belligerent at worst. And no nation can be really like this, except if they’re a product of a Ray Bradbury novel. Maybe my analogy is also flawed because there may be a difference between dwelling in the past, and learning from it!
We do it. We look back. We idealize. We romanticize and we tell stories about ourselves in our favour. Always with ourselves as the main characters in a universe that spins around our fancies and desires. But if the universe were to tell the tale of its past, it would be a string of nonsense gobbly gook. The universe does not speak our language for one; and two it would probably have a darned time trying to separate what the hell is important or not. It would lack emphasis. And therefore each tale would be like a child’s: full of enthusiasm but lacking form. And form, is the product of a thinking brain trying to make sense of seeing oneself, our surroundings and our place in it. The ego is good for one thing: it gives us relativism, which in terms gives our lives their points, which in turn stops us from jumping of terraces or more controversially: encourages to take that leap. The ego uses nostalgia as one of its many tools. And nostalgia is not neutral.
I believe one is always trying to get at the source. Everyone looks back some time or another. Some look back more than others. I include myself in this category. I look back too much. I trip over my shoes. I’ve got spacey eyes on the subway because I can reconstruct a time and place that I want to be right down to the dimensions of the room. People ask me what’s wrong. They don’t know that I’m in the past. I tell them I’m thinking about something at work. Meanwhile I’m picturing the face of the first sweetheart I ever made love to. I am the willing DJ in the basement of memory.
They form an imprint, these extreme sensations. You never remember filling out your tax return unless you stubbed your toe doing it. Perhaps that explains why some of us are trying to collect extreme sensations like bank robbers stuffing dollar bills in a gunny sack. These are always the people that are proud to claim they have no relation to the past. They say they have not a single nostalgic bone in their body. They dismiss their personal history like a mark of shame. They are constantly pursuing the new, the future. I am picturing the rock climber who loses his arm in a crevice, saws it off and then talks about how the mountain taught him something. I am thinking about the cocaine addict who turns to God afterwards for the same reasons. These people are also out to stake out extreme experiences. But what are these experiences if not for the recent past? I say they’re still interested in reconstructing no matter how much they talk about the next ride, the next jump, the next thrill. I’ll tell you something else. Movie stars watch their old movies late at night when no one is watching. They do.
Rewind is my favourite setting on all of my media devices. My favourite key function on my keyboard is “undo”. Sometimes I undo so many times on a project that I actually forget what I was trying to accomplish in the first place. I am aware of how potentially unhealthy this is. But the truth is we do sometimes get a do over. There are not an infinite amount of second chances but there are a few. For example: maybe someone can get back together with their ex wife. It seems oddly improbable but I bet I can list a thousand cases in the history of the world where it has happened. Thus life is a delicate balance between the undo function up to a point. Afterwards though, there is no more undo, there is just death. Unless you believe in reincarnation in which case we are constantly pressing the undo and redo function without knowing that we are doing it. Or maybe we do realize we are doing it but go softly insane or end up teaching lifestyle decisions via a bestseller.
Some people call being nostalgic destructive. I believe too much of anything is destructive but I refuse to dismiss nostalgia. It keeps things in perspective, does it not? Some of my enemies call this “crying in your beer”. Granted, there are several behavioural quirks linked to nostalgic reminiscing that often result in embarrassment, and at the worst, broken friendships and madness. These are, in no particular order: drink dialling, drunk texting, peering in windows of old residences, visiting old primary schools unannounced, taking a weird and often intrusive interest in talking to young people about their current love life and finally a more recent phenomenon: informing the world of my love for it through my various social networking sites. All of these traits tend to be construed by society at large to be destructive, borderline psychotic behaviour. But surely this is not the only outcome of nostalgic trips.
I recently looked up a girl I was crazy about in fifth grade. I found to my great interest that she was nowhere near as pretty as she used to be. In fact she looked older than my aunt and uncle combined and seemed as though she were squeeking out a living selling moonshine in a trailer park. Which leads me to the most important probing question: I have judged this poor person based on my own expectations for her. I believed she would have possessed a “Facebook” profile that showed her as a sexy single with a Mediterranean tan, naked to the torso, with the fine delicate skin of a sixth grader, a radiant smile, facing forward, her features caught glowing from the sunrise. This was not a person I was imagining. This was the base of a person that I was actually reimagining.
To state the obvious: nostalgia is not a neutral state. Nostalgia does not exist on its own like Munster Cheese, Nostalgia comes mixed with other more confusing emotions like: dread, regret, tenderness, anger, frustration, murder. But where is the positive argument? Personal history can be something positive can it not if looked on with the right temperament. Can it not be looked on as putting yourself in context with the outside world? And is that not a healthy thing? Is this not the general shape of wisdom? Neigh, let’s go one further. Can nostalgia effect positive change in peoples’ lives? Surely we cannot always abandon it in the ghetto of creepiness. If nostalgia is a fond deluded look at the past, isn’t human history sometimes the same thing?
The U.S. and Europe. Most would argue that U.S. could be considered a forward looking nation. Both the cultural revolution and the new economic miracle give evidence to this. The cliché about Europe is that it tends to be backward thinking or caught in the contemplation of history while other nations are out earning the daily bread. Europe is me. Sometimes stalking old girlfriends, occasionally swept away by nineties music playing on the supermarket address system. The U.S. is someone else. This person is constantly on the lookout for new experiences and never thinks of his past. Then, one night, he goes out and ends up shacking up with the same woman that he dated years ago while not remembering that he promised he would never make that mistake again. I would have never made that same mistake because I have been using nostalgia to properly learn and interpret my follies. I have processed my own history. I may make exactly the same mistakes, but atleast I thought about it first. The United States might be doing the same dumb things over and over again without knowing it. The U..S. perhaps would have never invaded Iraq again if it could remember Vietnam. Then again on the positive side, as a man lost in the revelry of my own experiences I might not end up doing anything ever again. Again, I find this naïve summary slightly unfair, namely because of the fact that I consider a nation that has no memory of its history, psychotic robots at best and belligerent at worst. And no nation can be really like this, except if they’re a product of a Ray Bradbury novel. Maybe my analogy is also flawed because there may be a difference between dwelling in the past, and learning from it!
We do it. We look back. We idealize. We romanticize and we tell stories about ourselves in our favour. Always with ourselves as the main characters in a universe that spins around our fancies and desires. But if the universe were to tell the tale of its past, it would be a string of nonsense gobbly gook. The universe does not speak our language for one; and two it would probably have a darned time trying to separate what the hell is important or not. It would lack emphasis. And therefore each tale would be like a child’s: full of enthusiasm but lacking form. And form, is the product of a thinking brain trying to make sense of seeing oneself, our surroundings and our place in it. The ego is good for one thing: it gives us relativism, which in terms gives our lives their points, which in turn stops us from jumping of terraces or more controversially: encourages to take that leap. The ego uses nostalgia as one of its many tools. And nostalgia is not neutral.
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