Edward Curtin
In spite of its pedigree as a basic component in civilization’s biggest stories, fond memories has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual dispositions.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Scriptural authors, and their ilk would demur, of course, however they have actually been dead for a couple of years, so development’s mantra prompts us to get on with it. This is now.
And now is always, and like its twin– exile– fond memories is perpetual.
The hurting for “home”– from Greek algos, discomfort + nostos, homecoming– is not just a desire for the past, whether in reality or creativity, time or location, but a passionate yearning for the very best from the past to be brought into the future.
Fond memories might be more a long pains of old individuals, but it is likewise a sensation that follows everybody along life’s method. Its presence might be much shorter in youth, and it may be quick, periodic, and unrecognized, however it exists. Definitely it grows with experience.
As everybody knows, a taste, an odor, a sight, a noise, a tune– can invoke a moment’s happiness, a reverie of possibility. Paradise gained back, however in a different way.
A yearning acknowledged, similar to seeing for the very first time how Van Gogh’s blue paint opens a door to ecstasy or a line of poetry fractures open an area in one’s heart for prospective love. Hope reborn as an aperture to the beyond reimagined and made possible.
There is no need to ever leave where we are to find that we are already no longer there, for living is a perpetual leaving-taking, and the ache of loss is its cost.
However like all discomforts, it is one we want to eliminate in the future; and in order to make a future, we need to be able to picture or remember it first. We are all exiled in our own ways. Home was yesterday, and our lost houses lie in our futures, if we hold to the imagine homecoming, whatever that may indicate to each person. But it likewise has a universal meaning, since we dwell on this earth together, our one house for our entire human household.
You may think I am taking part in fluff and puff and lightweight conceptions. But no.
All across the world there are numerous countless exiles, forced by wars, power politics, hardship, hunger, harmful industrialism, and modernization’s disastrous effects to leave their homes and suffer the disorientation of roaming. Emigration, immigration, salvaging bits of the old in the brand-new unusual lands– thus is their plight. A lot lost and small hopes discovered in classic keeping in mind. Piecing together the fragments.
However in a far less physical sense, the homeless mind is the rule today. There are very couple of people these days who do not wish to in some way go back to a time when the insanity that engulfs us didn’t exist; to get away the whirligig of fragmented consciousness in which the world appears– i.e. exists by the media– as a pointillistic painting whose dots move so rapidly that a coherent picture is near impossible.
This sensation is prevalent. It is not a concern of politics. It crisscrosses the world following the hyper-real unreality of the innovations that join us in a state of transcendental homelessness and anxiety. All the propaganda about a “new regular” and a digital disembodied future ring hollow. The Great Reset is the Terrific Problem. Nothing appears normal any longer and the future appears even less so.
The world has become Weirdsville. This is something that most people– young and old– feel, even if they can’t articulate it. The feeling that all the news is false which some huge con game is underway is pandemic.
Here is an irrelevant little bit of fond memories. I mention it since it points beyond itself, then and now. It has always been nostalgia for the future. I believe it is a prevalent experience.
When I remained in high school, there was a small cheese shop on Lexington Avenue and 85th St. in New York City near the train that I required to and house from school. It was the size of a walk-in closet. Countless cheeses surrounded you when you got in. The smells were frustrating. I would typically drop in there with empty pockets on my method home from school.
The owner, understanding I feared of the thousands of cheeses, would often give me little samples with pieces of crusty French bread. He would regale me with tales of Paris and the histories of the various European cheeses. He would stress their livingness, how they breathed.
By the door was a large basket filled with long loaves of aromatic French bread flown in every early morning from Paris by Air France. These were the days before every grocery store offered knockoff variations of the real thing. Each long loaf remained in a vibrant French tricolored paper bag.
Those loaves of bread in the French colors constantly carried me to Paris, a place I had never ever been, but whose language I was studying. Then, and for several years later on, I was sentimental for a Paris that was not yet part of my physical experience. How could this be? I asked myself.
One day I understood that I was not nostalgic for Paris or the cheese shop, nor for the cheese or the bread, which I had actually tasted often times, however for the paper bags the bread came in.
Why?
This question perplexed me up until I understood my concept of nostalgia was incorrect. For those bags had always represented the future for me, the birds of flight a sign of freedom beckoning as my youthful world expanded. My fond memories for the Air France bags was a way to go back to move forward, not to indulge sentimentality and the “good old days,” however to check out the entrails for their prophetic message: the small-life world is limiting– expand your horizons.
It was not a question of getting on an airplane and going someplace different, although that in time would likewise be excellent. It was not an invitation to review that cheese store, as if that were possible, for the shop was long gone and in any case it would not imply the exact same thing. It was not a desire to become a teenager once again. You can not repeat an experience, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald writing: “You can’t duplicate the past? … Why naturally you can.”
The past because sense is quicksand, a death desire. For lots of people (and this is the common understanding of nostalgia as a specifically unfavorable way of thinking), embittered fond memories is their method of denying the present and the future, often by the fictitious production of “the great old days” when whatever was supposedly so much better.
However fond memories can also be an impetus to produce a better future, a pointer that excellent elements of what has been lost require to be gained back to alter the course of today’s future trajectory.
Today many people are hoodwinked by world events, as a moron wind blows through the putrescent words of the media sycophants who churn out their constantly misleading and complicated propaganda on behalf of their elite masters. Offered a few minutes assurance to examine this drivel– a serenity damaged by the electronic frenzy– it becomes apparent that their fear, stress and anxiety, and inconsistent reports are intentional, part of a technique to pound down the general public into drooling, quaking morons.
However many individuals in their much better minutes do remember times when they experienced glances of a much better life, transitory as those experiences might have been. Moments when they felt more at home in their skin in a world where they belonged and they might make much better sense of the news they got. Not lost and roaming and continuously fearfully agitated by a future relatively disorderly, causing dusty death in a story informed by a moron loaded with noise and fury symbolizing nothing.
I recommend that those sentimental moments revolve around the changing nature of our experience of area and time.
There was a time when time was time and area and speed had some human significance, for individuals lived within the limitations of the natural world of which they belonged.
As I composed once prior to:
In former days you might cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different viewpoint, knowing what was obvious held true which to exist indicated to be made up of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summertime and winter. There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where area too had dimensions and the stars and worlds weren’t fictional landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid dreams.
Because rapidly vanishing world where individuals felt positioned in space and time, life was not yet a holographic phenomenon of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one location to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its component, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere.
The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the exact same roadways in the very same towns across a nation where the very same individuals live with their exact same devices and same ideas in their very same lives in their very same clothing.
A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by mobile phone and measured in nanoseconds where the options are the flexibility to pick what is constantly the same within a cage of classifications suggested to render all truth a ‘mediated reality.’
Fond memories is constantly about time and area. In that sense, it is equivalent to all human experience that also takes place within these dimensions. And when innovation has actually radically disrupted our human sense of limitations in their regard, it becomes more difficult and harder to feel comfortable, to stay enough to comprehend what is occurring worldwide.
I believe that many individuals feel nostalgic for slower and more silent days when they could hear themselves think a bit. When the sense of constantly being on the go and lacking time predominates as it does today, believing becomes extremely hard.
To believe, one must dethrone King Rush and silence Queen Noise, the two conditions that the speed and noise of digital innovation render impossible.
Tranquilized by the beeping trivia pouring out of the omnipresent electronic gadgets, the really gadgets being used by the elites to control the masses, a profound grasp of the source of one’s disquietude is difficult. The world becomes impossible to check out. The sense of constantly being away, ungrounded, and psychologically homeless in a cacophonous madhouse becomes the norm. One feels sick in heart and mind.
Most people sense this, and whether they think about it as fond memories or not, I believe they feel that something important is missing out on which they are roaming like rolling stones, as Dylan voiced it so poetically, with no instructions home.
How does it feel? It feels lousy.
So it’s not a concern of going back to “the great old days.” The future beckons. However if we do not find a way to discover those necessary human requirements of slowness and silence, to call but 2, I am afraid we will find ourselves speeding along into an inferno of our own making, where it’s loud as hell and not fit for human habitation.