Nostalgia for the Imaginary

[scrypt]

Watching a characteristically sentimental mini-series on PBS, I was reminded of something I used to say as a kid: nostalgia is like puking and then sanitizing the remains of what you've eaten. I recited that phrase at my earliest poetry reading, at the Ninth Street Exit in Portland. It's one of the few things I wrote at 15 that still strike me as true.


From what I could glean, the author of that roman à clef and its PBS adaptation seemed to enjoy conquest after conquest in every sense. Perhaps his past really was idyllic, though he depersonalized his casualties. By contrast, my own memories of childhood and youth are excruciating. Most of what I wrote or composed was indefensible, and my romantic/social life was a litany of rejection and selfishness. Certainly, I found self-injury before fashion validated the practice, but my strongest memory was of my credo: never to romanticize or deny the shame and pain; never to pretend that any period of my life was characterized by innocence, kindness or cultural support. The past was a place where everyone knew precisely what they did to everyone else. There's no such thing as a past sans brutal food chain.


The same is true of art: one should be merciless when evaluating earlier influences. Revel in reliving the experience of the work you once loved, but recognize that most of it, seen in the rain-gray dusk of sobriety, proves unremarkable at best; at worst, a train of terrible examples.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I think nostalgia has some very positive aspects but I agree with your main points.

I vowed to never forget the crushing boredom of childhood. I have a far better memory than most people and I think most people forget all those dreadfully dull hours. Either that or their adult lives are even duller, so that they have genuine cause to look back fondly.
I'm so glad I'll never be a child again. My single favourite thing from Quentin Tarantino was listening to him excitedly talking about leaving school.
But in a way I feel that childhood still goes on, I used to spend a lot of time on stupid crap that I regret but I still do.

But I'm still nostalgic about a lot of things.

I might be wrong but I often think I was more calm as a child and feel that I've probably taken on too many received ideas and attitudes that are difficult to get rid of.

I miss how easy it was to get lost in things and be pleasantly overwhelmed. After your mid20s you have to search and work harder at getting your thrills, I try to see this as a great thing and it probably is but it's difficult to adapt to. I used to be ecstatic when I went for a walk in the countryside; how could I not miss that?

Remembering my enormous and rich expectations for innumerable things is possibly the biggest source of my creativity. It's difficult to say if I'm generally more inspired by things as they are or things as I hoped they'd be.

Growing up around farms and farming families was definitely a wonderful thing to look back on.

[scrypt]

The balance you offer in your recounting of childhood is admirable. Thank you for making distinctions between multiple levels of your paradise and purgatory.

Even so, there's a difference between a happy childhood and uncritically regurgitated nostalgia about it. The latter can be death to development.

My sense is that one should explore former happiness in ways that render it complex. The complexity doesn't have to be recognized by the character who experiences happiness or even stated outright in the narrative. It can be revealed, cf., by patterns of response and by its relationship to other aspects of the character's daily reflections and perceptions.

There always will be distressing aspects of one's life no matter how peaceful it appears from without or even within. A child who dreams of monsters knows that something is making ripples appear in the waters of waking life.

[Druidic]

I can only go by my own experience, right or wrong. For me, there's a difference between nostalgia and sentimentality. I'm aware, of course that for many the two are inseparable and nostalgia is usually defined as a kind of pleasurable sentimentality.; but not necessarily for me. I think of nostalgia as a longing, a mixture of pleasure and melancholy; sentimentality as a kind of indulgence, sometimes quite sickly like over-indulging on sweets. If I feel nostalgia for the days when I played a reasonably decent guitar, I'm really recalling (and longing for) a return to the time before arthritis made playing a frustrating thing. In other words, I'm longing for the return of the me that was healthy. Sentimentality, on the other hand, is pretty much an exaggeration of something that never was: imaging my younger self as a far more skilled player, a virtuoso of unlimited talent and possibilities. I don't see nostalgia as a negative thing; but then what I experience in those moments isn't the sticky sweet kind of thing...it's a longing for something that once was and an appreciation of a kind of continuity in my life...Nostalgia can be a surprisingly deep, even profound, experience if relatively free of the maudlin or the element of self-pity.

[scrypt]

I would say this: one difference between nostalgia and sentimentality is that the first word is connected specifically to one's sense of an earlier time. Sentimentality has more to do with an understanding that is diluted by feelings of attachment. Those feelings can but usually don't have anything to do with empathy. After all, even Adolf was said to be sentimental about his dogs.

Strangely, Nabokov hated Dostoyevsky as much as he loved Pushkin and insisted that the great novelist's attachment to his characters resulted in prose that was stylistically execrable and depictions that were fundamentally inhumane. I'm not saying that N. is remotely correct about D. I'm saying that his attempt to diagnose and avoid what he considered to be nauseating sentimentality helped him to become a better writer if a uniquely tortured man.

I do think that sentimentality can be used to devastating effect if the writer is self-aware and/or maintains a degree of distance from the characters. Examples of this include Le perroquet (A Simple Heart), by Flaubert, Lolita, by guess who and The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. Even in mainstream films, sentimentality can be used to add piquancy to feelings of desolation. Cf. Schnitzler's Beatrice and Her Son.

The word nostalgia can be used in ways that aren't necessarily pejorative, so I'll focus on what I'm talking about specifically. I'm not suggesting that every definition of the word applies to what I'm saying, or that what it describes should be banned from the English language.

I'm saying that romanticizing one's past can result in narratives that are driven by wish fulfillment, which can render them so dead that they share the most annoying aspects of pornography. Nostalgia-cum-wish-fulfillment (pun distended) can result in characters who say only what the writer prefers them to say instead of what changing characters mutter and shriek en route to transformation.

It's beside the point to make me the gatekeeper of your permission to feel. To view me as a kind of desiccated disciplinarian who forbids you to enjoy nostalgic reveries. No one's invalidating anyone else's happy memories. I might not choose to read about them, but that is something else.

As I writer, I'm suggesting that it can be helpful to evaluate memories of happier times mercilessly in order to reveal the complexities of (and lies behind) that happiness. There's also the question of why those memories seem happy and what it says about the arc -- or Möbius strip or Shepard's tone -- of existence:

"There is no greater pain than, in misery, to remember happy times."
-- Dante

I'm only a writer who's interested in cleaning the lens; who has always found that casting a cold eye on life, as Yeats's epitaph proclaims, is the better method. Passion will remain, as will one's emotional attachments, but the richness of discordances will be added.

Another example: Mishima's Confessions of a Mask. Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams.

I'm asking that responses to the OP address the implications for a writer of exploring nostalgia critically versus uncritically. It's an impossible but necessary task -- to peel away the black paper behind the mirror no matter how much past love might wound or transport you if only you leave the paper alone and keep staring.

If you seek validation for your feelings of nostalgia, then you have endless sources in the world to console you happily. Let Star Wars be your friend as it's never been mine.

I'm only here to point to the less-entered doorway that happens to lead to the locus of my perceptions and possibly your own.

The ideal of benign irrationality as a healing and cathartic force seems to me to be the heritage of religious groups who left Europe and came to America with a view to erasing cultural history. They obscured their sobering past beneath sheetrock painted ivory, but failed to obliterate the past's momentum in the trajectory of the culture it shaped, which fuels our national tendency toward sudden anger and violence, which rips through the surface of optimism that creates our cultural coherence (hello, Moby Dick and David Lynch; greetings, Alien and American Werewolf in London).

That kind of rage and nostalgia seem to be ends of the same snake.

Ultimately, I can't be nostalgic because I don't trust my own perceptions, and the people I write about aren't nostalgic because their lives were devastated from the beginning. That's the experience I know.

I've been looking for a poem I wrote as an adolescent but haven't been able to find it. It's bad and histrionic, but it also shows the universe I've seen from my earliest moments. It was called "The Disordered Garden" and the first lines went something like this:

"The packed mosaic peered at him:
Each grain of matter was an eye
Unfixed by drizzling paraffin
And feeding on all things that die."

There is a real sense of cultural nostalgia in the air right now, whether it's people my age raving about a dull film like Jurassic World, middle-aged men pining for the non-PC days of the 70s, or weird fiction fans praising anything Victorian or Edwardian in its aesthetic over experimental modernised efforts in urban settings with characters who talk slang.

I'm not big on nostalgia in general, which often includes removing the past of its nuance. I'm pretty firm in the belief that generally speaking if you live in a first world country, then chances are you're in the best time to be alive right now. No matter how messed up the world is at the moment, I remain a modernist because the other points in time were all worse, but nostalgia sanitises the past so much that it looks rosy. All those ghost story readers/writers pining for the cuddly frock coat Victorian era would have found the reality of being forced to work in a coal mine as a kid pretty sobering.

Sure, the music charts would have been better in the 60s, but now I can stream all that music at the touch of a button whilst also being able to experience the work of independent avant-grade artists I would never have heard of (producing art that would have been banned in other eras), using ####ing insanely futuristic technology. I see nostalgia as the root of traditionalism, which is something I'm tired of as it's a trap of the mind.

Some things are undeniably worse when it comes to being alive today, but on the whole I would rather be here right now than any other time. The more I look at history, the more I see that every single period without exception saw itself as in an age of social decline or imminent destruction. The past has always been deified and romanticised to an absurd degree.

Some of my favourite strange artists, such as Aickman or Lynch, are hugely nostalgic people whose worldviews are reactionary, so it's not like I believe nostalgia completely inhibits creativity, but personally I try to free myself of such thoughts. I am sad that particular opportunities/relationships/people are forever gone, but I don't pine for any time period culturally and aspire to engage with modernity rather than insularly chasing some inaccurate view of the past.

[scrypt]

This isn't a response to you, James (I appreciated your energetic arm-sweep across the table). It pertains to a pattern I've noticed whenever I try to penetrate the swirl of reverence that obscures a band, book, film or collective memory.

It happens when I post public thoughts about nostalgia or even a given generation's perpetually arrested fondness for Star Wars. Various people assert their permission to feel a certain way instead of focusing on the process of recollection itself:

It is possible that emotional certainties based on memories are fictive if not tentative. It is possible that we cling to associations that were meant to provide practical or strategic coherence, not ultimate meaning.

It is also possible that ultimate meaning is an expression of the imperative of instinct; that, robbed of our sense of it, we retract our limbs like spiders, withdraw into dormancy and abdicate our path.

I think attaching unwarranted significance to trivial, insignificant details bounded by arbitrary distinctions is what comes most naturally to the human brain.

[scrypt]

Amusing and apt.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Curious about more examples of bad nostalgia and sentimentality. Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis and Tolkien?

Since you mention Star Wars, is that meaning the actual story or just geek culture's crippling attachment to franchises in general? Or even public domain mythology like Cthulhu mythos?