Notes on time and versions of nostalgia

In a story I recently published, this happened to the two main characters:

As the town receded from their field of vision, the nostalgia kicked in. Alma and Milan let their gazes wander outside the window. The weight of separation from their ancestral home crushed their chests and made them feel dizzy, almost weightless. They held hands.

The nostalgia kicking in at the moment of leaving their home surprised me, so I knew it was something very much alive that had just poured out of me. And now something else is pouring out of me: this meandering reflection on nostalgia, time, and how we’re all copies.

Listen: I’m 41 years old now, and I’m seven years old, one month shy of eight, now. I’m not trying to perform some semantic trickery. I believe time isn’t what we normally think it is. That’s a metaphysical statement. I forgive myself for making a metaphysical statement, because we all make metaphysical statements (even the statement “I don’t believe there’s an ultimate reality” is a pretty definite statement about ultimate reality).

It’s a day in May, 1992, in Rudo. I’m sitting in our one-bedroom apartment watching an Asterix & Obelix movie with my brother. My mother and father are nervously walking around the living room. All of a sudden, I hear one gunshot outside. Then I hear a rapid series. Then it’s quiet. Everything is suspended and everything keeps going in the deep hum of the quiet, the calm before the storm.

I look up at my parents’ faces. I didn’t look at my parents that way when I was seven, yet I must have been looking at them this way when I was seven, for how else can I be looking at them this way now when I’m 41?

I think me at 41 is me at seven, connected through some invisible DNA-like tube, or something.

I think we live across what we call past, present, and future, with far less separation than we assume.

What we call memory, reflection, judgment, smell, touch, sound, stories, and so on, are different doorways through which we can enter these times within a single breath, well maybe a few. I can write about 10 minutes or 10,000 years of happenings on two pages, and it’ll be real, because it poured out of me, and when it pours out there’s no limits to quantity, no iron law of time limiting whatever pours out.

I think time is life breathing, and all that’s implied in breathing. I think time is an ocean. Oceans breathe. Oceans crush. Oceans carry. Oceans evaporate. Oceans are dangerous. Oceans are beautiful. Oceans are alive. Oceans make you feel dizzy. Oceans are many and one. And so on.

I’m constantly dipping or plunging into what I call my past. To me it feels like this: in my present I’m floating on an ocean, and when I dip my feet or plunge my hand or my whole body into the water I’m plunging into what I call my past. Stuff looks and feels different under water, even the stuff I take with me from above the surface. I feel different.

And then there are times I come across a frozen surface, icebergs, because for some reason my past is just frozen at that moment, but it’s still there to be encountered. What’s liquid freezes, and what’s frozen melts.

Water is a powerful symbol, and so much more than a symbol.

Everything about my parents is displaced in that moment when the apartment goes quiet after we hear the shots. Everything looks different to them, which makes them look different. Their reality’s completely submerged under water, or maybe frozen in an ice-age. If they’re anything like Alma and Milan, they feel crushed by the weight of it all collapsing, and so nothing in particular—any object could take on the weight of the whole. Funny how that works.

I’m supposed to go to school tomorrow, but tomorrow’s already a ruin, but just yesterday it wasn’t. Tomorrow looks and feels like something different now, it entails different possibilities, it’s a dead-end, it demands life-and-death choice among these possibilities, this dead-end.

There’s an uncanny distance and intimacy to everything, because there aren’t any hard separations.

Rudo has knife-sharp edges, though. Because it has edges, people are all crumpled up on themselves, like scared little hedgehogs or scared little turtles. Some will stay hiding in there, waiting for it to go away. Others will go.

There’s an eery unfamiliarity and intimacy to all the sweet things of my home, my town, to everything and everyone I love so deeply like a child. The TV is still on. Obelix is slapping the shit out of some Roman centurions.

Now I feel like writing this:

Nostalgia is the sensation of longing that happens when a whole social order, the experienced quality of one’s surroundings, which one assumes disappears imperceptibly across many decades or centuries of change, crashes down violently in one or a few perceptible moments (and you may come to think: shit, it really was like a stage, an infinitely precious play, infinitely precious precisely because it was so finite, immersing you wholly). The moment of loss of the surrounding is simultaneous with the surrounding still existing and the sentiments attached to the objects in the surrounding, and the taken-for-granted future existence of those objects. So, one longs for something that’s both there and not there, something that’s past, present, and future all at once. The structure of nostalgia is set. This is why the object of nostalgia always feels uncannily intimate and uncannily distant at the same time. This is why theater and cinema are fundamentally nostalgic.

I kind of rebuilt my self in my new country, because that’s a favored integration metaphor for people like me. I “rebuilt” something “unique,” “resilient,” “successful,” “integrated,” or something along those lines. I lied to myself, and others, that I was doing that, of course. It was a pretty good performance, if I may say so myself. (Of course, today, those kinds of performances are seen as fake, subterfuge, lies. Today, it’s more like: how about you go fuck yourself and go back home. And I go: uhm, home?)

A version of nostalgia found fertile ground here, a version which leans toward the claustrophobic. Nostalgia here said: what once was can never be again, but you can look at it with longing, with sadness, with pride, with desire, the way you’d look at a ruin from a bygone area, or a museum exhibition, or a captive zoo animal, through impenetrable safety glass in a small, pathetic, room.

But nostalgia doesn’t have to be this way. It can be expansive too.

Like a breath, like the ocean, it contracts the soul and it expands it.

The critique of nostalgia should consider many variations with kind ruthlessness.

In expansive nostalgia you don’t encase the ruins. You wander among the ruins and wastelands of your life, and you realize they’re still livable, still inhabited by you. Maybe it’s a way to keep death close, and life closer, or maybe the other way around.

One of the insights of idealism, one still worth pondering, is that our obsession with uniqueness, origins, singular truths, authenticity, singularity, individuality, profound meanings, is, when believed to be the only truth, a harmful mirage, a kind of metaphysical separatism. It literally has animals in cages suffering for no good reason. I don’t see enjoyment as a good reason here, I see it as perverse. I don’t see any education or wisdom here, I see a display of how good we are at torturing and manipulating the earth and non-human beings.

Museums and, especially, zoos, are some kind of evil if you ask me. Here humans have perfected the art of the sovereign ego, the lie of authenticity, of the supremacy of the human fancying itself the purveyor of origins, originality, uniqueness, truth.

This obsession makes museum pieces, zoo animals, of us too.

One scholar wrote something that resonates: “Idealism is a check on the ego’s pretension of being original: it teaches the irrepressible joy of being a copy.”

You may object and say: a zoo is a copy of an animal habitat. I don’t think so. A zoo pretends it’s recreating the real surrounding of that animal’s life, “as far as possible,” “as best as we can,” as so on. Had it been a copy in the sense I’m using this term, humans would simply seek to emulate something of the animal’s life or being into their own life, and live alongside, with, the animal. Separation would exist or not or in part, but it wouldn’t be as harmful, because it wouldn’t entail cages and such.

I read somewhere if we broke down the hard barriers between cities and “nature,” we’d have such a resilient and earth-friendly way of living. We and our structures would kind of blend in, mix, with forests, farmland, marshes, deserts, and so on, but still retain some distinction. Of course that goes for things we call race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion too.

Listen: DNA copies itself. I learned to write by copying A, a, B, b, C, c… from a teacher writing A, a, B, b…. on the blackboard. I learned to speak by sounding mama after mama sounded “mama.” I smile when I see that the shape of my child’s hands copies the shape of my hands. I smile when I see how our breath copies the breath of the atmosphere. I’m in awe when I see how our lungs copy the pattern of a leaf’s arteries. I’ll copy a song for you and you’ll tell me it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.

Listen: DNA doesn’t take a little part of itself and sections it off somewhere else and says it’s sacred and untouchable. I didn’t learn to write by putting A, b, and F on a paper, locking it behind a glass case, and then looking at it. I’m not in awe when I see how the pattern of a leaf’s arteries is rendered in isolation by some plastic model at an exhibition. I’ll copy a song for you and you won’t tell me it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard, because you insist that only authentic sound is worthwhile listening too, and you’ll say that authentic sound is precious, like a valuable piece of ancient clothing in the museum, a rare species cared for in safety at the zoo…