nostalgia

I self-identify as a perpetually nostalgic person. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. I have spent the past few years living more vividly, more variously, more dramatically, in retrospect than in reality. Even before this, even when the future was still “touchable dream”, in that I spent my days looking forward to the day when life would open up, when the sun would fall into my room from a crack in the ceiling- even then, at that age to which you must obsessively return as an adult to make sense of your reality in a way that goes beyond nostalgia- even at that age I was plagued by this curious function of memory I could not quite understand.

In some ways, I might have acquired nostalgia as a learned habit. My mother talked about her past- not often, but with a strange wistfulness. I would imagine her in other lives, in other times- and instead of just asking her for a bedtime story as children are prone to do, I would ask her to talk to me about her childhood. I derived a peculiar sense of comfort from this vicarious nostalgia.

In adolescence, there was a distinct nostalgia I associated with winter. This was not the vague, or the indefinite, blurry nostalgia that the long-gone elicits. Rather, when the temperature dipped (and it does not dip much in Kolkata, but when it does it presents to us a vision of the world so novel we erupt into a holiday mood)- I would find that the last winter, or the one before that, would present itself in my memory vividly, and with an acute sense of loss. There was not much sense to this loss, as external circumstances rarely changed, and internal dispositions not significantly either. Rather, the sensory experience of winter would take me back in time, and my life would present itself as a series of winters I have inhabited and experienced, strung together by a thread.

It would seem, to a person so given to nostalgia, that the experience of everyday life should be one that is littered by the presence of many a Proustian madeleine. The curious thing is, however,that, the kind of sensory stimulus that evokes profound nostalgia, is rare. I refer here not to mere retrospection, but the kind of sensory reconstruction of the past that such stimulus evokes.

Yet nostalgia is not always reconstruction or remembrance. At times it is only an indefinite, inexplicable, emotive sensation. Can one isolate nostalgia as emotion unto itself?

In the pandemic-stricken world as we (I) inhabit it now-the past demands to be brought to focus, amidst a present that is shrinking and a future that is collapsing. Against this, I regret having lived most of my life in a way that let me furnish scant material for memory.

I remember often, with a sense of loss, but without any desire for return. This is not nostalgia. I have discovered that nostalgia, for me, when it does have an object, is centred more on emotional states I had then inhabited, rather than on situation, space and the like. I have missed people, but seldom the reality of them.

Yet, nostalgia as an emotional state, is one that impacts me so powerfully, so magnificently, that is seems to be one of the emotions shaping my experience of the world itself.

There is a certain smell- soap mixed with talcum powder, I think- that always takes me back to a water-adventure park that I had visited with my family as a child. I can remember it in some detail- if I strain my memory enough. Yet what the trigger to memory does is not bring back the swimming pool, the sun shining upon the water, the people I was with, or the bathing suit I had on, with any sense of accuracy or importance. What it takes me back to is the emotional state I inhabited at that age , at that time, on that day. It is loaded with poignancy because the majesty of the world as apprehended by one on a day off from school at the age of seven or eight, will never again return. Of late, this is what almost the entirety of my retrospective exercises has focused on- the loss of certain emotional states, the loss of modes of viewing the world that one can never go back to. It is the intervention of event that makes this impossibility insurmountable, and so my nostalgia wrestles against, not centres around, event.

Then there is phenomenon that is coded in cultural, or collective, consciousness, as nostalgic. For me, the most potent trigger of this kind is the sound of old Hindi songs. Of late, the emptiness of the streets at night, coupled with the melody of these songs drifting in from other places, other houses, combines to invoke in me a strange sense of aching longing that seems almost novel. I do not know why. I did not grow up listening to Hindi songs. Rather, they were almost taboo in our household, mostly at the behest of my father, an ardent linguistic nationalist at the service of his mother tongue. Do old Bollywood songs, then, invoke in me some sense of loss for that which I never thought of as desirable to start with? Or is the otherness they represent- they drift in from other people’s houses, and thus remind me of the existence of a world beyond the home I am confined to- that elicits in me something like nostalgia? Because it is neither the song as song, nor any sense of incomprehensibility- that fills me with that ache. It must be then, an alterity, an inaccessible otherness- of time, space, and sense- that elicits this emotional response.

Maybe nostalgia, as emotion in itself, is inseparable from despondency as a general phenomenon. And maybe it points to that which all sadness is really about- incompleteness, yes, in that we may only ever access our own life in fragments. The inaccessibility of parts of our own life- sometimes lost to us even in memory- brings us ultimately- to that which is at the heart of much sadness- the phenomenon of impossibility.

Loss speaks to irretrievability- a function, a brand, of the impossible. Yet irretrievability is not only that of the what was, but that of desire, of hope, of an expandable limit of the possible. Nostalgia is an apprehension of this shade of impossibility, as it manifests itself in the paradigm of time. Nostalgia, then, strikes at the lack that is at the root of all dissatisfaction- a consciousness of the what is not, the what could be, and the what could not be.

Why, then, is nostalgia as sweet as it is bitter, why then does nostalgia hold an odd comfort for us alongside the sadness it evokes? The answer is obvious, in that nostalgia reassures us that we have inhabited better times. This potential of other ways of being is comforting when it allows us to re-assess our lives, and with it, the human condition itself. Yet, is the comfort of the past as evoked by nostalgia hinged upon, necessarily so, by the consciousness of the future? Is any comfort we derive from recovering past modes of happiness ( a vague word, and I use it here only as example- I do not think recalling the happy is necessarily at the heart of nostalgia), really an assertion of the possibility of return? Is nostalgia about return, or its impossibility? Even if we apprehend time in an unwavering linearity, however, nostalgia is a reminder of alternate ways of apprehending, and inhabiting the universe, than is presented to us by our present. What use, then does nostalgia hold in a world where the future seems increasingly tenuous?

We are, of course, not nostalgic for its utilitarian value. Yet, in the regular world, every emotion would fit into our scheme of things in some specific, implicit, imperceptible way. Now, even in the face of this all-engulfing (and dreary) present, I am confronted with visions of the future as I am with that of the past. What does one do with the functions of time, laden with their usual implications of loss, or hope, or despair, at a time like this, when the present itself stretches itself out before you as manifestation of loss?

hostage to history

Everything we write, Adrienne Rich reminds us in North American Time, can and will be used against us. Or against those we love. Poetry, after all, she goes on to say, never did stand a chance of standing outside history.

This is true not only of poetry, but of all that poetry entails. Language, for one. And love. Of human, of animal, of tree or cloud or flower, of God. Love and language and prayer all serve to implicate us. Or maybe not, maybe they are a call for the need of an extrication we can never fully achieve.

For a moment, I thought we stood out of history. Silly, because is it not the schism between man and woman with which history itself begins? All that makes love possible, and impossible, is a history of this. Of men splitting themselves open.

The love of the crucified God is the love of the mother, the love of all origin. There can be no way to use language, or love, or prayer, that does not go back to this origin. Even when it is about hitting at the roots.

And this will be used against you. The splitting of life that all life has root in. There is no way to go back to inhabiting flesh and skin and bone the way you did before, after this knowledge. There is no way to inhabit language the way you did before, now.

Language has its meaning in splitting itself open. This is what word, the blessed word, the Word- must do. Split itself apart from its own foundation. Poetry is never innocent because neither love nor language is.

Would there be poetry in innocence? For Darwish, one could reconcile oneself to the loss of Eden by the awareness that it is our lapsed state that makes poetry possible. If history is one long exile, at least we have language. Even in the absence of a history that cannot collapse into one moment at the foot of the Cross, even without word made flesh, language allows the articulation of the felix culpa. It is what absolves the sin of itself.

If poetry is enabled by that which is a peculiarly lapsed condition- the disparity between what seems and what is, then Satan was the first poet. Stephen Gosse would have liked to hear this, but consider what the Satanic invention does to worship. Or maybe there was poetry before, in the pre-lapserian realm, verses we cannot now access. How did we pray, in the Garden of Eden?

I like to think that, if we could have carved out a winter’s, or an autumn’s evening out for ourselves outside this noose of history, we could have carved out with it an Eden peopled with flowers the exact shade of our exiles. If we could have had that, I would have written of you. In its absence, I refuse to subject you to a language that sits ready to turn itself inside out against you at any moment.

on recording transience

I read somewhere- somewhere on the Internet once- that we photograph the things we fear losing. I usually treat everything- especially every supposedly profound observation I come across on the Internet, with a healthy amount of disdain. I don’t know why that quote stuck with me.

I thought about what I photograph. This was before I had dogs. If you had scrolled through my camera roll then, you would have mostly found trees, and clouds, and flowers…things like that. Sometimes taken in the university campus- the lovely, sprawling space- sometimes taken on the way home. I feared, according to the rationale of that Internet post, losing the world. Losing the world as I knew it, at the very least.

This was not illogical or surprising. We were the generation that grew up under the constant threat of climate change. We saw photos of melting ice and displaced polar bears in our school textbooks and on our computer screens. We retreated to our rooms in the scorching summer days and guiltily switched on our ACs, thus making things worse in the process. Our mothers and our fathers talked about how the summers had never been quite this insufferable when they were children. How it used to get cold in the autumn and they would wear their warm clothes outside, sometimes, when they went out to light fireworks and burst crackers for Kali Pujo. The memory of loss coloured our parents’ childhood with a mild sepia tint, but for our grandparents, it was dust that lay thick on the rare black-and-white photo that had survived from their childhood. My grandmother talked of loss, as she picked me up from school, and we drove back home through a pleasant Bengal monsoon. To her, the rain in Kolkata was never as sweet as the rain she had known in Dhaka at eight, and never again. When I looked out, and I saw the trees, and the clouds, I loved the land I was in. Hard to believe, really, that this could be only a site of exile for somebody who lived here for decades, for all their adult and adolescent life. But this awareness of loss, then. This acuteness of the potential of loss. Sometimes individual, sometimes communitarian, sometimes universal. I might lose the landscapes I knew and loved and photographed because I would have to move away, some day- but did everybody not have to leave this accursed city, if they wanted to make something of themselves? Or maybe, we would all find our houses sunk, someday, as the water levels rose, or maybe the world would simply go up in smoke. Till then, everything beautiful would have to be plucked out and affixed in memory. We do not know if we can find a way to make our memories survive us, but we must try.

Since I turned eighteen, or nineteen, everything I have written turned out to be about time. About the awareness of temporality, of transience, of living anyway, in the face of this terrible knowledge. I used to place twelve as the year it all went downhill. I used to think of adolescence alone. In retrospect, I remember that was the year my grandfather died. It was the first time I lost a loved one. Nothing was ever the same once life had been touched by grief,  once the fact of mortality had imprinted itself upon my consciousness.

Since then, I have lived life with the awareness of the precarity of every moment. Yet, I did not realise the length and breadth of the horror of this realisation till I found new things to love. Adulthood robs you of much, but it fills you with the potential of new, wonderful ways to love. To find that, and to be infused with the sense of loss, from the very beginning, is excruciating. It is also the terrible curse humans are condemned to live with. As I write, I look at my dogs, and I dread a future where things are not exactly the way they are now, at this moment. My dogs are not bothered by this thought. They look out at the street beneath earnestly from the balcony, then they stretch out and nod off to sleep. Maybe I will take a photograph of them on my phone.

lockdown #2

It rains as I write this, Agha Shahid Ali once almost concluded a poem with.

It does not rain now, exactly. There is an odd rumbling of the clouds, there is a gentle breeze blowing outside, and there are birds chirping. I am at my desk.This does not seem like the setting for a dystopian text. There are people out there who are living out the dystopia now, but I am not one of them.

The potentially Edenic setting is disrupted by a parent who will barge into the room, often for no apparent reason now and then (no parents really in the Garden of Eden, parenthood as a peculiarly lapserian phenomenon too?), and there is a faint rotting smell outside that has made me slide the windows shut. Maybe a rat left to die somewhere but we can’t see it. Rats now, more of a motif for a plague novel.

A phenomenon I miss from normal times: the evening walk/run. Infinitely preferable to a treadmill at the gym. Anyway, it is these birds chirping that brought those walks to mind. Thinking of the trees outside where the lane I walk through is about to meet the main road- and there, at sunset, what majesty- I would always think of lines from G.M. Hopkins poems when I was there.

I miss the world outside in the way you would love a potential love. We could have had it all- I could have had it, always, and forever, but instead I got a stolen moment or two when it was all magical and good. And I would be left wondering- what if I had it for good, what if my life as I had known it had always been this beauty and that freedom? What if, walking through the streets of Jodhpur Park one evening, when winter was drawing to the gentlest of endings, I would not have had to be acutely aware of how rare and transient this moment was? Did that awarenesss enrich, or detract from the beauty of the moment? To love potential is to always love memory- memory in a curious, fragemented, collaged sense. All I have by way of comfort is the awareness of the inevitability of the end. When I loved the world, I always did so with the awareness of loss, of a lack of enough (on my part, not the world’s). Curiously, there is little regret as my world shrinks to the confinement of home, the street and the pond outside, and the rooftop terrace at sunset. I have had what I was supposed to, what I could, and even here, even now, there is much.

lockdown post #1: life update

I am back. Reading my old blog posts made me want to do such a thing as non-academic writing again. Amidst the pandemic induced lockdown we are currently in, my old posts felt amusing to read. First, because I have always written so much about nostalgia and about time, and seen the future as little more than a site of prospective nostalgia for the present. Under the domain of time, the present has been the site that interested me the least. In the past few years, it had been crammed with the sense of inadequacy, claustrophobia and the like…the present was always a lack. Now, living in a time that makes the future seem scarcely real and definitely conditional, and the past curiously distant, as if it belonged to another life time, there is nothing but the present. Yet, these sensations- of stagnation and of inadequacy, do not characterise my experience of the present now. This began before the lock down did- postgraduate life has felt far less stilted, far less suffocating and caught in a time warp than life did in my undergraduate days. These past few months have been challenging in many ways but developments- from my unexpected transition to dog person on the personal front, and finding areas that finally stimulated my interest and made me want to read, write, learn, on the academic front, had made life a lot less unbearable. There have been, and there continue to be, moments of crisis, but they do not engulf me always, and on the whole, the not-quite two years of postgrad have been far better, far fuller, than three years of undergrad. There has, however, been a disadvantage- in the absence of grand emotional drama, I seem to have lost any ability to write poetry/ write poetically. My constant self-surveillance and self-censoring of my own affect  will not let me write poetry, it will instead force me to read my minor heartbreaks as a text to be analysed through the harsh lens of feminist theory. But if my life is a text, I am worst suited to analyse it, instead the effort presents a thousand conundrums to keep me up at night. What I need to let go is this need to understand. There are things that should be relegated away from the field of comprehensibility. I miss living uncritically, but look where that got me. Living is a little bizarre now, but my mind refuses to register that. It is only in remembering the past- not so much consciously as through dreams and involuntary flashbacks, that I register the disparity between what was and what is. What is scariest, for me, is registering the unknowability of the what will be.  My mind refuses to be in the moment- relinquishing any interest in pandemic literature, past or present, for idyllic Victorian novels. This is the literature student’s version of seeking escapism in the cottagecore aesthetic that seems to be everywhere lately. I will, eventually, try to write, really write about the present.

P.S.  After writing this, I was aghast at how cold and mechanical my words have become now. Never again, perhaps, will I write the way I did at eighteen or at nineteen, never again that peculiar experience of the world, as you see it when it first opens itself up to you just a tiny bit, after a horribly sheltered adolescence, never again, that ice cream truck parked outside campus at summer, never again that that autumnal dusk, never again quite tbat shock of blood red krishnachura against the bright blue April sky. Everything quieter now, at twenty three, everything duller, even beauty seen and not seen and fretted over. The death of the imagination that worried the Romantics, that worried Sylvia Plath and who knows how many more? My writing has changed because my way of looking at the world has changed, and one cannot be that young and that trembling-vulnerable forever, only perhaps in fits and starts that leave you recoiling at last night’s self in the morning. But so what?

 

There are days when I’m startled by all the overwhelming beauty of this world. Other days, I am taken aback at its cruelty. I read a poem today. It was about a two-headed calf-

“tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass, And

as he stares into the sky, there are

twice as many stars as usual.”

Laura Gilpin. I read this poem and my heart would not stop hurting.

There are times when the world seems a cruel joke. Life being put on earth to die. And unbearably, little lives. Children and tiny animals and tiny animal children. I remember one year when a neighbourhood dog had pups and someone killed them all. These two little pups who we look after, now. They were part of a large litter, and they were the only two who survived, and at least thrice I feared having lost them for good. At least once, by the conscious effort of men.

The very fact that we, each of us, in ourselves, hold a capacity for unfathomable, unspeakable cruelty. To live with the burden of being human. To need to kill, some way or the other. And yet, I cannot be impeccable.

I took years off writing and I spent it trying to figure out how to think right, to be right. There is no radically corrective scope for redemption. To live, with inconstancy and imperfection. But how much imperfection is just that, just a matter of fact of life, and not more- not an engulfing discrediting of life itself?

 

We were so convinced of our own immortality before. So convinced that we, and our youth, are here to stay. That we would always be eighteen and it would always be the first flush of college life and it would always be raining just like that- the sky majestically darkened, us majestically drenched but always certain there would always be shelter, nearby, when we needed it. If we needed it.
That it would always be late fall melting into a reluctant winter as it can only in Kolkata…we would always be walking through the weary grey footpath against the premature dusk in search of someone or something to get us home. That we would always be gathering our blankets together in bed, safe in our hiding places as we watched the window panes frost over.
I think it took me a year more to realise it wouldn’t always be like this. I wouldn’t always have that warm December afternoon and a burn in my throat keeping me company while I watched the sun go down. That I wouldn’t always have this summer, stretching over our heads the brightest blue sky even as it dazzled us. That this is morning, and twilight and past midnight all together and that from now, it will always be like this. That we would get used to this, and then we would get used to the not this. That there is beauty, and majesty, and immense signifance in the temporal, that its temporality does not take away any of the beauty, or the majesty or the monumentality. Knowing this, and being at peace with this- this, is all the grey twenty gives us. This is all the magic twenty brings us.

I was terrified of temporality at eighteen. We had spent all our lives being immortal till then. We would live forever and be young forever and love forever. What were these possibilities of punctuated happiness…I had rather not be happy at all. And yet nobody really gives up on happiness at eighteen, so I watched a lot of movies with happy endings and played Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles on repeat. This would be me, someday, I would think, there will just be a long cold lonely winter to brave, some time in the future. After that, the smiles will return to the faces.
At twenty you understand temporality without grasping it, without making peace with it. And The Beatles will still play…little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter…this too, temporal and afterwards, here comes the sun. When the sun comes, it will scorch us all, and right here is that mythical winter so rare in Kolkata. Long, cold, lonely winters, and finally you will learn to shrug off the terrible shivering chill of time rushing past you-irretrievably, unrelentingly. Meeting this unshaking cruelty of time- it is impossible to make things stay. Little darling, the smiles returning to our faces…

I remember the last autumn like it was part dream part nightmare. I wore dresses like I had not worn before and I did things I had not before. Bright red lipstick, heels, smoke and alcohol. A perfect cliche, but nobody got too close and I came home to read poems that made me think of you and cry.

This fall I find myself reading a poet I have not in long. I find myself thinking not about you. I find myself thinking about the girl who loved you and I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

That is all.

A Promo!!!

To see my very pretty photos from a day or two by the sea, head over to calcuttacallings.tumblr.com