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.