Nostalgia (Part Three)

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The understanding of nostalgia has changed since the dark days of incarceration or forced interment into a concept that is enjoyed and has been commoditised and monetised. Where one’s eyes may glaze over on seeing, say, a cherished childhood toy in a charity shop, nostalgia is now big business. Boym notes that: ‘Nostalgia too easily mates with banality, functioning not through stimulation, but by covering up the pain of loss to give a specific form to homesickness and make ‘homecoming’ available on request. ‘

Nostalgic potential is cynically built-in to products, often in the form of ‘limited editions,’ of magazines, books, toys, records, etc. A second edition, almost imperceptibly altered version rapidly follows, ensuring sales for those who longed for the original. Instant Nostalgia has become a strong consumer force, and nostalgia really is not what it used to be.

As an example of instant commercially based nostalgia, I remember going to the Leadmill, a nightclub in Sheffield and a regular haunt, on the first weekend of 1990. I was horrified to see a poster for an ‘eighties revival’ night. The 1980s had become a marketable commodity mere seconds after they had ended. Even more confusing was that the majority of the songs played that evening, a non-1980s revival night, were, by virtue of so little time having passed between 1989 and 1990, of the 1980s. This is far, far from homesickness and Boym’s suggestion of the mating between nostalgia and banality seems uncomfortably accurate. (Boym, 2002) To be actively nostalgic, to live nostalgia as a lifestyle choice, smacks of crass commercialism or worse, the pseudo-ironic affectation of hipsterism or the steam-punk genre.

It occurs to me that nostalgia, in its modern form, has embraced and incorporated temporal dislocation into its orbit alongside the more usually physical and locational aspects. Nostalgia now suggests an attempt to return to a time before nostalgia, a return to a carefree childhood; for a time that is devoid of nostalgia. Nostalgia, therefore, arrives at the transition between carefree and careworn, a kind of emotional puberty. As such, far from being a disease in and of itself, it is a natural state of being, an indicator of becoming an adult, and a regret at letting go of childhood. 

This is a situation that is, alas, irreconcilable. The carefree past can never be reached, even if surrounded by toys, games and objects from the past. Whatever level of effort you put into recreating a situation, an object, or space, it will only ever be a false ‘then of now’ and never the desired ‘then of then.’

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What is it, then, that drives nostalgia? Is it just the slow acquisition of responsibility that ageing brings or something more fundamental? Alvin Toffler believed that ‘the acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. The accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences.’ In 1965 he proposed his concept of ‘Future Shock’ in an article in ‘Horizon’ magazine. He later expanded on this idea in his later book, also entitled ‘Future Shock’, five years later. He defines Future Shock as ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time. ‘ (Toffler, 1970)

It is a fascinating idea that has more relevance now than in 1970. Technological advances bombard us with alarming frequency, not allowing us time to process the present before the future, once again making the present obsolete. We are in a constant state of ‘resetting’, and where, for example, household items would become cosily familiar over a number of years, built-in obsolescence and constant upgrading do not allow us the same sense of familiarity. 

Media formats, for example, change and are usurped regularly. I grew up when vinyl was the most advanced form of musical reproduction; cassette tapes were almost on equal footing. After seventy years as the only available formats, CDs, DVDA, DAT, Minidisc, Audio-Optic, SACD, HDAD, MP3, and streaming services have all arrived, and many of them have already been rendered obsolete.

Although CDs have had some longevity and MP3s and streaming services seem likely to be around for a while, the other listed formats have come and gone in a period of around 20 years. Even methods of reproduction have changed from hi-fi separates to personal stereos and then as one among many functions on smartphones, and speakers have changed to headphones, first wired and then wireless. The technology, research and implementation are to be applauded, but the psychological and sociological changes caused by such rapid changes and the inability to ‘keep up’ is a genuine worry.

Toffler, perhaps overstating it, says, ‘The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us – the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions – can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock. ‘

While human evolution may have given us a nervous system that can cope with an upper level of stimulation, it did so over thousands of years. The rate of growth of available stimulants is increasing faster than evolution can facilitate the adaptations needed to survive them. We are, as Toffler puts it, ‘racing the engines of change’ and fighting a losing battle. He continues ‘Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the mind and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. ‘

Fisher further illustrates this idea by noting that ‘smartphones and cyberspace don’t speed up culture so much as overload the human nervous system with unimaginable quantities of stimuli.’ (Fisher, K-Punk: the Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher, 2018)

It is sobering to think that great discoveries and the leaps of intelligence exhibited by humanity are the very things that would cause its downfall, although biblically, this is no surprise at all. As Proverbs 16:18 says, ‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. ‘

Toffler indicates, in his list of societal ills, that outbreaks of nostalgia are a consequence of Future Shock. In finding the prospect of a future that you are unable to keep up with and that is physically and mentally harmful, where would one retreat but the past?

It is certainly true that in the last 30 years, the innovations of the internet and mobile communications devices have changed the very nature of everyday experience. Navigating the idea of culture has become an exercise in navigating obsolescence. With technology and invention’s constant race to a better future, it is forgetting the present and instead giving us the past , repackaged and pretending that it is something shiny and new. The primary function of the internet, once pregnant with the promise of a new age of communication, enlightenment and community, has become a repository of the past, an archive, a cenotaph, and a hall of remembrance for the human species.

Tanner tells us that ‘we measure time as moving from the past to the future, and for the present to become the past, it must get reconfigured in another dimension, of sorts, one we cannot access but with memory. So many things await us in that other dimension, out of the present’s view. Remembering gives us the feeling that we can control the nature of time, when in reality we cannot. Of course, things are always slipping out of that other dimension and percolating into ours all the time, but that does not mean we can just enter the alternate dimension of the past when we want to. Reminiscing allows us to get pretty close, but the yearning feeling that comes with being unable to leave this dimension and cross over into the past is called nostalgia.’ (Tanner, 2021)

The tragedy of this is that by the nature of biology, we can never view the present as it happens. The delay between perception and the sensory information reaching the brain to be translated means that we are always viewing the past. Milliseconds may have passed between these two events, but the ‘present’ remains imperceptibly in the past. We are in a state of remembering a present that no longer exists. By accident of evolution, our sensory apparatus demands that the present has already evaporated and is resident in Tanner’s proposed temporal dimension.

With nostalgia now being locational, temporal, object-led, and moment-led rather than a melancholic feeling of loss for home, nostalgia appears to be a natural state of being. It exists in mundane moments as well as in extraordinary events; in the lived, the manufactured, and temporal. There are few times when nostalgia is not an issue, and even some experiences that appeared to be terrible at the time are, when revisited, softened by the passage of time. Perhaps, then, nostalgia offers a path to the future by reconciling the past. Rather than clogging forward motion, rather than confounding the path of Time’s Arrow, it clears the trajectory, allowing for a smoother journey, a positive disruption.

With nostalgia existing as a replication of the past and as a gateway to the future, is nostalgia a liminal manifestation of Time’s Arrow? Are we all avatars of Janus?

Sartre comments that Descartes’ comment ‘I think; therefore, I am’ should be expressed as ‘I think; therefore, I was.’ (Sartre J.-P. , Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, 1984) It’s a comment that validates the idea that one can never live in the present by virtue of biology. Although Sartre used the term to express that thought can only occur due to past events, the temporal difference between observation and reception makes ‘the now’ exist in the past – or Tanner’s extra dimension.

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Despite a lack of religion, I find religious texts and the idea of faith fascinating, hence the biblical references and allusions to other religions. I once saw Matthew Fox, an excommunicated Catholic priest and author of ‘Creation Spirituality,’ speak at an interfaith conference. His comment that ‘there is an underground river of knowledge, and we all tap in at different wells’ met with rapturous applause and resonated with me strongly. Removing the religious subtext, it offers an illustration of hauntology – all that occurs is truth; all that we perceive is ours; all that we miss haunts; missed truths appear from the mouths of others further along the water course, providing the basis for learning and haunting. Borges speaks similarly, ‘Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river.’ (Borges, 2000) To me, this is a fair assessment of individuality and of the essential loneliness of living, ending with the return to the source, on death, on reaching the ocean. Perhaps this is why I am obsessed with the sea. Not as a wish to die but to experience the oneness of our rivers. This would seem to indicate that I have a belief in an afterlife. I do not, but as an idea, it offers comfort in the face of death.

My own experiences of nostalgia and, I suspect, the experiences of most people, are confused and confusing. As seen throughout this exploration, the nature of nostalgia is to confound, confuse and cure. Lacking the framework of ‘normal’ that is, non-agoraphobic life, serves only to complicate things more. Remembering place, time and object may elicit feelings of nostalgia one day but then be merely a mundane memory the next.

Clay Routledge (Routledge, 2015) proposes an experiment in which you compare and contrast an ‘ordinary’ memory with a ‘nostalgic’ memory. This is much more difficult than it appears. Ordinary memory becomes an almost Proustian moment of involuntary, intense, long-lasting remembering. That ordinary moment ultimately led to this work.

Routledge’s experiment aims to understand nostalgia by quantifying and standardising it in order to predict behaviours. This is missing the point and function of nostalgia. With each person having different value systems, frames of reference, and outlooks and experiences, nostalgia remains almost impossible to pin down to a ‘standard’ behaviour. I wondered what I would have done had I taken part in these experiments.

I chose a memory to play along with Routledge’s experiment. In it, I was three years old and sitting on the buff tiled kitchen floor in our RAF-owned house in Bedale, North Yorkshire. This led to remembering listening to the Jimmy Young show on Radio Two, a constant presence; being enthralled by ‘Raymondo,’ Young’s chipmunk-like sidekick for the cookery section of his show whose jolly call of ‘What’s the recipe today, Jim’ was undoubtedly one of the reason’s I later trained as a chef. I have traced and bought a copy of the first ‘Jimmy Young Cookbook’ that features a slew of recipes sent into the show. What had thrilled me as a child appalled me as an adult and led, as I processed the disconnect between past and present, to melancholy.

Most of the recipes contained within the book are inedible to the modern palate and recipes that seemed exotic when broadcast are breath-takingly mundane with the passage of time. From my kitchen floor vantage point, I heard ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys for the first time and therefore the event related in ‘Martin.’ (Below)

The mundane memory above became much richer and more personally affecting than the so-called nostalgic event. So indistinguishable, it makes one wonder if ‘nostalgia’ is merely a memory that is needed at a given time; whether the function of nostalgia is to ease the present from the past; whether these memories are a kind of personal shorthand or metaphor for what is happening in contemporary life?

Tanner tells us that ‘we measure time as moving from the past to the future, and for the present to become the past, it must get reconfigured in another dimension, of sorts, one we cannot access but with memory. So many things await us in that other dimension, out of the present’s view. Remembering gives us the feeling that we can control the nature of time, when in reality we cannot.

Of course, things are always slipping out of that other dimension and percolating into ours all the time, but that does not mean we can just enter the alternate dimension of the past when we want to. Reminiscing allows us to get pretty close, but the yearning feeling that comes with being unable to leave this dimension and cross over into the past is called nostalgia.’ (Tanner, 2021)

MARTIN
 
Martin came by to babysit.        
I was three                               and had heard
               Good Vibrations 
by the Beach Boys     
                    on the radio that morning
 
                          for the very first time.     
 
I asked my Mum what 
the WHEEOO noise was. 
She said she didn’t know 
and thought 
              I didn’t like it.
 
                So she switched 
the radio off            
and got                  a tantrum 
 
in return.
    
I told Martin                       about the song  
     and demonstrated 
the noise              that had thrilled me.
 
I’m sure I thought 
I was being sophisticated 
but maybe 
the flannelette 
pyjamas and arms 
flapping as I WHEEOOED
                
 
around my bedroom       told 
 
a different story. 
 
Martin pulled                                    the books 
  from his bag 
 
and tried to read 
for an essay.
 
   
   I didn’t know what           that was         
or where it lived or why
          it wanted to be read to.
 
              With patience 
              and a smile 
              I still remember 
- it being the only 
part of his face 
that could be seen 
through his 
 
                                                Michael Bentine
                                                hippy do 
 
- Martin explained 
 
school work 
and my three year old
self declared 
that when                           I grew up 
 
I wanted to write
 ee-says
                                                                for a living, 
 
the mispronunciation making him chortle,     
                                  lank hair
                                              quivering,
 
                              threatening to part 
and reveal
         
his unseen eyes.