Nostalgia (Part 2): Domination & Disappearance

Photo by Jaroslav Devia on Unsplash

 In last week’s post, we looked at how our living in one city is haunted by the memory of another. However, what I did not focus on was the character of the memories themselves, and the impact that such memories have on the moral life.

To start, allow me to make this suggestion: our moral lives have a lot to do with how we deal with disappearance.

When we think about it, our lives are but an ever-growing deposit of memories, as our lives over time become an every-growing catalogue of disappearances. At a biological level, there are parts of our person that fall away and disappear all the time, like skin cells. At a sociological level, there will be events, ages, places, people and even parts of ourselves - patterns of thought, living and stations in life - that will disappear from our lives all the time.

More often than not, these pass without us giving a second thought.

However, what leads to the kind of nostalgia I have been covering is when some disappearances resonate deeply, such that our awareness of these disappearances are felt more intensely and last for longer durations. What is more, we seek to reverse this disappearances, and make that which has disappeared come back to where we are now.

More accurately, however, what happens in nostalgia is that we hit our mental replay button and find ourselves back in those places, with those people, and living that age. This relocation is often coupled with a sense of loss. This loss is felt most acutely when we slide from the memory to the present. At the heart of this loss is the sneaking suspicion that in little snippet tucked away in our memory banks, life was bliss.

Such a sense of happiness gone past is captured splendidly in the credits for the 1980s children’s series The Wind in the Willows. Aching nostalgia is explicitly invoked as a unifying theme, with the accompanying sense of exile when sundered from these memories.

In the intro to the show, the vocalist plays an unknown voice that calls out for us to follow to another idyllic world, with mountains, valleys and seas.

The outro, on the other hand, exposes the tragedy of this idyllic world: It does not exist. In that part, the vocalist implores an anonymous friend to spin a dreamworld, only it knows that the people are ghosts from the past, and the places are from stories that have never been told.

I am rather fond of this fragment from my childhood, and find myself revisiting it often. My fondness of a blissful time gone past is an inescapable part of my human condition, since the past is the only part of life that is rich in materials which our minds and our bodies can engage. In the present, we are only faced with an openness, while the future bears nothing real to which the mind and body can grasp. For that very reason, I found myself wondering how much of the happiness from my memories comes from the fact that I am able to control them.

Think of the way that we accentuate some parts of a memory more than others, or manicure it to suit our moods and desires. Think also of the satisfaction that within the confines of that memory, there are no disruptions save for life itself. It would seem, moreover, that what we very often seek in the memory after the event does not square up with the event itself before it became a piece of data to recall. In my nostalgia, I end up distorting the memory as I try to control the event to suit my own preferences.

Even in something as innocent as a bit of nostalgia, there lurks behind it what Augustine called the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate and control. While my nostalgia is an inescapable part of the human condition, that human condition is also tainted by sin which, as mentioned in a previous post, leads to the creation of simulations of reality, including simulations of our memories.

In this time of lockdown, and as we conjure up the memories of a time “Pre-COVID”, we are presented with an opportunity to relinquish control over our memories, and thus relinquish the simulated home of our fantasies. This time can be the beginning of our transition from the false home of our distorted memory, subject to our controlling gaze, to the true home of our being subject to the gaze of God.

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