Memory used for nostalgia
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Nostalgia but not as you know it
[5 minute read ]
Nostalgia, the preserve of old persons, and I suppose preservation is what nostalgia is. The preservation of a number of judiciously selected memories carefully and seamlessly stitched together, just the same way we join up episodes in an overnight dream.
'...and then I was falling off a cliff but a lion reached its paw out and grabbed me before I hit the ground...but it was okay because he was also running away from the rabbit swinging a tree branch at us, demanding more ice-cream.'
Well, that isn't nostalgia but in a dream it all makes sense to the person who dreamt it and some highly-paid charlatans who pretend to know what it all means. Nostalgia is, however, certainly made up of a collection of pieces of information, either real memories or snippets of information from a past that a person has a longing for We might include 'saudade', the Portuguese word for longing for something we feel we have lost but had never attained here. At least, that is how I read it to be. Confused? Nostalgic for the past? Nostalgic for the Victorian days or the 1950s or some time that the individual never existed in? We might be not understanding this unless the highly paid charlatan pipes up with, 'The rabbit is you from a previous life chasing the greed of today from a position of poverty, which is why the rabbit is shoe-less and carries only a branch and not a key!'
This, so far is meant to be somewhat non-sensical because it carries with it the idea that the memory of our past is both subjectively personal to only each of us and unreliable. Just like witnesses to the same crime or event but from different geographical and biased perspectives we will describe the scene differently. All my family members (parents and siblings) on any of our holidays decades ago will remember our holiday differently. My parents, my brother and I never noticed the good-looking boy my sister spied. My sister never experienced my joy of winning a few pennies in the amusement arcade, and we children never realised our parents left us alone to go out and have a few drinks once we were asleep. None of us could describe the same scene and have more than a few aspects of those days match in our narrations. Of course, there is a common thread throughout but markedly different values are placed on different events. Oh, by the way, it never, ever rained when I was a child but it always snowed in Winter and my socks always dipped own inside my wellies when my sister and I went carol-singing.
The truth is that, like everyone else, I use selective memory to colour my past. Almost none of my fond memories actually happened on a day that started out as fantastic, had no negative issues and finished as me being the winner. Let's face it, as a child, I had quarreling parents, a bullying brother and a sister that always said, 'Are we there yet?' after about twenty minutes of going anywhere. She also got car-sick; at least I remember that she thought she was. My dad told her that cars have a chain underneath that hits the road and stops people feeling ill and she never complained about feeling ill again. My father knew about static electricity.
But, how about this? How about other people can change our recollection of what happened simply because they have enough information to convince us that they were there? Sound like a story? It is! I have already written it and it has been read and recorded as my own work. Yet, I cannot copyright such a story because it is factual in everyone's life. Take for example, a parent who, listening to us recount one of our favourite childhood experiences, adds information to the tale such as background or a sub-plot; a sub-plot that we must inherently be unaware of since we were engaged in a different aspect of the event. I remember my mum bringing one of our goat-kids into my primary-school class. As far as I remember the kid only came into my school classroom. Apparently, it visited the whole school and wee-ed on the headmaster's office floor. I am, however, not nostalgic for that day or those innocent days. The other children in my class may remember me as being aloof and uninterested. The boys may have taken my lead and not coo-ed over the cute, white fluffy creature. Indeed, my actions may very well have been such that those boys I influenced on that day means they did not form a memory that they wanted to keep. They didn't know that I was already familiar with our animals at home. Obviously, my memory of my mum with a white goat-kid entering my classroom is enhanced by her telling of what the kid did in the headmaster's office and the knowledge that the whole school saw the kid. I have, just now, also attached an image of my mum leading the goat-kid through the village from our home to our school. If this was a nostalgic memory it is no longer the original one and must indeed be a living one; still open for further tweaking and re-interpretation, quite simply because with a jaded eye I added the journey the kid made from my home to the school and back. I suspect it would remember that day sadly because it probably just wanted to gambol in our garden and eat the long grass near its own mum. But, its life was not going to be one out of a 'Babe' film or movie.
We might, as I mentioned, be nostalgic for a past time; a time when we were not even born. We must be in possession of information that pertains to that time, yet we also carry with us in those nostalgic journeys information of our modern existence. How wonderful it would have been to live in the Victorian times, except they had no welfare state and worked six and seven days a week. Television films and dramas show us a tiny tranche of how life was and the ugly bits are hidden. How wonderful the 1960s and 1970s were in France, the UK and America-land, but not in Nigeria, Israel or Vietnam in 1967. 'Fortunate Son' by Creedence Clearwater Revival, now heard as a background sound to the Vietnam war gives us a opportunity to think that it was a good lark, a romp, or a jolly good show that was had with some dope-smoking mates. I can't say it wasn't because I have to rely on accounts from people who were actually there with their personal experiences; who obviously had a different time from the strategists of their day and the historians of today. The 'picture' will always be incomplete; always a story and never a true account, not least because the people on the ground only bring forward selected memories.
I propose that if we can be nostalgic for the past (one we never experienced ourselves), theoretically, we should be able to be nostalgic for the future, any future. I propose that just like the past which is a patchwork of selected memories and supposedly hard facts, any number of futures can be imagined and all are equally true. Wait! What? Am I saying that understanding the past relies on imagination? Yes, I am. Someone studying at Cambridge University told me that they had been told by a tutor that because so little is known about the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, whenever an artifact that related to that time is unearthed they have to make up stuff in order to be able to include its relevance in an ongoing story of that time. I suppose they hypothesise in the positive form and wait for someone to test in the negative form to prove them right.
Anyway - back to nostalgic for 'the future'. I suppose that any movie franchise such as Star Wars or even Star Trek not only creates a hankering for a similar experience but also provides scope for a nostalgia of the same. Yet, that is not really the future, because everything we experience instantly becomes the past so we are really only wanting to refresh our past with another Star Wars movie. No, I mean we need technology to actually boost us into the future, notwithstanding that we would need to move across space to where the galaxy, solar system and Earth would be in the future. Fantasists who want to live like hobbits or kill dragons with swords and magic plainly need to be acquainted with witches, wizards, and spirits in the here and now to actually experience their nostalgic vibe. Yet, I go back to the idea that if we can be nostalgic for a past we must theoretically be able to pine for its reciprocal, the future and variations of an alternative life. Just Saying.
There is one aspect of nostalgia that we shouldn't overlook. Memories made in our childhood are the strongest ones that we retain. New experiences provide the greatest impact on our lives. Of course, if we are to survive we must sear into our minds, events, experiences and solutions that provide escape from danger, at a very early age, so it is natural for us to feel nostalgic about our childhood or other people. Apparently, this tendency to firmly stamp episodes into our memory fades after the age of thirty.
I had the distinct pleasure of writing a piece on nostalgia as part of my studies. It is not difficult to start an account and 'storify' it with lyrical description. It is not difficult to set moods and show the character's emotions. It is entirely natural to write the account in a chronological order. The difficulty lies in making sure the reader is not confused when the piece does not follow conventions, and let's face it, the 'White Swan' of iteration. If we only ever see white swans we come to believe that all swans are white through iteration. Time and time again, when we read a nostalgic account we are told what to understand. In its basic form: 'I remember when...Those were the days!' Or, more interestingly at the beginning of a story: 'Life on the beach in 1965 with Laura changed when Kiki arrived.' When the formula for recounting events, that are given as nostalgia, is cast aside to make room for an understanding of how memory actually works the reader can be confused. Putting a time machine into a story on nostalgia just trashes people's sensitivities. Questions might be asked why the typical chronological order of lyrical descriptions is interrupted by shifting perspectives. If, for example, I have a remit to write two thousand words prose on nostalgia, I am not going to write about the last holiday I spent with my grandparents, even if they did get washed away by the tide that summer. I am not going to dwell in a fractured and patched up past that is in my memory, that has been augmented with background stories, and pretend it actually occurred any more than I am likely to write about how my memory is corrupted by my biases, including the ones I don't know about. Grandma and Grandpa may well have arrived in France on a rubber dinghy and never made it home to England and all I gave them was a mournful wave, but there is no fun in the writing of it. Prose just means include lyrical description and avoid using meter to me. The sky was the limit. Unfortunately, my readers are on the ground. Even climbing a tree for a different viewpoint might be awkward for them. Of course, it is for the writer to provide a ladder for the reader to climb; or for the really stubborn, slovenly, or the reader trapped in a world of 'white swans', an armchair on a raised platform on a forklift.