The Dangers of Nostalgia

Dangers of Nostalgia

"Nostalgia" is so often said with that sort of simpering, "good ol' days", harkening back to the time when things were simple and clean and wonderful. They never tell you about the dangers of Nostalgia, the pain that blind-sides you, the hurt that hunts you down in your beautiful, mundane life and sticks a fork in your hand, heart or eye and says, "you think you control your memory but really your memory controls you." Maybe you should think of Nostalgia as a brother to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The way that the memory is triggered has to be similar; smell, sound, sight. Although some find a relief or a release in Nostalgia, there are others who find it like being mugged by their memory, their carefully constructed piece of mind stolen and them left bereft, shaking.

The Ministry of Pain- Ugresic

p. 226

"Words like 'phantom limb syndrom' or 'nostalgia' are arbitrary lexical labels meant to denote the complex emotional blow that comes of loss and the impossibility of return. They imply that it makes virtually no difference whether we make our peace with the loss or experience relief at being able to let go of the past or of the desire to return to it. Because the blow does not lose its intensity thereby. Nostalgia, if that's the word for it, is a brutal, insidious assailant who favours the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Nostalgia always wears a mask and, o irony of ironies, we are only its chance victim. Nostalgia makes its appearance in translation- most often a bad one- after a complicated journey not unlike the children's game 'telephone'. The phrase the first player whispers into the ear next to him passes through a whole chain of ears until it emerges from the mouth of the last player like a rabbit from a hat."

After the First World War

Writing Scotland: How Scotland’s Writers Shaped the Nation
author: Carl MacDougall
Polygon, Edinburgh, 2004

p. 96
The play [Peter Pan] was a huge success and has been adapted for various media many times, most familiarly in the Disney versions. But ten years after it was premiered, the generation who grew up with Peter’s cheery notion that ‘death is an awfully big adventure’ found [p. 97] themselves marching off to the battlefields of the First World War. Off-duty soldiers drew comfort from Never Land, a place of eternal childhood. The adventure of death- the greatest adventure of all- would have guaranteed eternal youth, a consolation many soldiers must have carried with them when they faced the guns.
The line was removed after the war.”

Slinkachu, "Scars", London
source

Integrations- Pablo Neruda

Integrations

After everything,
I will love you
As if it were always before


As if, after so much waiting,
Not seeing you
And you not coming,
You were breathing close to me forever.


Close to me with your habits,
With your colour and your guitar
Just as countries unite
In school room lectures,
And two regions become blurred
And there is a river near a river
And two volcanoes grow together.


Close to you is close to me
And your absence is far from everything
And the moon is the colour of clay
In the night of quaking earth
When, in terror of the earth,
All the roots join together
And silence is heard ringing
With the music of fright


Fear is also a street
And among its trembling stones
Tenderness somehow is able
To march with four feet
And four lips


Since without leaving the present
That is a fragile thing
We touch the sand of yesterday
And in the sea
Love reveals a repeated fury

-- Pablo Neruda

Before, during, and after.

Before, during, and after.
It's true that you never look the same after something happens.  PTSD changes the way your brain works, why shouldn't it change the way your face looks? Some people say they can tell differences in before and after photographs of me.
I rarely show anyone before photographs. 

Tim Hetherington
His photos kind of broke me.  I've never been able to scream after what happened to me, except for in my sleep.  This is what I always wanted to do. 

fine/nothing

How often is feeling fine really the absence of feeling anything?
Feeling fine.

Potential Loves

Potential, as in latent, as in unawakened or unrealised.

"Hunger for the other person, the lure of their hidden depths. But once their secret has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing. It all becomes comprehensible, reassuring. Now the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other one's mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise. Their heart to a set of predictable responses.
At this stage a kind of murder occurs, for we kill this being of infinite and inexhaustable potential that we have encountered. We would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person..."
Andrei Makine, "The Woman Who Waited", p. 3.


Tiutchev- "O, how our love is murderous"

"O, how our love is murderous,
The dearer something is to us
The surer are we to destroy it
In passion's savage blindness!
Was it so long ago you said,
Proud of your victory: she's mine . . .
Barely a year gone - stop and think,
What has remained of her?
Where are the roses in her cheeks,
Her smiling lips and shining eyes?
Rivers of scalding tears
Have scorched and burned them all.
Do you remember how you met,
Your very first, your fateful tete-а-tete;
Her gaze enchanting and her words,
Her laughter --lively, child-like?
What have you now? Where is it all?
Was it a lasting dream?
Alas, like northern summers,
It was a fleeting guest!
For her your love was naught but
Fate's awful judgment.
It weighed upon her life,
With undeserved shame.
A life of sacrifice, a life of trials!
Deep in her soul
She cherished memories . . .
Yet even they've betrayed her.
And earthly life has turned against her,
Its charms have disappeared. . .
The surging crowd's ground in the dirt
All that had flourished in her heart.
And what like ashes has she gathered
After her long torment?
Pain, the cruel pain of bitterness,
Pain without cease and without tears!
O, how our love is murderous,
The dearer something is to us
The surer are we to destroy it
In passion's savage blindness!"

One Man Gathers

Letters of Note: Ken Kesey
Heartbreaking letter from author Ken Kesey to his dear friends.
He says at the end: "One man gathers what another man spills."

How could you go ahead of me?
A letter from a woman to her husband.
She concludes with: "There is no limit to what I want to say and I stop here."