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THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 11
We were able to be nostalgic both for certain cultural phenomena that had vanished, and for the time before the cultural phenomena had appeared, as if every world we lived in hid another world behind it, like stage scenery of a city hiding stage scenery of tiered meadows hiding stage scenery of ancient Illyria. For example it wasn’t answering machines, or the lack of answering machines, or the sight of tiny answering-machine tape cassettes that triggered our nostalgia, but the realization that our lives had transcended the brief life of the answering machine, had preceded and succeeded it, encompassed it, swallowed it whole, which meant we had to understand ourselves not as contained entities, but as planes intersecting with other planes, planes of time, technology, culture, desire. One plane had waited by the phone for our best friend’s phone call before answering machines, and then one plane had recorded outgoing messages on the answering machine over and over, trying and trying to sound blithe. How many tiny tape cassettes still stored pieces of our voices like pale-blue fragments of Plexiglas shattered into attics and basements across any number of states? We still owned a tape cassette with the voice of our first beloved on it, or a version of it, and remembered the version of the girl who kept rewinding his messages over and over, under an analogue wedge of black sky and endlessly delayed stars. She was listening and listening for answers the answering machine could not provide. When we felt our material planes sliding to intersect with immaterial planes, or vice versa, we bowed our heads and submitted to the pile-up of the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 15
If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, i.e., if a beautiful moment we experienced but were not able to apprehend could be apprehended post-hoc, then the impossibility of living in the present could be slathered over with a layer of gold-suffused salve, SALVE, as the blue-and-white tiles spelled out before the door to the barber shop in the city of our youth, for which we feel nostalgic. Repeat. The barber is dead; long live the barber. The city of our youth no longer exists; it exists in our minds. The barber’s pinup calendars are smoldering their way down the landfill. Johannes Hofer believed that nostalgia could be cured with opium, leeches, or a trip to the Alps, but we know that the only cure for nostalgia is nostalgia. There is an illness informing the illness, and that illness must be mined to extract the exquisitely atavistic elixir. We kept walking through the beautiful city in our minds saying, Stay, thou art so fair, but the city did not comply. We walked and walked through the city in our minds infecting and healing ourselves at the same time, infecting and healing, infecting and healing, until it was impossible to tell the difference, until we were totally infected, and totally healed. But as soon as we left the city in our minds to come back to this city, we knew that the healing was temporary, and the infection forever. * If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, then it is also unstable, and if we get attached to beautiful images today, we might spurn them tomorrow. We might love the beautiful images because we can’t apprehend them, “the beautiful” always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds. And it’s why we slather salve over SALVE, suffuse it, why we gold-leaf gold leaf. It’s why we ruin the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 30
When we were in Berlin, we stopped and got coffee at Starbucks. When we were in London, we stopped to get coffee at Starbucks. When we were in Beijing, we stopped and got coffee at Starbucks. When we were in New Delhi, we stopped to get coffee at Starbucks. When we were in Seattle, we stopped to get coffee at the original Starbucks in Pike Place Market, but the line wound around the block. So we walked one block east to the next Starbucks, a non-original Starbucks, where there was no line at all, and we stopped and got coffee, then resumed our walk, talking about authenticity, origins, belonging, reproducibility, Melville, the local, the glocal, frappuccinos, the English language, the Italian language, what kind of world it is where “tall” can mean “small,” portmanteaus, the white whale, the chaste mermaid, feathers in foam, access, distributed sameness, the history of sugar, and home. * We got so caffeinated we did not notice the six more Starbucks we passed on our walk—nor, like ghostly overlays, the ruin after ruin of what had been there before, quietly foaming in immanent nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 37
We were trying to find the world before we were born that the loved one had taken with him, a world in his mind he had shown us pieces of from time to time, so that over the years we had fit together a version of this world in our own minds, which had taken on material, if fragmentary, form. Handwritten lists in all caps on graph paper, stories solicited and retold over pumpkin muffins, a whole house secreting photographs and rosaries and bone magnifying glasses belonging to people we could not identify, who were our relatives. When the loved one took his world with him, it turned out that the world in our minds built out of fragments of his world had been mostly dependent on him, like a whole illuminated villa powered by a single generator in the shed intended only for emergencies. The generator suddenly stopped, and the lights of the villa went fragile. Like when someone in a movie turns off a bedside lamp, and another light turns on—cold and bluish. The scaffolding holding up the details faltered; the photographs of strangers with eyes the color of tarnished skies would remain forever photographs of strangers—as one day the photographs of the loved one would depict a tarnishing stranger to others. The lake that froze over every winter. Streetcars to downtown that had since been dismantled. A hand-built house carried away by a cyclone. The zoo down the street where as a boy he had brushed the ponies. The loved one took his world with him, a world sovereign to our world yet touching it at every point, a world we had believed we would always be able to reconstruct in our minds. But from that time on, only fainter and fainter reproductions of it could be pieced back together in the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 61
“Nostalgia is at the core of the modern condition,” wrote Svetlana Boym. But if that is the case, then why are some modern people not nostalgic? Is everyone “modern” just by virtue of being alive? No matter how old-fashioned our old-fashioneds, our superannuated utopias, our antique ideations of egg creams. * We confessed we felt nostalgic for egg creams, although we had never drunk an egg cream. Instead, we drank Slurpees, blue Slurpees, from the Woolworth’s in the mall we grew up in. First egg creams disappeared, then the Slurpee machines in the Woolworth’s disappeared, then the Woolworth’s disappeared. And then the mall disappeared. Egg creams, we’d been told, were never as creamy as their name fathoming a creaminess and a frothiness, an impossibly frothy creaminess, the dreaminess of creaminess. * Still, it came as a mild shock to learn that there are no eggs, nor is there any cream, in an egg cream. This we were told by a person who is no longer alive, and thus no longer modern. Svetlana Boym is no longer alive. The ruin of the egg cream foams all over the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 64
We rode in the back of the white Pontiac convertible with its top down, summers, to get to the lake, the mother driving, her two daughters in the back, the mother with her filmy pink scarf over her beehive hairdo tied in a bow under her chin, with her cat’s-eye sunglasses, we rode on the back of the white Pontiac convertible with its top down, with the AM radio playing, we rode to the lake, or rather to the wading pool next to the lake, where the mother sent her two daughters into the shallow water and sat on the grass to smoke a cigarette near the other mothers, her eyes behind her cat’s-eye sunglasses, we rode on the back of the white Pontiac convertible as it climbed up the stair-like gradations of the hill, and then as it sailed down the stair-like gradations on the other side of the hill, to get to the lake, in the white Pontiac convertible top-down, without seat-belts, perched atop the back seat of the car, up and down the hill, back up, and down, to get to the lake, to get back home, to get to the lake, to get back home, the daughters with their bathing suits coiled tightly in their towels, the father at work, the father driving an hour north to work each day not knowing if he would be driving back to work the next day, the company of the company town laying off three-quarters of its workforce, the mother driving up and down the hills to the lake with the AM radio playing, with her cat’s-eye sunglasses, the two daughters perched on the back seat clutching their towels, the brother who knows where, the mother driving, the father driving, the AM radio playing “the bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle,” the sisters perched on the back of the seat of the white Pontiac convertible with its top down, down and down the stair-steps of the hills and into the ruins of nostalgia.
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