Needless nostalgia and the function of memories.
Missing childhood friends who now feel imaginary.
(This essay was originally written as part of and submitted as reflection on class, Time and Life. The topic of this class was “Nostalgia”.)
Yesterday, I saw a child playing with their iPad, and I suddenly remembered how you and I used to gush over our littlest pet shop. It felt strange, to see myself in this little human, so deeply engrossed in their device, and seeing myself in him. I felt insulted by myself for drawing that comparison but a little part of me felt a small inkling of excitement, recalling the image of the unbridled joy of playing with you, untainted by any of the fights we’ve had. Perhaps, it’s because you’ve been gone for a while and I miss you, so the memory of us playing together gives me a modicum of comfort (or maybe this is what nostalgia feels like, a longing for the return of something or someone). I don’t remember why or when we stopped playing with our littlest pet shops- I have an intuition that I left it in the back pocket of my jeans and put it in the washing machine one too many times and my father finally stopped buying me new ones. All I wonder now is, where did the good times go? I have a feeling that I’ve chucked them away like those littlest pet shops, to the back closet of my mind. If that is so, perhaps this letter is a spring cleaning of my mind, in the form of a letter to you. Like Freud's dream-work, in transforming the latent content of dreams to its manifested content, the dissection of memories or rather a moment of nostalgia, in this case, will reveal a part of myself that has been locked away by my unconscious. After all, Haruki Murakami once said, “in truth, all sensation is already memory”. Does the sensation transform in its metamorphosing into a memory?
In The Gift of Memory (Kirsten, 2015), Kirsten Jacobson used a metaphor for the self as a home we build for ourselves. This precious gift of memory seems like furniture and trinkets that people give us, and we choose to use them to decorate a home that people see. Things mysteriously disappear in this home I’ve decorated for myself, like the other side of my headphone that I dropped in my bed and into a void, to be lost forever. Still, sometimes I hear the phantom sounds that it once made, and I scramble to find it, digging through everything, to no avail. In that process, the image of the headphone consumes so much of my mind, it almost becomes real again. Nostalgia feels like that to me, the chasing of something that no longer exists. Yesterday, I wished that I had a picture of a littlest pet shop, to put on my bookshelf, next to the magnolias, your favorite flowers. I would have created a shrine for you in my home, but like the littlest pet shop, I know that soon, it’ll become a smell or touch redolent of a moment in the past, of you. So what is the point of clinging on to these memories? The needless nostalgia, maybe to serve as a reminder that Einmal ist keinmal, what happens but once, may not have happened at all. Memories endure through the passage of time, though sometimes they get tucked away, to hide from someone, maybe yourself- a sensation you are not ready to confront. The home is always redecorating. Yesterday, I felt the brief happiness of our childhood memories, and it reminded me to sweep away the dust that I’ve let collect over the things you’ve given me and pack them away for when you return, if you ever will. The reality is, nostalgia and memories exist in a time locked away in the home we build for ourselves, it passes through from present realities to immorality in our homes, even if we can’t find them sometimes.
Always, Claire.
Reference:
Jacobson, Kirsten, 2015, The Gift of Memory: Sheltering the I. In David Morris and Kym Maclaren (ed.), Time, Memory and Institution. Merleau-Ponty’s New Antology of Self. Athens: Ohio University Press, 29-42.