Nostalgia was a word I always battled with in graduate school. I would throw it around unaware of the weight it would bear, especially when using it in the presence of my art history professors. In her book On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart looks at our desires and the "social disease of nostalgia," where the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being. Nostalgia is a sadness; a longing for something that is inauthentic because it is not part of a lived experience. It looks towards a utopian past, which only exists in an ideological reality. The point of desire that nostalgia seeks is the desire for desire; an absence of the mechanism of desire.
I just returned back from a weekend at home where my youngest brother was married. My parents farm always hits a soft spot with me, especially in the fall. It is nostalgic. A very sentimental longing for the past; memories of childhood on the farm.
While my parents farm is one of my most favorite places to be, the present is not. I have to constantly remind myself to be present, even in the midst of pain and suffering. I want to fast forward to another time or go back to the past before Winona. While I know that I am wasting my days, hours and minutes thinking about months from now and months ago, anxious energy just keeps me moving away from today, from this very minute. The uselessness of nostalgia. Nostalgia directs us away from the present and accentuates the reality that ALL things are temporal. None of us have what we have today forever, nor will we continue to have what we had forever. So is it possible to just watch and listen, taste and smell, all that we have this very minute?
"May we go back, then, to the floor of pebbles beneath the water and the fish in the sunlight's ripping net. . . . and watch?"-Alan Watts
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