I want to spend some more time on the topic of nostalgia. In the last post I wrote, "So nostalgia points to the reality that we have appetite for beauty that seems to only live in our imagination, or beauty that is out of this world." I think I came to this conclusion on my owns sometime in my late twenties. It's a nice surprise when you find out that people smarter than you and famous also happen to agree with you. The first one is from "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss:
link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Love
The Birth Of Feeling
Just as there was a first instance when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness.
For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling resentment on one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a counter clockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the feeling of awe.
Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.
It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that being moved, but to describe it – just name it – must have been trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might have been confusion.)
Having began to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feelings. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It is possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joys were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is, the relief of unexpected reprieve, the fear of dying.
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.
The second comes from "The Weight of Glory" by C. S. Lewis (a great Wikipedia site on the topic of Sehnsucht)
link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht_(C._S._Lewis)
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
I don't think I can say any better than this.... I anticipate with eager expectation that the scent of the flower, the echo of the tune, and the country that now only exist in wordless cries of our soul will BLOW us AWAY when met face to face... one day.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
About the photo
I downloaded the photo in the title block - the silhouetted cowgirl standing before the mushrooming storm cloud - from the National Geographic website (It has some amazing pics you can download for free). So why this photo? Well... I like it. I think it's a really cool picture; it has an effect of stirring my inside somehow. Let me try to figure out why exactly it does.
1) It's a lazy sunny afternoon in the picture. I don't know for sure, but it exudes that late summer afternoon, an hour or so before sunset sort of an atmosphere. You can almost smell the impending dusk. The smell of summer dusk always triggers my nostalgia switch that takes me back to the hilly village in Seoul, Korea, where I spent my youthful summer nights playing the game of tag with the village boys (not Village People). The nights seemed endless then as I would run through all the corners and creases of the village that never slept. Everyday, I'd wait for the sundown so we can start our nightly ritual (I actually wrote about this in my undergrad writing class. The prof really liked it. Maybe I will post that short essay here soon). My point is that the mood of the photo has the effect of initiating my brain to reach back to one of my favorite memories. But nostalgia is really a distortion of memory to create an ideal "picture" which one longs to have in the present, but never could. So nostalgia points to the reality that we have appetite for beauty that seems to only live in our imagination, or beauty that is out of this world.
2) The cloud in the photo is awe-inspiring. The explosion of multiplying cells, each containing potentials for devastating downpour, fills up the horizon behind the rodeo stadium. There's a beauty in something that makes us tremble by its shear size. It says that we are children born from something or someone of awesome encompassment.
3) The silhouetted woman looks mysteriously cool. You can't see her face so you can put whatever face you want in it. Or she remains the faceless goddess of COOLNESS.
Ok. I think I'll stop now.
1) It's a lazy sunny afternoon in the picture. I don't know for sure, but it exudes that late summer afternoon, an hour or so before sunset sort of an atmosphere. You can almost smell the impending dusk. The smell of summer dusk always triggers my nostalgia switch that takes me back to the hilly village in Seoul, Korea, where I spent my youthful summer nights playing the game of tag with the village boys (not Village People). The nights seemed endless then as I would run through all the corners and creases of the village that never slept. Everyday, I'd wait for the sundown so we can start our nightly ritual (I actually wrote about this in my undergrad writing class. The prof really liked it. Maybe I will post that short essay here soon). My point is that the mood of the photo has the effect of initiating my brain to reach back to one of my favorite memories. But nostalgia is really a distortion of memory to create an ideal "picture" which one longs to have in the present, but never could. So nostalgia points to the reality that we have appetite for beauty that seems to only live in our imagination, or beauty that is out of this world.
2) The cloud in the photo is awe-inspiring. The explosion of multiplying cells, each containing potentials for devastating downpour, fills up the horizon behind the rodeo stadium. There's a beauty in something that makes us tremble by its shear size. It says that we are children born from something or someone of awesome encompassment.
3) The silhouetted woman looks mysteriously cool. You can't see her face so you can put whatever face you want in it. Or she remains the faceless goddess of COOLNESS.
Ok. I think I'll stop now.
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