“How could you be so heartless?"

“How could you be so heartless,” the driver sung along quietly under his breath as Kanye West’s “Heartless” played on the radio.

I sat in the back of the rideshare vehicle dumbstruck, shocked to hear this moment of heartfelt reminiscence. I mean I did not visibly demonstrate my sort of shock in witnessing this grown man get caught in his feelings to an old Kanye song. It was evident that even his silent murmuring was chock full of meaning to him. You could tell in how he was investing each intonation in those six words that he was somewhere far away from that car. I just allowed him the space to have his time with the song, because he was kind enough to offer me the space to just be during the ride. Every person deserve the right to get lost in their feelings, lost in their nostalgia of the past with music. 

I want to write about nostalgia, because of this meaning-drenched moment I experienced getting a ride back to my house after dropping off my bike for service. As is evident with this project, I chase the nectar of these moments like a hummingbird chases the nectar of a fresh spring flower. As a sociologist, I’m trained in human pattern recognition, looking for those moments when something bubbles to the surface that is of a special enough character to resonate as the ideal sort of example of some idea I have been reflecting on.  Since I mine the archives of my own life as kin of nostalgia ceaselessly, it was a nice moment of synchronicity to see someone else display a quiet devotion to their own internal film reel playing their hits back to them.  I pictured young Landry, real display name for his ride share service profile, just having his heart strings pulled by that chorus, thinking back on a lover who had done him wrong. That’s the real nectar of life, not what some dingbat was forced to publish to get tenure. 

Accordingly, I will mark on with my 453rd official pronouncement that I intend on keeping my commitment to my de-education program. Henceforth, I will continue sequentially from this point in this official reminded that I don’t want to read or talk about a definition for nostalgia, memory, or reminiscence. I don’t want to cite anyone who has written about the fuzzy areas between these concepts. No, I want to rest in the liminality that exists between them. I want to embrace a culture that isn’t obsessed with being clear about what we MEAN when we say x, y, or z.  No, we aren’t defining variables in a multilinear regression model, because this is art, globdammit. We are trying to describe a corporeal experience where we transcend time and are lost re-membering, reminiscing, or experiencing nostalgia for something that has happened in the past or something we want to step into in the future. I want to leave the confines of the space between these words fuzzy just like our experience of the past is when we draw ourselves back into it.

“Pop quiz, hot shot, what sort of possibilities can you come up with for nostalgia without relying on your precious books?” a Dennis Hopper voice says inside my head like I am in some alternate universe version of Speed. “A man my age has got to think about his future and how we will find meaning,” Dennis Hopper, the Speed villain, continues. Like Keanu Reaves, I throw down the phone and like my mind start running toward nostalgia. So, I come up all the possibilities related to that fuzzy constellation of concepts that are buzzing around nostalgia.

Nostalgia is time travel.

Nostalgia is experiencing life as a film.

Nostalgia is enchanted.

Nostalgia is interconnection: A relational conduit that connects us with every animate being we have ever known. 

Nostalgia is death work.

Nostalgia is Amelie.

Yes, Amelie is quite perfect to embody nostalgia. Specifically, the scene where Amelie helps the blind man across the street and narrates all the little details of the street scene he cannot see. The scene is earnest, whimsical, filmed in a magical glow, and accompanied by the perfect music for the scene. Well, at least it’s perfect for me, seeing as I am a weirdo, magic-practicing druid that is the sum total of my favorite little moving picture shows that I have seen. 

Yet, I do contend that one would be much better off looking to art to understand the feeling of nostalgia than they would reading a dictionary definition or academic study on the matter. You know why? Because it’s a matter of the stirring of some of the most fundamental strings that comprise your own mortal constitution. Science, at least as we know it today, is only capable at partial glimpses. It’s only in art that we can capture those full glimpses of the past from an array of perspectives in one vignette. A definition or incremental advance on a concept isn’t going to hit you like Amelie helping a blind man experience life will. 

And again, I am slapped upside the head with how we use overly academic approaches to death-adjacent concepts like nostalgia to avoid confronting the immensity of death and grief. I often wonder to myself if our culture uses the dampening of a scientific approach to nostalgia (e.g., insisting on definitions and citations) because it cannot take the immensity of a multilayered reminiscing of those people, places, and times we have lost and will never get back? Just writing that question, I felt my own heart strings pull. It seems my heart thinks this is so. I know how much more difficult it is for me to sit with the vivid reminiscence of moments of time that were both gut wrenching and wonderful. Each is difficult for different reasons but they are united in the experience of losing something. That’s why I am so much more interested in visiting the “temple of my memory” in these essays and not getting too bogged down clearly delineating conceptual definitions. I am much more interested in rendering visible this corporeal experience and pushing back against a deathphobic culture than I am intellectually passing through my own grief and death fear through impressive citation trees. 

Welp, dear reader, you made it through another essay. I turned 37 yesterday. I still can’t believe that I am who I am. It’s kinda wild to see the changes and continuities that have marked my experience as an animate meatsack this past year. I feel like I am everyday growing into the writer that I want to be. I feel like I am increasingly honing this voice that I want to speak with. All this writing is just the never-ending practice of speaking with different voices that need to come out of me. Maybe that’s all writing is in the end. I find that process of chiseling away at voices I don’t want to speak with infinitely interesting. Even in the last few weeks, we have found a way to write with our own embodied voice, resisting our current culture’s emphasis on nesting everything within a scientific animism. I think that is a rather disembodied way to get to the place that you are this animate being having this spiritual, mental, and physical experience surrounded by ecosystems that are on the same journey. 

But whatever, I’m just trying to entertain myself at this point. I’m not making any money off of this project. I write it in the depths of the night with headphones on, delving into the vast archives of digitally uploaded music.  I did have a meeting with my new small business accountant this past week though, so there is some movement on that front. Our goal is to be all set up for subscriptions on October 1. Consequently, y’all are getting FREE stuff. Well, to be more specific, free essays. I have to go set up a business checking account though, which for some reason makes me anxious and scared. I have noticed that all my feelings of anxiety and fear related to this project have accompanied me taking things seriously and setting up good infrastructure for my business. It’s likely a little fear of failure that’s seeping in there. Intellectually, I know that failure is not possible since I get to define success. However, the fear is still sitting there in my body for me to air out. Me writing this is asking the friend to come on out for a hug or ice cream or something like that. 

Until next time, dear reader, 

James

P.S. This album “Long Season by Fishmans is AMAZING and I listened to it twice while writing this. Way better than Kanye IMO.

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