The first in a series of articles looking at the phenomenon of nostalgia…
I’m something of a traditionalist when it comes to words; even, you might say, a reactionary. If the meaning of a word has changed significantly in the last century or so, then chances are I will prefer the meaning it had prior to modernisation, and will stubbornly stick to using it in this sense, even though I know no-one but myself will realise or care. This is mostly because I have an intimate relationship with my Oxford English Dictionary, and I can be very pedantic and boring and dry. But it is also because the older sense — before mechanisation, as it were — often has a richness, a depth, and sometimes a lateral-ness, that the modern usage has lost. Sometimes this is just down to the specific context from which the word arose having been forgotten, but more often, I feel, it is that the way we think has changed. I get the sense from reading a lot of old books that our thinking today is less subtle, less poetic, somehow less alive than it could be. Perhaps I am being sentimental.
But I am not, in the way I like to use the word, being nostalgic. Now the word ‘nostalgia’ is a good example of a word whose richness has been somewhat obscured over the course of time. Used today, it is taken to mean a kind of wistful yearning for the past. But to my understanding, that is not quite it. To me, the word is far less about time than it is about place. That is because, when it was first coined in the seventeenth century (I was surprised to learn that this word from the Greek is in fact a relative neologism) it was intended to mean something like, ‘illness arising from prolonged period away from one’s native country’ — so basically, homesickness. The usage focusing on a sense of yearning for a lost time comes later, dating from 1920 or so. This focus adds a certain tang of resonance to the meaning, but to me it brings the word too close to denoting a feeling of pleasure. But originally it had nothing to do with pleasure. it’s nost-algia, like neur-algia — it’s a pain, an ache, a sickness.
Nostalgia, like the machine gun or the internet, is an invention of modern warfare. It was first observed as a sickness by a Swiss doctor attending to soldiers on campaign far from their homeland. It was reported that the symptoms of the illness included depression, catatonia, and even, in extreme cases, death. The severity of these natural responses is a measure of the importance of home to the human animal. What is interesting is that nostalgia was seen as a new phenomenon, and a new word had to be specially coined for a medical textbook. Nowadays, it is taken for granted that one is likely to experience serious depression in their life, a general sense of displacement, a feeling of hopelessness because one does not belong to their surroundings. But through the early modern eyes of a Swiss physician, we see these natural ailments as new. Perhaps it could be said that all the experiences we describe today as ‘mental illnesses’ are the children of this original nostalgia; maybe the great sorrow of the post-modern human is essentially homesickness.
Certainly, nostalgia the sickness is a necessary by-product of that force certain people call ‘progress’. At root, it is an illness of subjection. It arises when an individual is forced, or at least coerced, into doing something that they wouldn’t otherwise do, and is wrenched from their native country. Exile, enslavement, warfare, all cause nostalgia. Today, few people are forcibly exiled, few are enslaved, few are forced to go to war. But nostalgia in its many forms is everywhere. We live in a post-nostalgic world, where its symptoms have been normalised. Probably, the time when the human relationship with place was a simple one, free of sickness, has gone forever. We are going to have to live with the contagion of nostalgia; it’s in the air we breathe, it’s in the soil.
To take a deeper look at this relatively new phenomenon, I am going to discuss five songs called ‘Nostalgia’. Here’s the first.
Bleak Soul — ‘Nostalgia’ (ft. Patty Walters)
Why the hell does the outro of ‘Goodbye Sky Harbor’ go on for thirteen minutes? It’s not like there’s anything special about it — just the same four guitar chords with a little repeated melody played over and over again; they add some organ in the right channel, a wordless, quiet ‘ba da da’ in the left, then a ‘do doo do’ in the right. There’s no development in the meaning of the track at all, and it’s just tacked onto the end of an otherwise unremarkable indie-emo song. If that were my track, I would’ve faded the outro out after two minutes at the most.
I know why, it’s because it’s the end, and we always want the end to go on forever. This final track of Jimmy Eat World’s 1999 album Clarity is one of the two songs directly referenced in the song ‘Nostalgia’ by pop metal band Bleak Soul, and hearing it again after fifteen years or so suggests two thoughts to me: one, nostalgia arises from our wish to be immortal; and two, a happy environment for the human being is one that allows him to think he is indeed immortal.
That is what home is: it is the one place that convinces you of your immortality. But the post-Enlightenment ethic has a tense relationship with immortality and its place in the home. This tension is the jittery life-force behind the Bleak Soul song, whose first line is ‘Nostalgia is the enemy of progress’. One can’t detect if the singer, Benjamin Langford-Biss, is expressing this line with a hint of irony. As it accords closely with the predominant emotional politic of our time, I suspect not. What we hear in this track is the wiry frustration of the commercialised, rationalised subject divided against itself; we hear the fraught rhetoric of the self-helping individual venturing to conquer the parts of himself which are apparently without utility. As Langford-Biss wages discreet war against his own nostalgia, his own looking back, the ‘familiar’ things which he associates with ‘regression’, one gets the feeling that no part of the modern spirit, no part of the modern soul, is allowed to be immortal.
Nostalgia is the enemy; home is the enemy; human sickness is the enemy. Is this not just a new sickness in itself? There is a hint that Bleak Soul understand this in the song’s chorus, which name-checks the aforementioned Jimmy Eat World song: ‘I still hear ‘Goodbye Sky Harbor’ at night’. Of course it’s at night, when the spirit is often more forgiving of itself, of its otherwise conquered components, when it’s more lucid and more willing to see the poetry in the human condition.
For all that it is a sickness, there is pleasure in nostalgia too. Like other sicknesses, its chemical breaching of the physical status quo is capable of giving a certain clarity to one’s thoughts. Often, we feel more intelligent when we are sick, as if we are accessing a higher plane, or perhaps a lower, in the sub-soil of our being. Here, we know things differently, and worship different gods. One gets a sense of this complexity and doubleness of nostalgia in the Bleak Soul song. I particularly like that this is hyper-produced, hyper-rationalised modern metal trying to reach back to a former version of itself through genre tropes and geared-up sonic sentimentality. The impossibility of the task, and the squeezed rage in the result — which is a great, fun song — says something significant about the phenomenon of nostalgia, and the apparent impossibility of immortality today. I can think of only one thing that would have improved this song, and deepened its resonance, and that’s a perfunctory thirteen-minute outro tacked on the end. Just for nostalgia’s sake.
