“Nostalgia… it’s delicate but potent.” Don Draper, “Mad Men”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” which I’m currently revisiting, is a semi autobiographical novel, in which essentially nothing happens, but author Betty Smith’s vivid, bittersweet, recollections of life in the the 1910’s tenements, transports us back to a specific time…the same milieu of my grandmother who would share with me her photo albums of her large Italian immigrant family. How I loved poring over the pictures of a bygone era as she recounted stories of her 11 siblings, the way all the sisters would make the beds, “keeping company” with my grandfather in Coney Island…him looking sheepish and skinny as my grandmother squeezed him with glee. Nowhere is the concept of nostalgia, capitalized on more, than in advertising and marketing. In the tv series “Mad Men”, set in the advertising world of the 1960’s, Don Draper masterfully pitches to Kodak execs, the latest in technology… a slide projector, “not a space ship, but a time machine. A device you can use to travel backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we long to go again. It’s not a wheel…it’s called the carousel.”
Nostalgia holds fascinating aspects, some of which I will attempt to explore here, through the lenses of art and science, the personal and the collective, time and space, memory and imagination, the unconscious and self identity. Can a blog encapsulate such scope and breadth? Probably not, but one can die trying! Traditionally we think of nostalgia as a desire to return home (nostos, Greek for “nest”) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so, but we can also feel nostalgia for eras in which we never lived, such as the 80’s Facebook group to which I belong, filled with millennials! Nostalgia can also arise for those times we actually begrudgingly endured. I have experienced this first hand, from recurrent dreams of longing to go back to college…a time of my life in which I was fairly miserable. The campuses and dorms vary wildly in my dreams, but the intense emotion of longing is consistent. According to Freud, these repetitive remembrances are a way to assert control over our past. In this case, nostalgia as a mind state serves to re imagine our troublesome past in an attempt to better our future.
In 1688, the Swiss physician Dr. Johannes Hofer, coined the term “nostalgia” as a medical diagnosis for which the symptomatology included: rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety, and loss of appetite. It was originally thought to primarily affect soldiers and sailors, but the label made an indelible mark in society. Even author Emily Bronte, while away at boarding school, became afflicted with nostalgia,…its subsequent treatment a speedy dispatch home. By the early 20th century, nostalgia was considered a debilitating psychiatric, rather than neurological, illness. The object of the nostalgic state as “homeland” or a place, was expanded to include the non spatial : loved ones, carefree times, holidays, and even societal norms. Marcel Proust described these sudden, nurturant memories so well in his magnum opus “Remembrance Of Things Past” (the longest novel ever written, clocking in at over a million words!), that the term “Proustian moment” was coined. In one of the early scenes of the novel, the voice of the depressed narrator describes an encounter with a little madeleine pastry cake and a cup of herbal tea, that can only be described as transcendental. The flavor and fragrance, unexpectedly evokes a flood of childhood memories in the French countryside, imbuing him with a renewed sense of grace….a sense of peace, safety and gratitude …the belief that no matter how hard life gets, and no matter the tragedies that befall us, there is beauty in the world and these fragmented recollections are “like souls….in the immense edifice of memory.”
In the mind body landscape, a plethora of tools are at our disposal.…whether of a scientific or spiritual bent, but I would venture to say that art is underrated! One could even argue that all of psychoanalysis can be found in art and literature. As Tolstoy lamented “Art is long, life is short”, but what triumphs over the destructive power of time better than art? Years ago I stumbled upon the film “Nostalgia” by the director Andrey Tarkovsky, and it was unlike any other prior film experience. The film was meandering, long, and seemingly plotless, but I found myself transfixed to this painterly, dreamscape of a visual fugue. Tarkovsky, an artist obsessed with the concept of time, was not concerned with entertainment, but of contemplation, and his films demand of the viewer to be part of the experience. He maintained the belief that cinema was the only way to record the moral qualities inherent in time itself. Asserting that time and memory were two sides of the same coin and that without time, memory could not exist, and without memory a human is bereft of self identity and connection to others. As a film geek, I concur that movies are the closest thing we have to a memory bank in visual form. In the case of “Nostalgia” (and Tarkovsky’s entire oeuvre), it is the journey into a person’s inner world…their psychology… a film that imitates life, and would lead to life imitating art. You may be thinking,”What does any of this have to do with my life or the present? I thought we were supposed to stay in the present moment?” Stay with me! By shattering plot driven narratives, cinema can illustrate non linear states of the mind in which past, present, and future are fused into the inner self. In order to understand ourselves better, we need to step out of the temporal plane, and art can serve as a tool. As Tarkovsky notes in his work “Sculpting in Time”, “Given that art expresses the ideal and man’s inspirations towards the infinite, it cannot be harnessed to consumerist aims without being violated in its very nature.”
Returning to the film, which recounts the story of a Russian poet, Gorchakov, who journeys to Italy to research the life of a Ukrainian serf who became a renowned composer in Bologna, Italy in the 18th century, only to become stricken with nostalgia and return home to poverty and suicide. Tarkovsky himself left the Soviet Union, became exiled, separated from his wife, his son, his farm house, and subsumed with what he described as “the stifling sense of longing that filled the screen, which was to become …the painful malady within myself…my lot for the rest of my life.” One of the locations in the film includes the thermal baths of healing waters, made famous by St. Catherine of Siena, in which for centuries travelers would wade, for ailments of the liver, spleen, stomach and skin. The water was believed to be particularly effective for expelling “melancholy”. Entranced by the pool, Tarkovsky employed it as the locus of the movie. Gorchakov, who has a heart condition and is accompanied by an Italian translator named Eugenia who bears an uncanny resemblance to a Botticelli painting. Eugenia pines for everything she can’t have including the love of Gorchakov, while he yearns for his homeland. I remember viewing “Nostalgia’s” long meditative sequences, and feeling an array of emotions, but it was the six minute long, uninterrupted, unedited take of Gorchakov crossing the drained pool with a candle, despite the wind threatening to extinguish it, that had me on the edge of my seat. A single task being carried out and completed in real time. One forgets why they even started it, much like writing this blog, it becomes about the act itself… you’re in a constant present. When he finally succeeds, his heart promptly gives out…The final shot represents one man’s inner division being made whole at last… the hypnotic image of a gothic cathedral on a Tuscan hill and a Russian dacha merging into one, indissolubly. As Tarkovsky expressed, “It is a way of preserving time which in theory gives us the possibility of moving backwards, freely, eternally.” More on the power of memory and nostalgia as a motivating force in Parts 2 and 3 !
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