Nostalgia produces wonder. It's a sort of licit pornography in the sense of allowing you to escape the confines of the familiar via, in this case, time-travel. It’s similarly jaw-dropping if not in the same way. *grin*
To see Olivia Newton-John again in 1978 via YouTube is to be shocked by the lapse of time, not just in her but in me. It’s to see oneself as “other” almost, and sometimes I wonder if the “hermuentic of discontinuity” that some apply to Vatican II applies to me. YouTube is to nostalgia what marijuana is to the munchies. (Or so I've been told, as I've never inhaled or imbibed.)
Sounds and smells and sights are the common triggers of nostalgia. Taste and touch less so. The smell that most takes me back is my undergrad apartment complex, the smell of bleach from the downstairs laundry and the stale-smelling hallway carpets. There's also some additional undefinable quantity that perhaps is imaginary, in the same way a fourth generation Irish-American still thinks there is part of him would recognize his ancestral home via his senses if it appeared before him.
Sound-wise, the sassy opening chords of Olivia Newton-John’s “Let Me Be There” take me there. Just four notes seem to trigger some memory in the distant past, as if a distant me was unwittingly giving the current me some signal simply due to the fact that at some moment in my past I was surreally present during those four notes.
One of the bigger surprises about growing older is to learn that that what you thought was utterly evanescent in the past has lingered, in an almost material way, into the future. And often not the moments you anticipated. They can be almost banal.
It can occur with respect to people, in a way that becomes almost mythical. When I was in the hospital for a week at the age of seven, I recall mostly only a miasma of pain, misery and boredom interrupted by terror. I don’t recall that my childless great aunt came and visited me almost every day while I was there. And yet I was told this by my Mom and that made Mary my favorite aunt. Mary’s actions may not have been remembered at the time but when relayed to me later, they had a big impact. I felt loved and accepted when I needed it. (It may be sort of like photographs in a vacation album – you begin to confuse whether you actually remember events or you’re remembering photos from the event.) But I learned that actions have consequences beyond the moment. The things you do today will resonate beyond you. It also suggests our mutual dependence: without Mary’s visits, Mom could not have told me about them. (That is, Mom would not lie.) And yet without Mom, Mary’s visits would’ve had no lasting value. It was only this “community of saints”, this combination of Mom and Mary, that helped give the hospital visit some meaning beyond seemingly useless suffering.
During childhood, a million words run by and over you and surprisingly few stick. Words have to be received at a certain moment to be effective. They must be received either for the first time, or be particularly dramatic in an insulting or flattering way, or must be received in a receptive (usually vulnerable) situation. One of the few words I recall from the hospital visit was the first time I heard the utterly foreign concept of someone offering to take my place. I was undergoing this torture when Dad said that he would take my place if he could. At the time it seemed simultaneously the most ludicrous and yet most wonderful thing I’d ever heard. The ludicrous part was: doesn’t he know how horrible this is? He must be insane! But the words were beautiful because I believed them. And now, after the passage of years, I see that it was something a father would do for his child. It’s not as shocking now as it was then; I can imagine myself going through something like that if my kid didn’t have to. But then I couldn’t imagine it. That is ultimately, of course, the way we must see God. That He’s simultaneously ludicrous and wonderful.
Maybe the way to use pleasure, rather than having pleasure use you, is to give thanks to God for each instance of it. To mentally associate the source of pleasure with God, as is self-evidentally the case since our senses would not exist without God! This will result in being able to give up pleasure when called for, for God out of gratitude. If one only associates suffering with God and pleasure with self, then it seems you’ll be bass-ackwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment