The novel Ignorance by Milan Kundera paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations. It also explores people’s selective memories as a precursor to ignorance in order to avoid recalling certain disturbing events. Nostalgia can also be an uncomfortable sensation: to feel, discover, know one cannot repeat what was once lived, enjoyed.
Kundera’s novel helped me -a colonial migrant in New York City- to deal with issues such as memories and how they can mislead the person by formulating false or partial or blurred visions of the past. Furthermore, it gave me a window into how so many of my adult students faced their new “culture”, different ways of doing things. Immigrants themselves, quite often, they were having a difficult time making adaptations to the new society, idealizing their past lives in their countries of origin, and struggling, trying to understand how their own children approached life related issues that were so different from how they had done it “back home”; including deciphering the new hybrid languages/codes (Spanglish, Portoñol, German/Turkish) developed by what the literature calls “first generations”.
My psychoanalyst friend and woman with a proven and documented social and political activism history says, “It [the past] feels more real than the present” for so many who prefer to lounge in the nostalgia realm than facing the present. One can continue exploring “nostalgia” and find so many deeper alleys, corners, paths that can be used to explain it. From playful activities (read Philippe Aries’ chapter on games in his book Centuries of Childhood and link it to today’s obsessions with computer games), that can be enlightening, refreshing, to those nostalgia mindsets that can be frightening and dangerous. I saw so many children falling into the traps of parents or adults who were not able to make a smooth transition into their new “cultures”, understand what was happening. These were kids that became tools of manipulative, dogmatic, nasty or confused adults and parents, falsified copies, fossils, of what they left behind.
In one of the most eloquent poems on nostalgia and clash of values, "Valle de Collores", Luis Lloréns Torres explores the conflicts experienced by a well travelled and educated man, who, after achieving glories and power, desires for a return to his past and simple life in the village of Collores, but knows it would not be possible. So many young lives, products of industrial societies, were lost during the sixties, when these idealists went to live in “primitive villages” all over the more rural world in search of Nirvana, recreate a past that never existed for them.
The opposite can also happen, when one remembers the pleasures of the past without feeling the need to be back in time, or recalls its pains without experiencing them as if they would be happening again. I see a poster of 1980’s New York City, relive the time, the places where I used to hang out, feel quite happy to have been there, not wanting to return to the past, but so glad to be in the present, seeing how the world is moving thru its eternal changing phases, a critique here and there, wondering where the pandemic would lead us, while being served by a member of the tattoed generation, more universal than mine ever was: a young woman wearing hot pants and a t-shirt printed with Bad Bunny’s mantra, “deja que el flow fluya” (let the flow flow).
My psychoanalyst friend and woman with a proven and documented social and political activism history says, “It [the past] feels more real than the present” for so many who prefer to lounge in the nostalgia realm than facing the present. One can continue exploring “nostalgia” and find so many deeper alleys, corners, paths that can be used to explain it. From playful activities (read Philippe Aries’ chapter on games in his book Centuries of Childhood and link it to today’s obsessions with computer games), that can be enlightening, refreshing, to those nostalgia mindsets that can be frightening and dangerous. I saw so many children falling into the traps of parents or adults who were not able to make a smooth transition into their new “cultures”, understand what was happening. These were kids that became tools of manipulative, dogmatic, nasty or confused adults and parents, falsified copies, fossils, of what they left behind.
In one of the most eloquent poems on nostalgia and clash of values, "Valle de Collores", Luis Lloréns Torres explores the conflicts experienced by a well travelled and educated man, who, after achieving glories and power, desires for a return to his past and simple life in the village of Collores, but knows it would not be possible. So many young lives, products of industrial societies, were lost during the sixties, when these idealists went to live in “primitive villages” all over the more rural world in search of Nirvana, recreate a past that never existed for them.
The opposite can also happen, when one remembers the pleasures of the past without feeling the need to be back in time, or recalls its pains without experiencing them as if they would be happening again. I see a poster of 1980’s New York City, relive the time, the places where I used to hang out, feel quite happy to have been there, not wanting to return to the past, but so glad to be in the present, seeing how the world is moving thru its eternal changing phases, a critique here and there, wondering where the pandemic would lead us, while being served by a member of the tattoed generation, more universal than mine ever was: a young woman wearing hot pants and a t-shirt printed with Bad Bunny’s mantra, “deja que el flow fluya” (let the flow flow).
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