The Ruins of Nostalgia 18
As a child we dialed “SU2-8598” to call home, SU two, eight five nine eight, and the letters — SU — stood for Sunset: Sunset two, eight five nine eight, our phone number had a sunset in it, a sunset forever in the act of performing its orange gradations, built right into the phone number, which was not a phone number at all — but a scene, a scene with a number articulated into it, a scene with a sun that glowed once like an ember each time we articulated our phone number. There were also phone numbers that began LA (Lakeview) and AT (Atwater) and EM (Emerson), and so each phone number began with letters standing for a word that conjured an image — a phone number was also a phone-image — offering the dialer a setting in which to imagine: the telephone, located, the person answering the telephone, located, sitting perhaps at a little wooden table specially designed for telephoning, performing her orange gradations into the phone, in the background a sunset, in the background a lake view, in the background a neighborhood named after a Transcendental philosopher. We didn’t know why, over time, the usage changed, and the sunset was dropped from the number, and the scene went dark, the childhood phone number went dark, the sunset dropping down and down to the end of the sky, the childhood phone number went dark, the sun setting and setting and the lake view obscured by a set of numbers with no letters, the sun setting into the setting that was dismantling, nothing transcending nothing, the sun setting fast behind the woman sitting at a dismantling telephone table in the onset of the dark. Now she is only locatable in the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 53
Scenes from the lake near our childhood home had built up in our minds over the years not like geological strata neatly stacked in chronological order and amenable to labels and arrows, but like a heap of scree that occasionally shifted and then resettled in a different order. Such is the disorderly mind. Funny, isn’t it, that people throughout history have devoted their lives to dividing the day into hours, minutes, and seconds, time into years, decades, and centuries, the universe into galaxies, history into eras, rock into strata, matter into kingdoms, flowers into cultivars, buildings into rooms full of flat files and shelves and bureaus lined with false-bottomed drawers stuffed with catalogues organized by index card and albums by theme, encyclopedias arranged alphabetically — when the zyzzogeton is at least as important to us as the aardwolf. But the scenes from the lake are disorderly. Like the afternoon we watched a bunch of older kids with unruly hair blasting AC/DC from a tape deck, wearing tube tops and cutoffs, sitting on striped towels smoking cigarettes and sipping Slurpees they’d probably spiked from a stash in the car. How to file away this scene, which pops into our minds from time to time, the blasting of the AC/DC with its terrible and irresistible carnal knowledge into our prepubescent body, along with a faint bell of the desire to both turn into and not turn into one of those shaggy older kids, doing god knows what and going “nowhere,” already inducted into the halls of “screwing” and pot-smoking and driving their big, stupid cars too close to the edge of the bluff? Oh the bluff, the bluff — the bluff was nowhere near the lake, what a shitty collagist memory is, the bluff with its cargo trains rumbling along its base, its buff crest towering behind the gray-sand beach, it was a couple of miles away from the lake — and suddenly we think, maybe the AC/DC kids weren’t at the lake — but no, we tell ourselves, the AC/DC kids were at the lake, the AC/DC kids will be at the lake till the end of time, at least until the end of our time (what other time is there?), the AC/DC kids were at the lake, with their indestructible bodies and their deflowered nervous systems flooded with the drug of their enviable insolence, the boys with their turbulent hair, the girls in terrycloth tube tops will be at the lake, in their yellow or orange or hot-pink tube tops, the yellow or orange or hot-pink Slurpees, the blue Slurpees, and the mind with so little organizational redress in the ataxic mess of the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 55
Two turn-of-the-century train stations once provided ornamental ingress and egress to a single large city. One was torn down, and one was restored. But at both sites, something is missing. The commuters entering the dark misshapen warren that replaced the torn-down turn-of-the-century train station might notice the missing, let’s say, grandeur of departure, while the people exiting the restored turn-of-the-century train station might notice the vanished program of optimism for the arriving future — in which antiquated train stations are not restored, in which the past is not refurbished and retrofitted and reified, because it is universally and deliriously understood that the future is going to be so good that it’s going to demolish the past (if only by virtue of the fact that it has not yet had the chance to get fucked-up.) * As for us. All too often we felt like the future was a train that was always just leaving the station with us not on it. And so we understood the unending unease between hopes for the future and hopes for the past, we felt in our own infrastructure why every city we knew was a permanent construction site, here demolishing and there restoring, here restoring and there demolishing. For we, too, were a permanent construction site, permanently trying to understand when an edifice should be torn down, or restored — or, when to break ground to start erecting something new. * We didn’t want to perambulate and perambulate under a vaulted verdigris ceiling hermeneutic with stars considering the constellations as consolation for a world we ourselves were unable, despite all our efforts, to diagram. Oh we had tried and tried to enter the geodesic domes and the modular pods, but we kept falling backward into the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 56
We called them “tennis shoes” even though they weren’t worn to play tennis, in fact we’d never learned to play tennis, might not so much as ever have held a tennis racket in our hands, but still we wore “tennis shoes” all throughout our childhood, and adolescence, to run through the neighborhood nights for hide-and-seek, to play softball or tetherball, to walk around the lake, and it wasn’t until we left to sync ourselves up with the wider world that we understood it would be necessary to drill “tennis shoes” out of our vocabulary and train ourselves to say “sneakers” instead. It wasn’t until we had extracted ourselves from our native soil that we were able to perceive the illogic of “tennis shoes” that were not actually meant for tennis, that were meant for any sport, or no sport at all, but sometimes we still thought “tennis shoes” when we saw that type of shoe in a shop window, or in our own closet, we had never warmed to the word “sneakers,” but you had better believe we used it without fail, we knew our provinciality was leaking out all over us from a thousand holes we couldn’t even see, and as we didn’t want to be provincial, as we wanted to stand at the center of the universe with our feet clad in sneakers, as we did not want to be peripheral, or irrelevant, in tennis shoes, as we did not want to be local, locatable, as we wanted to move smoothly through the sleek corridors of extreme mobility, with no part of us catching, no element sticking, we did not wish to reveal what we did not wish to reveal. * But now that we had spent so many years sanding down our own specificity, we were starting to question our contribution to the demise of this bit of illogical language still used to the end by those who had once tied our tennis shoes onto our feet, then taught us to tie our own tennis shoes, then wore blank looks on their faces when we returned home from the wider world and said “sneakers,” then left, taking “tennis shoes” with them. Our provincial city was no longer provincial, all the people who said “tennis shoes” were disappearing, and soon no one would remember the little specific illogic of people saying “tennis shoes” for shoes that were not meant for tennis, but we remembered, and we kept “tennis shoes” in a little territory inside of ourselves that was only for ourselves, a territory we would never cede or relinquish or trade away to the wider world, a selvage on the border of our self, one tiny bulwark against the overwhelming sea we ourselves had invited to annihilate us, one islet of intactness in the ruins of nostalgia.
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The Ruins of Nostalgia 57
We sensed that we were mistaking our world-weariness for wisdom, but we didn’t know how to sift one from the other, we didn’t know how to extract disillusionment from the ability to see the world with no illusions. The world, it seemed, was still honeycombed with traps, but we no longer fell into most of them. But if we didn’t give in to persuasion architecture — the candy hearts arranged right next to the cash register—did that mean we had also sacrificed a certain ability to surprise ourselves with our own weakness? Surely a susceptibility to strategically placed sweetness sweetened our own stringencies. Oh the reward centers in the brain, imploding with impulse sugar. * If we were merely world-weary and not wise, how come we knew that revolutions eat their young, that lotuses are actually just onions, that erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (Brecht)? We knew the turquoise globe was dependent on a stand, a housing, or a cord, and we also knew it could slip away from us if we failed to hold onto it with the appropriate awe. * Was our nostalgia a symptom of our world-weariness, or was it a sign that we were finally wise enough to build our own factory-palaces of synthetic happiness churning out candy hearts in our minds? We were wise to the synthetic, but in our world-weariness — or our wisdom? — we allowed it in. We were wise to nostalgia, but in our world-weariness — or our wisdom? — we allowed it in. Butter might not have melted in our mouths, but that didn’t mean all our orifices were not of ice. We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise. We were world-weary, but we were wise enough to our world-weariness to succumb to the attractions—and the repulsions—of the ruins of nostalgia.