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The False Nostalgia Syndrome
It’s not déjà vu. Nor is it a ‘remembrance of things past’---or at least not any part of my past.
I think it must be part of ordinary human experience, since most people I’ve asked about it say that they’ve experienced it or something similar. People I know, like my friend Santee, who believe in past lives---a point on which I simply have no opinion---can easily explain it as the remembrance of things past in a past life.
The feeling is powerful, sometimes (depending on surrounding circumstances) well-nigh overwhelming. It brings up thoughts that certainly used to be nearer the surface but that have (thankfully for my ability to concentrate on my work or to get anything done) over the years become submerged under the mundane, practical emotions of an adult trying to live an adult sort of life. It sweeps all that away, at least temporarily. I feel uneasy, excited, and above all, expectant. I feel on the verge of losing my detachment and of developing desire (though for what or whom I can’t say).
The feeling is most reliably evoked by that ‘ certain slant of light’ at a certain time of the day during certain seasons of the year. It’s brought on by that golden late afternoon light that down here in the flatlands reaches its peak of clarity and richness between November and late February. It’s also very reliably brought on by certain music. It’s very reliably induced, for example, by the music of Jethro Tull----not ‘Aqualung’ or the songs like ‘Locomotive Breath’ where the band is rocking out but the much stranger tunes from ‘Songs from the Wood’ or ‘Heavy Horses’ with their emphasis on ancient English legends and musical themes (not that I know anything about either, but that’s how they strike me) and on nature.
When I hear them I’m overcome with that much under-appreciated state of mind, yearning. But for what? Perhaps just for experiences that I never had? During my emotional adolescence (which lasted well into my late twenties) I was constantly battling my feverish emotions, but even marriage, divorce, and a series of (in retrospect) rather absurd affairs didn’t create the welter of emotions I feel when I hear “New Day Yesterday” (for example), “ Moths,” or “Velvet Green.” Though I was emotional in my younger days, I was never what you’d call romantic. And no one I’ve loved has loved those songs. I am not harking back to some long vanished love, trust me. I feel desire. But for what?
So when I’m riding through that particular late afternoon sunlight that’s like gold dust in the air listening to “New Day Yesterday” with tears rolling down my face, what am I crying for? It’s not a case of “It is Margaret you mourn for”---not at all. The tears aren’t tears of sadness; they are tears of impatience and of longing. It’s as if there’s something that I had, lost, and am waiting to have again. It’s as if I am reliving something (that never happened) in the expectation of having it again. I feel as if I’m standing on the brink of something joyful that I’ve had and expect to have again.
If I were a man, I expect I’d deal with this feeling by divorcing my spouse, buying a red sports car, and purchasing a 25 year old in a hopeless attempt to find what’s been lost (that I’ve never had) in sex and love (or ‘love’). But I am quite happily married and have in any case had ample experience in my life with both sex and love to know that both are comparatively workaday matters. I am ‘remembering’ something more, of which sex and love are at best mere precursors.
My friend Elinor says that the longing is for a connection to eternity, to God, to what you get (according to her) when you ‘remember who you really are and return to being your true self’ (her words) at death. “You don’t have to wait till then,” she said to me earnestly, “the kingdom of Heaven is upon you now. Think about what that means.” I think she lives a good part of her life feeling that sense of connection and joy. I’ve never read that Shirley McClain book, Dancing in the Light, and I never expect to, but the title reminds me of Elinor, whose whole life has been one way or another about her religion and who certainly seems to feel a kind of constant joy I can’t really understand or relate to.
"Perhaps you've a migraine coming on," said my husband worriedly, when I tried to describe to him what I was feeling. He didn't think it sounded like something I ought to want to have. "You're mad and this is just a further manifestation," said my friend Rumcove, when I spoke to him about it. "Take some prozac."
I don’t think that’s what these feelings are. Maybe they are just flashbacks to what I wanted---and naturally, didn’t get--- back at the time in my life when I was most deeply in love with the person to whom I felt the deepest psychic connection. Everyone has one love like that one. It has to happen when you’re fairly young and love still seems like some sort of mysterious transfiguring agency capable of working miracles. In those days, I could still share my deepest thoughts with the object of my affection. I could write poetry, and three page emails, without a trace of embarrassment. In our hundreds of ours of conversation, we each poured so much of ourselves into the other that it really did seem as if something was actually happening to us. It was the sort of feeling that makes you understand all the nonsense about two becoming one and the rest of it.
It didn’t happen of course. There’s a line from a song (not a song by Jethro Tull, but by the Moody Blues) that’s on point: “For one short time for awhile you I were joined to eternity---but now we’re split in two back to me and you like the rain rising from the sea.’ That’s exactly how it felt when we started to fall apart. We certainly never achieved any shared transcendence, though we talked about it and thought about it and I think there was a time when we both felt that we might be on the brink of it.
That love affair is long over. That longed-for moment of clarity or whatever it is (I don’t know what it is) didn’t happen then and couldn’t happen now if I were reunited with that particular man (and neither of us would wish it). At the same time, the sense of merging with another soul was as close as I ever came to the feeling that I now only dimly imagine and wish to ‘relive.’
I call it false nostalgia because I don’t know what else to call it. But it’s nostalgia for something I must have imagined because it certainly never happened. It is painful and exquisite---i.e., exquisitely painful. At the same time, it is one of the types of experience that gives me hope. Hope for what? I don’t know. Perhaps some sort of emotional reawakening or revivification---some sort of more fully realized life. But in this life, not some theoretical or actual next one.
RELATED POSTINGS
Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts.
The False Nostalgia Syndrome.
How Donne Missed the Point.
The Ghost in the Image: Photography and Memory.
Thanatology 101---The Need for an Etiquette of Dying.
Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
5:09:14 PM 
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