Nostalgia

"During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing. We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realise that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena and Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken reollections; it suffices, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else."

~ Milan Kundera, "Ignorance"

Like Homer's Odysseus, I'm on a voyage of uncharted waters, of storms and tempests. And along Odysseus' arduous return journey to Ithaca after the Trojan War, I seek sense of this voyage I've set sail on.

Kundera writes of nostalgia that Odysseus suffers from, a nostalgia that is cruelly dislocated and broken from memory and recollection. The people of Ithaca remember Odysseus but feel no nostalgia. Odysseus is ridden with the scent of nostalgia and too intoxicated to remember. For there is something fundamentally different between the nostalgic and that which is remembered, there is a chasm, a gap of signification.

Like Odysseus, I am suffering from nostalgia because I can no longer remember. I have no one to remember, to the point of nausea, with. And as I reminisce more, the gulf between the nostalgic and the recollected widens. Memory is collective, nostalgia is singular. Memory is the inscription of history, nostalgia is the wonderland of imagination.

Perhaps it is then nostalgia that I am feeling. Perhaps it is then merely the imagination of what was the past, and a nostalgia of a future that will never be - because nostalgia remains the child of the imagination.

What am I doing when I write each entry, as I put ink on paper or key in words on screen? Is it not merely nostalgia that is immortalised? Is not any inscription already dislocated from truth and memory, re-scribed, re-invented, re-narrativised, adorned and furnished with the colours of nostalgia? Why, for those of us who write and believe in the power of words, write? Is this why the truth of action seems such a far cry from the fiction that we write to others, or read from others? Is that why action seems so inconsistent with expression? Does this explain the inconstancy of lovers, of friends, or all relationships? What do we miss then we tell someone we miss them and remember them - memory or nostalgia?

"You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."

~ Milan Kundera, "Identity"

It is not merely nostalgia of the life I've left behind but nostalgia for you. Because it is an imaginative past that I share, a past that to you is memory but nostalgia for me. It is an impossible future that I look back with painful fondness; it is a plausible impossibility that I weep over.