Nostalgia is a bitch / A coat I borrowed from James Dean
Sometimes I wish I could just escape into the past. A curated aesthetic rendition of an era. Salad days. I like the mien of the 60s counterculture. I like the smell of revolution. Let me get into character — I am a deadbeat out of a Jack Kerouac novel with a James Dean persona, denim clad, cigarette in my mouth, my hands in my front pockets — Bob Dylan style — a rebel with a cause. I am on the road searching for adventure and liberation, writing poetry, getting stoned, reading Camus and Ginsberg and most important of all — Getting Laid.
But what do I now do with all this aesthetic and personality? I learn the truth from nature and the beatniks. The road and memories were circular, they returned to me temporally. I saw how we got jazz. I saw how we got the blues. On a dark summer night, a black man entered a New Orleans bar. After three shots of whiskey, he lit himself a cigarette and from the dense cloud of smoke and desperation The Lord appeared. He came to him and said — ‘Let there be Jazz’. While hippies in The Village gathered in communes to smoke marijuana and trip over acid to shout — ‘No war only peace!!’.
I love the smell of revolution in the morning. Actually, anytime works, as long as there are girls and drugs. Wink wink nudge nudge.
I typically talk about cinema and music before talking about myself. But as you can see I have already indulged in both. I’m not sure what I want. Or that I exist even. I am all the writers that I have read, all the films that I have watched, all the music that I have heard, all the people that I have met and all the cities I’ve lived in. Hopeless romantics like me are stuck in the past. Novels and music from now and then, cinema from the 70s. It is comforting to think that in another era we could have made it. Perhaps we were left out and finding a way back in seems tiring.
A yearning to wander into the past is sometimes so strong because of an overbearing present or future. And some people turn sad when they are awfully young. It almost seems as if they were born that way. They feel too much and sometimes nothing at all, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Afraid to make a move, afraid to love, afraid to cry. They will read books and poems from then and now to make sense of their solitude. I believe I am one of them and you might be too. We could discuss enough art to forget that we are very lonely people.
‘Nostalgia,’ as media artist Svetlana Boym once wrote, involves ‘a superimposition of two images — of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life.’ And in the midst of our self-gratifying complicated desires and emotions, we have the internet playing the joker whispering slyly into our ears– ‘I can be anything you want me to be’, taking us across time and space, allowing us to experience anything we want in real time. It could be a Japanese City Pop track from the 80s, an old jazz track from the 60s or a Bollywood Melody from the 70s, Midnight in Paris, Before Sunrise — we manage to weave stories around them. It is personal and universal at the same time. A chance encounter like the one in Before Sunrise hardly ever occurs. Yet the heart wants what the heart wants.
And nostalgia for people and places always seems like a permanent thing. We could always come back but we could never come back all the way. “Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine and Paris is a man in his 20s in love with an older woman” John Berger wrote. I think Bombay is masculine, a jazz player; Delhi is a lady in her early 20s who loves the revolution — chants Marx in the morning and drinks herself to oblivion at night; Hyderabad is a girl who has been hurt a lot and thinks no one loves her but doesn’t see how beautiful she is. And the jazz player falls in love with the femme fatale again and she breaks his heart again.
Sometimes people and places from the past catch up with you. They have changed, you have too. But your heart skips a beat thinking about them. Yet here you go again, infatuation touches you just when you thought that it would end. And again it seems more than that but you are not sure about what you are thinking. You toss and turn all night thinking of her ways of affection only to find that it’s not different at all. You throw away your past mistakes and contemplate your future with them only to say — “What the heck”.
An expectations vs reality montage plays in your mind all the time and you are finally forced to choose reality. And reality is often disappointing. It sucks. And no one understands this bittersweet feeling of love not returned. People — they don’t understand, your friends they can’t understand and that person for whom I penned this down can’t ever understand. But then again I met a girl who sang the blues. And I asked her for some happy news. She just smiled and turned away. I am smitten again. Rock and revolution, love and romance, jazz and melancholy, people and places, both from now and then, I want them all. I want them all and end up with nothing on most days. Nostalgia is truly a bitch!
