as the year ends, notes on nostalgia.

(most of the images in this post come from a self-imposed photo challenge, a couple years old now. though the north carolina mountain village called blowing rock has changed a lot since my childhood here, these snapshots are of things that remain exactly as i recall them, unchanged since my boyhood in the mid-1970’s.)

here’s how jb and i have spent our week on the mountain: feeding the fire, drinking bourbon, buying firewood, wrapping gifts, cooking stews, hiking, and watching netflix. mostly though, we’ve sat on the porch, sometimes glimpsing the valley below and the distant hills, but more often hypnotized by the thick, roiling  fog.

sometimes it looks like this:

mostly, it look like this:

end of the year, my love by side, happy to let minutes pass on the porch without speaking, staring into the fog, back in the town where i was a boy: a perfect recipe for thoughts on nostalgia.

nostalgia (n) pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again.

— merriam-webster dictionary

it took me a long time to learn how to answer the question ‘where are you from?’ born in winston-salem, when i was five we moved to blowing rock, and joined the 800 year-round residents there. six years later we rejoined the flat-landers, a move so fraught that even now, four decades later, my brothers and i speak of this place and what we seek here in terms of ‘redemption’.

i am from blowing rock.

‘Nostalgia’ is a portmanteau neologism coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer from the Greek nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain, ache). . . Hofer coined ‘nostalgia’ to refer to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in foreign lowlands. Military physicians attributed this homesickness, also known as Schweizerheimweh or mal du suisse, to ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Recognized symptoms included pining for Alpine landscapes, fainting, fever, and even, in extremis, death.

-from ‘psychology today’ 11.26.14

though at times i suffer from the mal du suisse, pining for this alpine landscape, i am, even while pining, deeply skeptical of nostalgia. i’ve never been one for backwards looking, and pity those people who’d eagerly return to high school or college, naming those days their happiest. (it’s their hairstyles that really get me; denying adulthood, frozen-in-time, never mind the thinning or the gray; so much cotton for the safe storage of fragile faces that have failed to evolve.)

the link between conservative politics and a sentimental stripe of nostalgia also leaves me deeply wary. despite all their backward-looking, they fail to see the pain and sorrow of the past. they scrub it clean till no heartache remains, till it’s truly no longer nostalgia at all. we’re all prone to this, but in the neocon world the rosy worldview metastasizes, becomes unhinged, pathological.

but though craven people have worked hard to give nostalgia a bad name, and though sentiment (that is, unearned emotion) is cheap and shallow, the longing for where we come from, the ghosts sited there, the hold it has on us– all of these make nostalgia worth our care and consideration.

next time: lost in the fog; three centuries in this place.