The Traps of Nostalgia

The Traps of Nostalgia
May 14, 2013
Verónica Vega

HAVANA TIMES — That the pangs of nostalgia can deceive us, painting our
memories of the past with bright colors, is a feeling I had for the
first time some years ago, while reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

As I've grown older and had my share of bitter experiences, I have,
expectedly, become slightly more suspicious of any romantic perception
of the past. Even when a melody takes me back to a distant love, an
earlier time in my life, or those fantasies about the future spawned by
the excesses of youth, I take a step back and try to organize my
memories, take apart and analyze past situations carefully and try to
recollect faces and attitudes objectively.

Our upbringing gives us an exaggerated sense of longing for times past.
Not only in Cuba, where the early years of the Revolution are constantly
idealized and the martyrs of yesteryear turned into something of a
mystical cult. Generally speaking, this is true everywhere.

Nostalgia is exploited in the mass media, through retro fashions and in
most romantic songs, which are often dripping with cheap sentimentalism.

We are taught to hold on to things (with our hands, our eyes or our
minds), in a world where life is just the opposite of this, an endless
process of transformation, which starts with our very own image. Our
friends depart, not only to a "better place", beyond the horizon or the
grave, but also because circumstances, interests and paths diverge.

Couples part ways, parents depart, children depart. Even if they do not
leave their homes (as is often the case in Cuba, owing to the great
housing problem we face), children experience body and mental changes
and our relationship with them similarly changes.

Objects, no matter how much we cherish them, ultimately wear down or
break. The spaces around us assume new forms. Ideas change, "the times"
change.

So, why go against such natural tendencies? Why not conclude, like
Tagore, that:

"(…) Beauty is sweet to us, because she dances to the same fleeting tune
with our lives.
Knowledge is precious to us, because we shall never have time to
complete it.
All is done and finished in the eternal Heaven.
But earth's flowers of illusion are kept eternally fresh by death.
Brother, keep that in mind and rejoice."

A change in perspective.

I aim these comments especially at myself, for nostalgia seems to follow
me like my own shadow. Lately, I catch myself avoiding places I went to
with my younger sister, who left the country years ago, or with a friend
who no longer lives in Cuba, or circumventing the building where my
mother once lived.

What I recoil from most violently, however, is the severe deterioration
shown by the places of my youth, the places that once housed my dreams:
the "Russians' beach" in Alamar, the swimming pool I used to go to with
my sister and our kids, places that have become ruins, a collection of
dilapidated walls submerged in foul-smelling water.

A movie theatre in Old Havana, where I saw an unforgettable film, is now
unrecognizable, buildings that are torn down and replaced with parks,
stores or kiosks that strike me as fake, as though clumsily superimposed
on the composition using Photoshop.

It terrifies me to come across this past, trampled on by a derisive
future (now present), corroded by an inherent weight I was unable to see
before and now leaps at me from its ruins.

Some days ago, however, these visual impressions produced the opposite
effect on me: I was able to see, with the utmost clarity, that one tends
to miss those things that brought one pleasure at one point in time,
isolating those things in one's memory, severing them from their
evolution as events – separating them from their "before" and,
particularly, their "after".

As such, we do not see the experience as a totality, or where the causes
behind our loss lie, or the fact that what we miss is but a detail in a
ceaseless flow of events.

It makes sense that a battered city, at once a witness to and an
intimate part of our identity, should have an impact on us, more so when
its image is frozen in the instant we felt we were flourishing, with the
city, into something beautiful and prosperous. Carefully pulling apart
my memories, I find only scattered splashes of splendor, as I do right now.

What, for instance, do I miss about Centro Habana, where I lived in what
was once a hotel, a building with corroded beams and walls that reeked
of humidity? A building that, as early as the 1980s, looked as though
about to collapse, a building that's still there, inexplicably defying
gravity?

From Vedado, perhaps you could say I miss what the Coppelia ice-cream
parlor was years ago, the variety of flavors and the richness of the
ice-cream, the ice-tea we would drink at the intersection of 23 and G
streets, at noon on a sweltering summer day.

Perhaps I miss the small delicacies, which, today, have simply moved
elsewhere. The things saved from the wreckage are no longer where they
used to be, true, but, in the end, we have gained more than what is
perceivable at first glance.

Because, what we believed was about to come into existence before was
simply a mirage. It was an illusion sustained by our alliance with the
Soviets, an impasse in the real process of transformation which has not
ceased, not even in moments of apparent inertia.

As a Hindu proverb proclaims, "Though lies may run for a year, the truth
shall catch up to them in a day." Cuba is, today, more than what it was
when it was nothing but a promise. Idealizing our past does not help us
understand our existence or how the world works. It envelops everything
with a thick fog, making us lose our way, while history continues to
move forward.

I believe that what we miss, most of all, are our own dreams, our minds'
great flights of fancy. In this sense, our nostalgia is no different
from the nostalgia a person living in the First World experiences, when
they feel sad at being unable to recognize the neighborhood they were
born in (even if this is owed to inevitable progress).

A friend told me that, one day, he was walking down the street with his
father. Coming to a halt before Havana's Parque Central, the father
froze and his gaze went blank. When asked what was happening to him, he
replied: "it's just that I saw…if you could only see what I just saw! I
just remembered how everything looked before (1959)." In his eyes,
rather than nostalgia, one could see pain.

Those who feel they benefited from the revolution will likely react in
anger, and I understand them. I also think that, if change came, it was
because something was festering, somewhere beneath the splendor. Might
it not be a positive sign that the festering wound is now on the
surface, like those pustules that, once burst, can only be drained and heal?

Yesterday, the main character in a film I saw said something which left
me thinking. She said that one is afraid of the future because, in a
way, one feels that nothing is going to change, that the future will
ultimately be something like what we have now. But things do change. And
if things do not yet feel right, if they still do not satisfy us, if we
continue to harbor a feeling of lack, of conflict, this means that we
have not yet reached the end.

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=93067