Journeys of any kind—physical, mental, virtual—are
multilayered things. There is the experience of the present, in terms of the
stimuli of the immediate; then there is the remembrance of the past, the paradigms
and the vocabularies that frame the way we see and respond to these stimuli;
and there is the anticipation of the future, the steps we need to take to
further immerse ourselves or shift direction, along with the wondering about
what it all means.
Further we are all constantly narrativizing our lives, plugging
moments of existence into a storyline, imagining the way we will be read on
social media, and shaping the retelling of our journeys to provide coherence to
the ongoing script of the self.
Maybe the yearning for coherence and meaning forces such a
perspective, and who am I to argue with that, being as culpable as anyone else
in this project of self-making and self-presenting?
These past few months have been particularly poignant for me
in relation to this project, having had the luxury of time and solitude to
think through and about the various moments that have made up my own life—personal,
professional, political. I have had the opportunity to discover new people and
places and rediscover old ones, some unearthed from distant memory formed more
by photographs in an album than by tangible experience.
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| Pasadena, 1966 |
Thanks to the indulgence of my nephew and his wife, I was
able to drive through the streets of Pasadena and find my kindergarten school.
Two old photographs, now lost somewhere in the detritus of multiple moves, along
with the remembrance of my teacher’s name and a blurry sense of her face, are
the only things that tie me to this spot. I have the vaguest memories of that
first school year in this CalTech neighborhood: Mrs Nevra’s 1960s beehive
hairdo, a girl called Maeve who walked with me a few times and told me never to
“step on the cracks”, and the privilege of banging dusters in the backyard at
recess. Yet, for some (not-so-inexplicable) reason it was important to me to
find the yellow building and recover the reality of having been there, half a
century ago (groan, the years, the years!).
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| Pasadena, 2016 |
And then, the Grand Canyon. I always said I had never been
there, but that was only partly true. I could not remember having been there,
despite the images in that same old photo album and my mother’s occasional
references to a cross-country drive that we undertook in a blue-and-white
Chevrolet in 1966. Fifty years later, a dear old friend and I spent a wonderful
day riding on a bus listening to a garrulous driver-cum-guide educate us on the
history-geography-culture-ecology of the Arizona desert. Apart from the warmth
of really good friendship, I rediscovered bits of sandstone-etched images that
were now busily acquiring a second layer of remembering-in-the-making.
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| Grand Canyon, 1966 |
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| Grand Canyon, 2016 |
Many people say that nostalgia is not only useless, it is
counter-productive, particularly in political and social change projects. Reminiscing
takes time and energy from what needs to be done. But we might also argue that
it provides a motivation for movement, a template for where we might want to
go, or a framework for what we might want to recover. Maybe, nostalgia adds
meaning and perceptual depth to our personal stories. It is in the journey to
recover our past that we sometimes find ourselves, and in the process are
given—in a more conscious way—a means to curate our memories and reclaim (or
discard) elements that give us pleasure, or that define our pain. Maybe, it allows
us to map our lives in a way that redeems those of us who feel like we’ve stumbled
through the maze of existence. Maybe, it gives us an appreciation for where we
are now and the things we’ve lost or gained along the way.
I’m certainly not arguing for wallowing in the past. But
once in a while there may be something to be learned from taking a quick detour
from the present and pause at instances—and places—that can give us clues to
that inner self.
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