BACTERIA READER 03: On Nostalgia
Nostalgia, I feel it boil up like slow heat. This heat has its own language, causing the present moment to retreat into the background. Memory, like a drug in the way it distorts reality, observes the past through rose-tinted glasses. Sometimes in vain, I drape these stories over my collar bones, like a shawl of intricate lace, or like the skin of a hunted animal.
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After the heat simmers I’m left swinging, a pendulum suspended between then and now. I cast a silver net over it all to consolidate the fragments; gathering memories caught like sea shells, hoisted up from the subconscious, shining pearlescent and singing the songs of sirens.
To return to a person or place is to stare into the eyes of a ghost. Half real, half hallucination. Sometimes I return to the past through my senses; the smell of familiar perfume, a gesture of body language, the prosody of a voice close to my earlobe, echoing into the bone marrow.
Writers are thought of as sentimental creatures, developing the habit of recording moments as a way of experiencing life twice, or never letting something go. Pouring over the tactile and time travelling practice of remembering, of never forgetting. Collecting memories like lockets filled with faded photographs.
To return to a person or place is to stare into the eyes of a ghost. Half real, half hallucination. Sometimes I return to the past through my senses; the smell of familiar perfume, a gesture of body language, the prosody of a voice close to my earlobe, echoing into the bone marrow.
Writers are thought of as sentimental creatures, developing the habit of recording moments as a way of experiencing life twice, or never letting something go. Pouring over the tactile and time travelling practice of remembering, of never forgetting. Collecting memories like lockets filled with faded photographs.
If it were made visible, nostalgia would be a concert hall, equipped with all of the baroque details, a symphony of recollection. The instruments tuned by time, their sounds receding slowly into the background until there is nothing but the ambience of an echo left behind.
Every memory leaves its own imprint, we are coded with the essence of everything and everyone we have loved. Each person or place that we visit has its own halo, resonance, vibration. They remain written on our bodies like a map or compass. We are oriented by the past, it walks us into the future.
Every memory leaves its own imprint, we are coded with the essence of everything and everyone we have loved. Each person or place that we visit has its own halo, resonance, vibration. They remain written on our bodies like a map or compass. We are oriented by the past, it walks us into the future.
There have been times when I arrive at the page still quivering with the ink of someone. Their stain left on my clothing, written on the inside of my skin. I hold them like water in my mouth until it is time for them to be spilled, released, spat out. Returned to the sea like a stolen pearl, which never belonged to me.
Storytelling can be a libratory practice in this way, it helps us metabolise experiences and return them to the outside. Diffusing their hold on us. So we can step outside of the memory and back into the warm blood of reality.
WORDS: Shannon May Powell.
IMAGES: Japanese Sword Guards (1916)
William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef (1893)
WORDS: Shannon May Powell.
IMAGES: Japanese Sword Guards (1916)
William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef (1893)