Maps of Nostalgia
How to Cut the Cord of Time & Place
This piece is part of the 2nd Symposium (theme: Nostalgia) of the Soaring Twenties Social Club, “the home of the 2020’s artistic renaissance,” founded by Thomas J Bevan. I’m new to this group, but if you’re currently subscribed to I Won’t Keep You, it is because of your awareness of STSC!
Nostalgia’s start was in a heartache for home. Yet now nostalgia is often used to describe a longing for the past.
Place vs. Time.
But nostalgia is as much Time-based as Place-based, because the home I long for is not the lateral home that still stands (if it even does), it is the once-ago home, the structures and past versions of people studding our history; untouched by time.
Where are the Maps of Nostalgia? Maps of place, with layers of vellum sitting in for linearity.
If I was a Cartographer of Longing, would that soften my Homesickness for you? Push a pin into each of the places we have been, and string an umbilical cord between them. Trace the web of coiled connective tissue with the hand you used to hold.
A friend of mine who was raised on the island of Guadeloupe told me of a tradition where the umbilical cord of a newborn infant is buried by the godparents, and then a tree is planted in that very same spot. She said, “In Creole, la lombric an mwen téré, means ‘home is where my umbilical is buried.’” (1) Do Creole children suffer less from nostalgia because they know where their corporeal origin stories are buried?
Ever a home to return to.
What is Death’s umbilical cord? If we snip a nutrient-giving cord at birth, what cord is snipped at death? I am tired of being tethered, yet I long to be tied (down).
The first pin in Your Nostalgia Map would be the pecan orchard in Mexico where your grandmother slashed “X”s in the dirt to keep the spirit-driven storms away.
The final pin in Your Nostalgia Map would be at the prairie, where you opened a hole in your head for the moonlight to flood through. Telluric currents flowed from your wound to soak the soil so deeply the grass remained green long past frost.
But there are no maps, and I avoid most of the places we used to go because of a daily desperation to make place stand still.
Maybe nostalgia is longing for what no longer exists.
The mindfuck of our bodies continuing to recall the sensations of a person or place when our minds know the truth of absence.
No such sensations - aroma, sight, sound, and touch - exist, and maybe they never did. I can barely remember the feeling of your thumb pressed against what you called “the sleep button” on my forehead.
Nostalgia is the word humans devised to explain away the crushing consciousness of forgetting.
The language of Guadeloupe is Antillean Creole, but when I entered this into google translate for Haitian Creole, the result was “the earthworm I grounded” which is pretty fantastic to think of the umbilical cord as earthworm.
I still love how the premise is that you'll keep these posts short so as not to take too much of our time, but they're so rich and dense that, for instance, I had to read this one three times and considered entire conversations that could gestate from it lasting hours unto themselves.
I read this last night but it was the first thing I thought of when I woke this morning. Truly beautiful and lyrical and profoundly moving. There's just something about the line 'to soak the soil so deeply the grass remained green long past frost' that I know will stay with me and revisit me again and again.
I think the symbolism of the umbilical cord extends beyond the space of the piece and moves to that of the relationship between you as a writer and us as your readers. It becomes an intimate bond between us where experience and thought flows from you to us, feeding us, making us grow better through reflection. Thank you.