Back to the Future, Forward to the Past
© 2007 Dennis Patrick Slattery, used with permission

No one owns the past, but it is a grave error...
not to inhabit memory. Sometimes I think it is all we really have.
Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories, 36

The day before Thanksgiving I find myself standing with my wife in front of a fully-restored 1953 Chevrolet. Its new paint glistens in the morning Arizona sunshine in front of Big Dave's historic 50's store sitting alone along old Route 66 in Williams, Arizona. In one hour we will board the train at the Williams' depot for a 2-hour ride to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. But right now, the big hole in the earth retreats before the glistening Chevy, one very like the one I owned in the late 50s in Cleveland Ohio.

On the window is the price: $13,500. No "or best offer" attends the sticker price. Big Dave will not budge. The car's paint makes my stomach ache a bit. It is a creamy light brown, with a roof the color of fresh coffee before the cream. Inside is new upholstery. But who can forget the dashboard of their first car? It is hard metal, with a crisply-written "Chevrolet" in metal and chrome just above the radio with its black plastic dials. Big Dave says everything works "like new." How I love that phrase: when something very old is just "like new." Something nostalgic lingers in that phrase. Standing there admiring this gem, I see myself 43 years earlier cruising the local Manners' Big Boy restaurant in my used Chevrolet, looking for chicks and sporting the new wax job on the car in spring after the snows have melted and the chalky white salt streets of Cleveland have been washed clean by spring storms. Cleveland, Ohio, 1960 — Williams Arizona, 2001. What terrain lies between the landscape of nostalgia; a mysterious passageway that is both as much before me as it is in my rearview mirrors. This 1953 Chevrolet is the vehicle that transports me over space and time, for the full feel of nostalgia is both spatial and temporal as it moves to retrieve something in the future that has been lost, forgotten or discarded.

For a moment I feel like Bobby Garfield, the 50 year-old photographer in Stephen King's story, "Hearts In Atlantis" One day Garfield finds in his mailbox a package containing an old baseball glove promised him years ago in his childhood by a buddy from whom he was inseparable. Receiving the glove in the post marks his friend's death; Garfield returns to his home town to attend the funeral, only to discover that another close companion, Carol, whom he loved in that passionate intensity that 11 year-olds alone are capable of, has also died. The film's entire action is a nostalgic revisiting of those summer days in a lower class neighborhood in Connecticut. Yet Garfield, as is true of all nostalgic interludes in our lives, does not just return to a place from his past; simultaneously he moves into something in the future. So nostalgia is not just a return and a retrieval; it is a creation of something new and so moves us both forward into the past and back into a future that has possibilities based on our capacity to imagine our own history.

The Greeks gave us perhaps the most profound exploration of nostalgia yet in the Homeric epic, the Odyssey. Nostos is the Greek word for homecoming, and Odysseus takes as many years — 10 — to return home as he did fighting for Greece's honor at Troy. We might pay attention to what Homer wants us to see in this temporal symmetry. The word nostalgia also has an interesting history and etymology. From the Latin, nostalgia, it backs up to the Greek nostos which is homecoming + algos, meaning pain, grief, distress (Chambers 1136). The word is related to another, neisthai, meaning "to come, go, go back, cognate with Sanskrit nasate, "he approaches." In addition, its more current meaning of "a wistful yearning for a past or earlier time," D.H. Lawrence first used in his story, The Lost Girl (1920), according to Chambers (1136).

Nostalgic has come to mean some incident or memory "that evokes a wistful and sentimental yearning for the past (OED, 1254). But definitions, fine though they are, do not tell the entire story of this mysterious impulse in the soul to retrieve, in sorrow and in suffering, something lost, as a poultice against the pain.

After 11 September's national trauma, we all felt the clarion call to remember: to remember patriotism as the flag suddenly appeared everywhere: on tee-shirts, houses, bridges, cars and trucks; to remember to treat one another with greater courtesy; to return to normalcy, a fantasy impossible to realize. But in the trauma of violence, nostalgia appeared as a desire for something lost, blown to bits, shattered. Could we personally and collectively really re-collect the past and, like Humpty-Dumpty, glue its pieces back together? No, but the literal wish for such a move was evident everywhere. I think it was also a confused failure because it tended to literalize the movement of nostalgia too quickly and too simply. Nostalgia's motion was horizontal rather than vertical. Nostalgia deepens the experience of loss; it does not ride across the horizontal surface of life.

Homer's poem, to retrieve that marvelous epic for a moment, is a witness to the fact that nostalgia is first and foremost a poetic activity. By that I mean that nostalgia is a poiesis, a making of something new from the old. It is not just to return to something to escape the pain of the present; it is a new creation in a move to the future, to what has not quite yet been completed. A nostalgic move, when creative, is not after a perfect life, a perfect world, but a more complete one, as much as can be in space and time.

We might ask then: what is it that Odysseus "makes" on his journey home where the memory of the past, especially in the image of his patient and all-seeing wife, Penelope, guides him. When I teach this poem I like to think, in her weaving the funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, which holds the suitors at bay for a long time, until they discover that at night she unweaves what she accomplished during the day, that she actually weaves her wandering husband back into the fabric of Ithaca by her design. Penelope and Odysseus feel a ferocious nostalgia for one another; her weaving carries them finally to their marriage bed, anchored safely in Athena's olive tree, so stable, permanent, and part of the natural order, a kind of Greek version of the bowers in the Garden of Eden. That is Penelope's poiesis.

Odysseus' poiesis is captured beautifully in Books 9-12 where, safely in the palace of King Alcinoos and his Queen, Arete (which in the Greek means excellence) he tells his story and so recreates and prepares himself for his literal nostos, or landing on the shores of his homeland. Remembering where he has been gives him the correct compass reading to return and retrieve what he has lost in war. Odysseus cannot complete his nostos until he remembers himself, recollects all the forms of home that he and his men have visited; only then can he imagine himself home. My point here is that to be fully nostalgic engages a reimagining of who and what one is, to retrieve a context for one's life that has been lost or shattered by something as devastating as a war or the bombing of buildings on our own homeland.

Nostalgia speaks of a yearning, a desire in the soul for connectedness, for communitas and for continuity, all in a context that is conscious. These are the "4 C's" of nostalgia's stubborn impulse. Deep nostalgia is a poetic response of the soul to be narrated into an authentic community with others, a journey that is at the same time a homecoming. It is therefore not accidental that as soon as Odysseus finishes remembering his adventures from the time of leaving Troy in victory to arriving naked and alone on the shores of the island of the Phaecians, he is whisked home by this marvelous and magical people so quickly that when he arrives on the shores of Ithaca he has not a clue where he is. He is home but remains homeless. His nostalgia remains for a short time incomplete until he is advised and guided once more by the divine Athena.

In the fullness of nostalgia or a nostalgic fullness, I must allow myself to be in a constant tension between tenses —the past and the future through the present. Nostalgia is in-tense. It places me both behind myself and in front of myself. Nostos is both behind me as a figure or figment of imagination and before me as a promise or desire for what is yet to be realized. In nostalgia I both create and discover myself in a new context. I can feel the full force of nostalgia according to how open I am, not just to the past, but more importantly to the future — that place where déjà vu has yet to occur.

When Odysseus tells his story, recollecting himself and recreating himself in the process in Books 9-12, his telling is not only an imaginal remembrance; it is also a statement on the nature of poiesis itself: poiesis as a making, if we stay with Odysseus' own autobiographical narrative. It is a recollection into newness, a revisiting of what was in terms of promises or possibilities that might be. Is poetry, then, I wonder if Homer wants us to imagine, a nostalgic activity in its renewal and re-membering of the old and familiar? Is one of poetry's primary benefits for an individual or an entire culture, to aid in the retrieval towards what is not yet? Does nostalgia retrieve what is yet to be? How can we not remember Plato's dialogue on education in The Meno, wherein he shows through a Socratic dialogue with a young uneducated man, that all knowledge is already present in the soul, waiting for the best teacher to come along to ask the right questions in eliciting it. Could Plato be suggesting that the act of knowing is a nostalgic act, one in which something is retrieved that we did not even know we possessed? Is the act of knowing an act of homecoming, a satisfying of a yearning that is deep in the soul? Are we then most at home when we are learning?

My own thinking is that nostalgia is indeed a yearning for a transcendent reality — for some immortal part of our nature to be fulfilled in its seeking after an ultimate home. The nostalgic move is to make of our individual life a unique form, which in the paradox of existence connects us to all other forms of life, a connection that we tend to forget. If such is true, then nostalgia may reflect a desire in the soul for just such a transcendent connection, with the things of the earth and those that go beyond it. In poiesis the world and the self are made anew through what has been. To be nostalgic is to journey back and forth between the familiar and the foreign, what is yet unformed. Not mere sentimentality, which is what the gush of nostalgia can become in an age where thought and feeling are as uncritical as they are vapid, a kind of kitsch of the psyche, or a cheap and cheapening garage sale.

That 1953 Chevy that seduced me in front of Big Dave's store full of nostalgia for Starsky and Hutch, Route 66 and a Norman Rockwell America actually catapulted me forward as much as it pushed me back four decades. From it I learned that nostalgia is not so simple as retrieving or recollecting a past of peace, or prosperity, or whatever stasis pulls us back. It is rather a return to a renewal, a poiesis, a making of something new. An imagination seduced by nostalgia both repeats and renews. What is new is deeply imbedded in remembrance. If the Garden of Eden is a psychological and emotional reality, then it is in front of us to acquire, not just behind us to retrieve, like Odysseus' quest for Ithaka, not behind us as the opening act in the drama of the Old Testament. To be nostalgic is, paradoxically, to be at home with the new, the changing, with flux itself. Nostalgia resides in the narrative of newness itself, not in retreating back to some puffy comfort zone free of strife, though that can be the shallow way that nostalgia is packaged today: "Oldies but Goodies" indeed!

At Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara where I teach adult learners, many of whom are returning to school after decades to pursue a graduate degree in psychology or mythology, we gather in a lecture hall on the first day of the academic year where students are invited to introduce themselves to the other present and offer one or two things about their lives. I am always struck by how often individuals will say some variant of the following theme: "Here at Pacifica I have found a home," or "when I read the catalogue I realized that this was the home for me to study," or "when I came on campus for the first time, it was as if I were coming home." How can this be if they had never been to the campus until this day? Their heart-felt remarks confirm that homecoming, nostos, nostalgia is perhaps more in the soul, in emotional desires, than in the physical world. These new students have in essence come home to their own futures; all of them implicitly know what homelessness is and feels like in order to make the statements they do.

Nostalgia might then be finding a place in one's past that has not yet fulfilled or satisfied, and about that past finding its own place in the future. This kind of making space for the past in the future is a poetic activity, something Odysseus knew when he told his story to the enchanted people of Phaecia. What else was occuring within him was his own interior journey that would eventually allow him to be at home with himself in a strange land. The impulse of nostalgia is self-homing, discovering how once alienated, I can find a place for myself in the home of my own being.

Additionally, nostalgia involves and finds necessary a communal audience with whom to share that speaking. Perhaps the classroom is the most nostalgic of places if treated as a space for retrieval into the future than as a place for data-processing. Information passing only, without context or purpose, is the sentimental analogue of nostalgia as a retreat to the past to avoid the wounds of the world.

Let we who teach and those that learn from us and from whom we learn allow more nostalgia into our rumination — who knows what novel idea or image may erupt unexpectedly into our vision as a result of such a form of nostalgic openness. Entering nostalgia may indeed be a methodology, one of the oldest methods for teaching and learning. Homer seemed to think so.

Scars That Wound the Past

In northern Ohio in winter off the shores of Lake Erie
early morning plows packed the streets with
hard white asphalts of snow.
We'd stand shivering on street corners, faces red
from Canadian storms blasting across the
frozen lake —
Bare heads but for the slick glue of Vaseline
Petroleum jelly that turned Tom Plecek's dirty
blonde hair to granite or Jim Tercek's the color of
Dark maple tree bark standing shivering beside us.

We'd joke and spit and lift our thin-soled shoes out
of the frozen white ground, waiting, till a car slowed
to turn. Then we three or four frozen warriors would
crouch, running and slipping under the wings of the
rear-view mirrors, and grab the sharp chrome bumper
of a '53 Chevy or Buick Special sliding clumsy, with
big engines that treated our drag with the indifference
of smooth cylinders.

Down that street we'd slide, looking sideways at one another in
excited silence, holding on with frozen gloveless hands,
eyes tearing up over the white exhaust that made our
jackets stink and the jelly in our hair turn to
slush.

Once we hit a patch of cinders that had no right to be
there so early, its barbs digging into the packed snow
like burrs on summer socks and laces.
I fell forward towards the car's monogrammed emblem, now hostile
and menacing when my contorted face stretched
in the green glare of the contoured trunk.
But I forgot to let go; my finger sliced now
by the clean edge of chrome,
I fell and bled in the street.

Others relinquish the ride in fear.
We gather at the curb,
coughing poison gas from the engine's
flatus.
I cupped my left hand as it filled with blood,
flowed like time over the lip of fingers and gashed
red in the white snow. The cold air cauterized
the wound and I, only 11, walked home in the
gloom of a grey sky.

Now, decades later I stand behind a '53 Chevy
in Williams, Arizona. I know in a shock that
sharp chrome bumper, unlike me, is fully restored.
Some force begins to feed on my organs. I crouch
behind the still car and rest my fingers across the
sharp edge of yesterday; the scar on my finger,
a piece of white roadmap, a slice of Route 66,
finds its home, fits tight and snug.

I crouch low, out of mirrors' sight, and see
a beardless wondering face in the trunks' rolled
reflection.
My scarred finger opens a wound into a forest of
red faces pimpled in blotches of purple.
Home again.

In the space between wound and scar I feel open
in me a longing for the future to zipper the past,
in deep silence.
If I trace the scar like a Braille bump, its road will
take me home, the soul's via of gathering silence into itself.

Works Cited

• Barnhart, Robert K. (ed). Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
• Burchfield, R.W. (ed). The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol.III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
• Hampl, Patricia. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. New York: Norton, 1999.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph. D. is a member of the Core Faculty in Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, the author of 6 books, as well as more than 200 articles and reviews that focus on the confluence of culture, spirit, soul, myth and poetics. Dr. Slattery's work includes The Idiot: Dostoevsky's Fantastic Prince and The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture), and Station-To-Station: A Monastic Memoir. He is co-editor with Lionel Corbett of Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field as well as Psychology at the Threshold, and a volume of poetry, Casting the Shadows: Selected Poems. His most recent work is a collection of poetry, A Limbo of Shards: Essays on Memory Myth and Metaphor. He is a Fellow of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture where he teaches the classics each summer to high school teachers in a Summer Institute for Teachers. He lectures and offers workshops to a variety of Jungian groups in the United States and Canada.

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