Same town, same planet, different me. A takedown of nostalgia.
Cville Hotel Bones, Image by Martin E. Dodge
The best memories are often rooted in nostalgia for a time that never was. I am not a native of the town I live in. But I have now lived here longer than many, and despite my extensive knowledge of the area, I feel more out of place than ever. My priorities changed as I grew older and diverged from the town's social and entertainment trends. Restaurants and old haunts have passed, as have friends, and some moved away while I stayed. New buildings and unfamiliar names encroach upon my mental graveyard.
My new hobby is digital photography. I must include the word "digital" because film photography is trending in some circles. There is too much to unpack about photography, but it is the perfect reference for my nostalgia narrative. Black-and-white photography, especially vintage images, captures how nostalgia distorts truth into fantasy.
Art snobs who do not make art often tout the significance of this composition, that photographer, or some real or imagined process. Snobs who do make art but imitate famous artists find everything derivative. Nothing is new, and everything is filtered through interpretation by supposed experts.
The black-and-white pictures from olden times often look stylish. I am talking about buildings, towns, cars, clothes, and any other subjects that are people-based. Black-and-white or not, recreating historical images with current equivalents will not hit the same way. Nobody sees the process used to create an image. We only see the familiar and don’t know the context.
Take a random picture with your phone. No expert can tell you what to think, and your subconscious is seconds away from erasing the scene from your short-term memory. But the image will live on in the photo gallery, as if it were meant to have a purpose. Life is full of the profoundly mundane. So, unless there is a massive story, pop culture event, or meme attached to a new derivative work, it will be forgettable or meaningless.
So where does that leave us as we wander through our time on the planet? We are doomscrolling for a spark of joy instead of discovering what makes us happy. The flood of images we view today is becoming less human because social media has sculpted our aesthetics, and now AI is feeding us the most successful derivatives and summarizing what the experts should think. We are not only forced to pay for this new existence, but we are also buying the notion that there is no other way. The only new derivative we are not experiencing is an official multi-tiered subscription service for our quality of life.
Nostalgia is not a state of mind known for solution strategies. Many people do not experience nostalgia because times were and still are horrific. Genuine poverty, oppression, and destruction have no equivalents in culture-war politics. Culture-war politics cause these societal conditions and enrich the people who succeed in fanning the flames.
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, on planet Earth. This town is not what it was, and I am not the same as when I moved here. The past is more a cautionary tale than a story to emulate. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. By that measure, we are all crazy. And then a new crowd arrives and renames things. Then we get to do the ride all over again, but the people who recognize the process are the problem. Maybe we should look for preventive measures when analyzing the friction in our lives. We may discover a way to create a future worth remembering.
