About memory and nostalgia
This is an entry from my journal.
Living in the present moment demands situational awareness. You pay attention to your immediate surroundings and you notice changes in your environment. Those you discern exactly because you have a mental representation of the setting. Change is understood as the difference between one representation and another.
When it rained heavily during this past Sunday’s early morning hours, the stream adjacent to my land brought down a lot of gravel and mud. I have taken care to build infrastructure there with the intent of making my areas less susceptible to flooding. My work has yielded great results. I sleep peacefully now even during heavy storms.
Mountains erode naturally, even though human negligence can greatly speed up the process. Over the course of millennia every existing system on this planet will disintegrate, though the capacity for integration will remain latent in its constituents.
Entropy does not undo systematisation. It does not stop the forces that turned the originary star dust into bacteria, and dog, and plant, and human, and Earth or, indeed, that gave that very dust its innate pattern qua dust. Entropy is the same process of transfiguration that engendered the forms in the first place, which remains in effect ceaselessly, such that existing forms give way to forms-yet-to-be in an ever-lasting flux.
It is, because it is becoming; it becomes, because it is.
Presence with memory
Our experience is similarly one of being and becoming. There is no fixed point to it. One may not cling on to their adolescence, for example. What many refer to as the “good old days” are but a representation whose traces remain imprinted in memory. It is not their lived experience anymore as it does not form part of their environment nor does it characterise their interpersonal relations.
Though memory is inherent to one’s presence. It stays with them and it produces consequences in their life, such as by underpinning future-oriented projects or by determining how they choose among mutually exclusive sets of outcomes. A memory, then, is ever-present. What generated it may have transpired, but the memory itself persists to condition each situation as it unfolds.
This is true for what is thinkable, such as feelings one has about what their grandmother told them when they were little. It also is the case for information that is encoded in the very fibre of our being, unconscious to us yet definitive of our condition. Evolution effectively is the compounding and subsequent reconstitution of encoded memories.
That I am able to type this out is an indication of memory embedded in muscle tissue. I do not actively think where to move my fingers as I input the individual characters. While I am thinking through these words, my focus is on their sequence and the meaning they form. Because I have memory at the level of the muscles, I do not need to expend my limited capacity for concentrated thought on the keyboard. My attention remains undivided, directed at the topic I am expounding on.
The layering of memory
I speculate that whatever we consider as supreme skill effectively is an extraordinary layering of memory. Talent, in this regard, is the capacity to establish layers of automaticity which free the person’s attention from more basic tasks to then channel it towards higher levels of complexity. When done to great effect, there is excellence.
I think as much because I know from my experience with football how much knowledge is involved in each part of the process. Walking and then running is already something that needs to be learnt. Keeping your balance is a skill as well. Controlling the ball with your feet is already a challenge unto itself. Knowing where you are on the field is another difficult part of the sport that you have to develop. Then figuring out where your teammates and opposition players are relative to you and the ball. These and others are all improved through continuous practice and the accumulation of experience.
The person with an elite talent, then, is one who incorporates inputs so effectively that there is no waste in their efforts. They learn quickly and integrate findings into their existing corpus of knowledge to great effect. Furthermore, they are able to discern patterns among the mental representations they have, such that they can better predict outcomes. To continue with the example of football, you can recognise a skilful player before they even touch the ball: they move around with purpose, knowing where to be at each phase of play.
The layering of memory down to the little things
Excellence thus manifests as situational awareness. It is about understanding the prevailing conditions so well that you are no longer inhibited by them. One may think of the surfer who succeeds only when they ride the wave, but who otherwise experiences degrees of failure. Excellence consists in one’s alignment or harmonious adaptation to their situation. The most excellent is the most aligned.
I can write regularly at length because of the aforementioned layering. Writing is a form of collecting one’s thoughts. This is the case regardless of the topic and skill level. Every act of writing involves focus, which only happens in a state of calm.
I have been practising all the little things for long enough that they are embedded in my life as second nature. Each article flows naturally and I am able to quickly put it together. This was not always the norm. I remember when I first had to write a 2000-word essay for college: it took me months to do it. Now I write as much practically every day. And the quality is superior to what I could have achieved back then. I quite literally am a different person in this regard.
The office setup is as I need it to be. The keyboard is configured to my liking. My computing environment is optimised accordingly. My room has plenty of light. It is quiet outside. I can listen to the birds right now, while I can look at Olympos in the distance. There are no notifications on my phone and I am not on social media anyway, so I do not feel pressured to direct my focus away from the screen every few minutes. Similarly, there is not much happening on my computer screen. It is largely static and text-centric. All these in concert facilitate uninterrupted creativity.
Though the tools alone do not make the artisan. There is also work to be done at the personal level. On the technical front, this is about practising the relevant skills, such as to read, to speak, to write, to think things through. All have attentiveness in common. Then there is the overall constitution of the person. Benign routines that are stable contribute to a state of vitality.
This has been my normality for many years. It actually improves over time in what may be likened to a process of compaction. Every single day I wake up feeling energetic. My emotional state is stable as well. I do not have mood swings. I do not feel demotivated one day and excited the next. Reading something does not upset, anger, or otherwise push me towards an extreme reaction. It might sound boring in this regard, but I describe it as “what you see is what you get”. So this alignment I alluded to is uninterrupted all the way down to who I am day-to-day.
It is not a matter of intelligence. Plenty of smart people feel they are not in a position to control their attention and life in general as much as they would like. Intelligence may affect the degree, such as how quickly may one acquire knowledge. Though it does not remove the need for layering. Again, I can think of the gifted kid who could perform all sorts of tricks with a football, yet owning to the absence of work on the fundamentals was not able to become a decent footballer.
What I describe here is about paying attention to the little things. To take care of every part such that they all contribute to something greater. Layering is akin to construction work. If you mess up the foundation, then you cannot build something stable on top. It also is like organising your room. If you misplace stuff, then whenever you need to bring something new in you must first remove what you had misplaced. Whereas putting everything where it ought to be saves you from the future trouble and makes you more efficient as a result.
From memory to nostos
This brings me to the Greek concept of “nostos” (νόστος), which is a constituent of “nostalgia” (νοσταλγία). Nostos refers to one’s longing for home or, more generally, the want to be at the place where they belong.
Nostos necessarily covers themes of place and of space. What qualifies a specific location as home is that it exists in a wider space of peace, or calm, or sustainability, or generally one or more conditions which render it habitable, welcoming, interesting, and so on. There can be no viable place absent factors of viability inherent to the space.
The space that nostos describes encompasses people as well. If one is thinking of their village, for example, they are factoring in the kind of relations that are possible there, the familiarity with all the locals, the attendant sense of kinship, the perception of a shared destiny, and the resulting understanding of a common good that all agree to and aspire towards.
The village itself is no longer home if, for instance, it is turned into yet another theme park for tourists. There are no locals there with whom to develop a community centred around such a common good. The theme park attracts arrivists who come and go on the basis of business incentives, plus those who are keen on a fleeting connection with a simulacrum of local culture.
Wherein we discern the predictive power of memory. One may have an intuition of home without ever experiencing it. They have a sense of what would work for them as a space of viability and a niche carved therein. Memory thus has a future orientation as well.
One may harbour nostos for a bygone era. They may also have nostos for a potential state of affairs.
Pain in general
“Nostalgia” incorporates a second Greek word as a suffix: “algos” (άλγος). It literally means pain but can be more broadly understood as malaise. Algos is used in medicine, such as “myalgia” (muscle + pain-ness) and “neuralgia” (nerve + pain-ness).
Algos is thought of as something bad and it is indeed the case in the context of medicine. Though pain as such is a messaging system, a transmission mechanism to communicate some effect. If you are sitting all day, for example, you may feel discomfort in your back. This can develop into an injury, with varying levels of severity. What this is telling you is that you need to change your ways. Do not sit for so long. Maybe modify your desk setup. Check your physical conditioning. Et cetera.
Pain is the messenger. If all you do is silence the pain, such as with pain-killers, without addressing the reason it is there, then you are shooting the messenger: the problem persists and will return to haunt you.
In being a transmission mechanism, pain is neutral. It can still communicate a sensation whose longer-term effects are benign, such as the immediate discomfort of physical training which culminates in longer-term health benefits if sustained, but which can still be injurious if overdone.
The pain of nostos
Nostos consists in memory of a past world or projection into a possible future world. It can thus develop into a malaise when it detracts or distracts from the present by means of contradicting the prevailing conditions.
A person who is guided by nostos may feel unsettled where they are. They may sense that the world around them is inimical to their stay there. They may further believe that everything is falling apart and there is no way to take control over one’s milieu. Hence algos.
This is increasingly common nowadays for a variety of reasons, such as the ongoing industrial revolution in the wake of Artificial Intelligence. Plenty of jobs are becoming obsolete and many others are being radically transformed. There is great uncertainty about the nature of change and there also is concern about the pace of the transformation. Everything seems to be breaking and it is happening fast. A person may thus feel powerless in the face of magnitudes that are far beyond their control.
In this light, nostalgia can turn into depression. It is the longing for stability, which is so strong that it takes away from other considerations, such as the need for adaptability.
Though ours is a world of admixture. Nothing is purely good or bad. Whatever we get has elements of both. The result is thus subject to the application and extent thereof. In other words, it is a matter of degree. Even in this state of unrest, nostalgia in response to apparent powerlessness can inspire a root-and-branch rethink of priorities which can engender a bigger shift in one’s values and patterns of behaviour.
The individual may recognise the importance of community, for instance. They understand that it is no longer viable for each individual to live in their own filter bubble. They need to find the others and to be collocated with them.
Pain, then, becomes the driver for thoroughgoing reform whose telos is the cultivation of a sense of belonging, the formation of a shared destiny with others, and the establishment of a place that has the trappings of home.
Couched in those terms, it is a mistake to dismiss a view of the past as a rose-tinted representation of the world, such as what we had pre-AI. It is not about the past being faultless. Such is a strawman. But rather to appreciate how nostos comes forth as the distillation of the elements which are worthwhile even in the presence of the potentiality for harm and abuse. Those are clarified as important and then rendered in the conscience as irreducible components of a desired configuration of factors.
Future orientation depends on the ability to target what is worth having even in full knowledge of potential downsides inherent to it. The person who finds negatives in everything will eventually become nihilistic in their quest for perfection. Since nothing is ever going to be flawless, they will end up with nothing they accept as valuable. Nihilism become self-enfeeblement once it is totalised. It does so by removing all motivation.
There is no perfect home. What matters is an approximation that moves in the right direction. One understands that having a place where they belong is better than not having any, despite what it may make inaccessible. For example, to be home necessarily precludes the adventure of not being home. To make that judgement call is the sign of self-awareness, else maturity, and, more importantly, a precondition for drawing delineations between home and all that is non-home.