new clothes and old roads

Spring has brought with it the call to life that has slumbered deep inside us since the end of march. Everyone in Melbourne has felt it in the last week; something slowly unfurling inside of them, stretching, drawing the curtains, taking its first tentaive steps towars the front door. The light skies and new greenery have called for tea parties, kite-flying, morning jaunts to the market and fast-driving with the windows down. Maybe this has something to do with the life drive; that calling to health and and equilibrium that balances out the destructive forces within all of us. Because new things make us all feel a little more sane. New leaves and new sun brought shoppers out in force yesterday, in search of things to make themselves feel a little newer too. I wasn’t immune—I bought new clothes last week for the first time in months. My overwhelmingly black wardrobe, which I had mentally penned as “classic and elegant” suddenly took on the characteristics of “dowdy and morbid” in the light that blasted through my bedroom window. I came home with new blue jeans, a red checkered shirt and a white t-shirt with an old film print on it. I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time in months too. Undeniably, the had weather awoken some innate urge within me to rejuvenate. And suprisingly, instead of the usual retail therapy guilts that go with any significant spending, I felt nothing but lighthearted as I emptied my bank account down to the remaining $4.49 that I’ll have to make do with until payday. Not that I need the Bible to justify my spendings, but if the lilies of the field get colourful new dresses for spring, why shouldn’t I?

I’ve always been a little skeptical of the idea that the weather acts as a mirror of ones interior state, but in the last week it seems foolish to deny it. Breathing in the spring air seems to have cleared away the cobwebs of stress and depression better than Zoloft ever could. Not that I don’t love a good gloomy day, in fact I rather enjoy reveling in the melancholy for a day or two. But after five months of it, warm yellow light and a fresh breeze proved to be exactly what was missing. It makes me wonder whether people that live in warmer climates really are significantly more mentally healthy and happy than the ones in the arctic.

But spring isn’t only a call to embrace the new; for me it seems fundamentally linked to a turn back towards the past. Towards other times, other things that happened under the same sun and the same weather a year or ten years before. Of course this can happen at anytime of the year, but spring seems to be the time to call up old friends, listen to old music, visit places you haven’t been to in months or years. During spring two years ago I got my drivers lisence. I met the season soaring along the bumpy back roads between Coldstream and Chirnside Park to work and back, past farms and bushland with the windows down so that within a week my dashboard was littered with hay-fever inducing grass seeds. I listened to Imogen Heap and Liz Phair incessantly, and even though it was a brand new era of my life, I remember feeling that it was as though the last eighteen years of my life had compacted together to deliver me into that one moment. Spring weather constantly calls me back to childhood, to the cyclical nature of life, and thus at the same time as it celebrates newness, the strongest feeling that I get from spring is one of wholeness. Wholeness is one of those words I hate, like purity and stability. But the “wholeness” feeling I get from Spring hasn’t anything to do with that, it’s a wholeness that seems to come from seeing life (past, present, future) as one; an intangible yet real thing working together to construct and order life.

Maybe I’m analysing Spring far too much. Maybe my all too visceral body is respondly purely and simply to its seasonal body clock, caveman style. Perhaps Spring only triggers a bout of nostalgia, serving to remind me of my provincial origins and the fact that deep down I’ll never escape a primal love of pop music. Either way, crawling out of the cave sure feels good.

O, nostalgia!

Nostalgia:- Noun. A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.

Clearly, previous posts have made evident my obsession with certain periods in history. While watching the movies, wearing the clothes and generally attempting to emulate life sixty years ago, I started to wonder if something wasn’t a little off. For one thing, if I really wanted to live like it was the 1940′s, I would have to go without alot of the modern conveniences I take completely for granted. 

But what is the reason for us to continually look at the past and see it as somehow better and more ‘real’ than our reality now? ‘The good old days’ seem to timelessly stand for some kind of authentic and more ideal world, connoting ideas of wholesomeness, good clean fun, hard work and family values: things that are continually lost with the ‘next generation’. It doesn’t seem to matter who you talk to or how old they are, it’s always the same: ‘kids these days, they don’t get enough fresh air,’ they will say. There is already a movement of nostalgia for ‘kids of the 90s’ reclaiming the icons of their childhood; Power Rangers, Mr. Squiggle, Captain Planet, Tazo’s, Yo-yo’s, the list goes on. 

But when we look back with such fondness, are we yearning for something that never existed? Is it possible that nostalgia lies? I say, yes. You only have to go to Sovereign Hill too see nostalgia in full swing. Period dress, horse and cart’s, panning for gold, quaint old shops – what could be more authentic? Well…. alot of things. What Sovereign Hill is missing is exactly what all nostalgia seems to fail to recognize. Where are the cultural problems of the time? Where are the ideologies that governed that society; the racism, the sexism, the class struggle? Where is the excrement in the streets, the poverty, the hardship? Nostalgia has buried those in the depths of human history and resurrected instead ‘the good old days’, something that was never real. 

So what? You might say. Why does it matter? The Praise of Folly says “the reality of things… depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth.” There is nothing stopping us from re-creating the past as if the ideal were real. But there is a danger, I think, in living purely in the ‘truth’ of nostalgia. In its extreme, nostalgia forgets the mistakes of history and runs the risk of having us learn them over again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But a mild dose won’t do you any harm