Nostalgia

Words are beautiful, think of your favourite snippet of poetry, a lyric, something that some said to you off hand, something that stuck with you, something so powerful that just hearing those words can twist you round and send you straight back to another place and time.

But why stop at words? A melody, a smell, a painting, a sunrise, an face from the past…

Sometimes one thing can trigger off such an overwhelming ripple effect of memories that your breath is quite taken away. This might sound so insane, but I have to write it. I feel so overwhelmed by nostalgia, pricks of forgotten pain.

The trigger for me tonight was watching a movie called “Remember Me”, something that I’ve had on my hard-drive for the longest time and avoided, probably because it stars Robert Pattinson. But I gave it a chance, and it crawl up and around my heart, flaking off strange nostalgia for poems I’ve forgotten. Somewhere in my teens I got hold of a collection of poems by Rod McKuen, I don’t think many of my friends would even know who he is, but he wrote the lyrics of the song “Seasons in the Sun”. I must have picked up the book at a 2nd hand book stall, maybe urged by my mom. However I came about owning it, it moved me. Lines that haunt me still, glimmers of adult themes, who knows, I flicked through the book now and poems I’d forgotten about were so familiar, like seeing an old friend.

If I thought
that I was dying,
and I am
            of inattention,
                         indifference
                         and the need
to prove just once
                 I’ve lived –
for someone
              other than myself,
what would/should
my reaction be?
Especially if I knew
that finally and forever
there would be no one.

An excerpt from “The Pause, Before the Going” – Rod McKuen

Reading these words, the words that have haunted me for probably 15 years, brought back a few lines of a poem by D.H Lawrence. I remember my surprise at finding a poem like this in my poetry setwork book, it seemed a strange concept to me.

I am worn out
with the effort of trying to love people
and not succeeding

Now I’ve made up my mind
I love nobody, I am going to love nobody,
I’m not going to tell any lies about it
and it’s final.

An excerpt from “The effort of love” – D.H Lawrence

I could go on and on with haunting lines, but will end for good measure with the painting that made an 8 year old me fall in love with Dali... I was a very cultured child.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus - Salvador Dalí (1937)