Above all, nostalgia demands that the past remains timely. With the fixation of the past fixed, a centre is established against which memory can be anchored in the present through becoming malleable. Thus, both memory and place serve as homogenous platforms for the nostalgic conscious to impose and identify itself. Thereafter, the representation and formal features of the place-world becomes mediated and impregnated by a pathologized timescape. When conjoined with the imagination, the experience of specific architectural features in the present can invoke an imagined return to a past, which ontologically, no longer reciprocates the contents of the desiring mind. This is a position of pure subjectivity straddling between two points of place and time simultaneously. In the present, place is experienced as indeterminate, but that indeterminacy only gains a determinate identity by reconstructing what memory lacks in the present. In effect, the spatial present is morphed and manipulated in order to adopt the impression that the nostalgic is part of this place. Phenomenologically, banisters and staircases, features which commonly recede into the everyday background, serve as place-holders which re-enact a similar bodily interaction in a place experienced in time before. To descend a staircase in the originary place but once is sufficient to withdraw what is essential to that descent in order to reapply it elsewhere.
In relation, hotel lobbies, airports, shopping malls, and other largely homogenous spaces reinforce and encourage the possibility of cultivating altered place by dint of lacking any features particular to its own locality. Instead, they open themselves to reinterpretation and the possibility of being anywhere at anytime. Where the persistence of sensory experience is concerned, then the alteration and flight into this created past is heightened. The convergence of homogenous space, together with feel, sound, and smell of lost place, brings about a moment of precarious equilibrium, soon to be shattered, in which the passing of time is momentarily erased.
The body also contributes to this re-enactment by allowing us to repeat gestures and movements which were previously embedded in the past. Here, I borrow Casey’s definition of body memory as “an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting, and regular manner” (Casey, 2000, p. 149). Only, I would wish to subtract regularity and orientation from Casey’s account by suggesting that bodily actions which are associated with an originary existence irregularly reappear as disorientating an established centre. To find our bodies embodying the past by way of repeating actions in the present is to instil a distance, if not a dualism, between what persists in the body and what has asymmetrically diminished in the mind.
Certain chairs, for example, can encourage a particular way of sitting in place, which in turn may partially inform how that place resides as a memory. The partial involvement of how we sit in a chair with our bodies contributes but does not fulfil the wholeness of an image. Thus, as body memory and mental memory dissent, the repetition of bodily memory in the present emerges as a foreign thing producing its own ghostly history. The result of this temporal dissociation is spatial disorientation. Instead of being privileged to mode of radical breakage, such a lack of coordination is central to the everyday mode of episodic, and even habitual, memory. Let us not overlook that bodily repetition need not necessarily harvest familiarity. Instead, becoming accustomed to the presence of a bodily action as having existed elsewhere, means recognizing the continued presence of that memory as an after-effect of the past. Adopting the posture we once took in the old chair—but only now in a different location—is to be reminded, not only of temporal discontinuity, but of physical discontinuity too.
In relation, hotel lobbies, airports, shopping malls, and other largely homogenous spaces reinforce and encourage the possibility of cultivating altered place by dint of lacking any features particular to its own locality. Instead, they open themselves to reinterpretation and the possibility of being anywhere at anytime. Where the persistence of sensory experience is concerned, then the alteration and flight into this created past is heightened. The convergence of homogenous space, together with feel, sound, and smell of lost place, brings about a moment of precarious equilibrium, soon to be shattered, in which the passing of time is momentarily erased.
The body also contributes to this re-enactment by allowing us to repeat gestures and movements which were previously embedded in the past. Here, I borrow Casey’s definition of body memory as “an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting, and regular manner” (Casey, 2000, p. 149). Only, I would wish to subtract regularity and orientation from Casey’s account by suggesting that bodily actions which are associated with an originary existence irregularly reappear as disorientating an established centre. To find our bodies embodying the past by way of repeating actions in the present is to instil a distance, if not a dualism, between what persists in the body and what has asymmetrically diminished in the mind.
Certain chairs, for example, can encourage a particular way of sitting in place, which in turn may partially inform how that place resides as a memory. The partial involvement of how we sit in a chair with our bodies contributes but does not fulfil the wholeness of an image. Thus, as body memory and mental memory dissent, the repetition of bodily memory in the present emerges as a foreign thing producing its own ghostly history. The result of this temporal dissociation is spatial disorientation. Instead of being privileged to mode of radical breakage, such a lack of coordination is central to the everyday mode of episodic, and even habitual, memory. Let us not overlook that bodily repetition need not necessarily harvest familiarity. Instead, becoming accustomed to the presence of a bodily action as having existed elsewhere, means recognizing the continued presence of that memory as an after-effect of the past. Adopting the posture we once took in the old chair—but only now in a different location—is to be reminded, not only of temporal discontinuity, but of physical discontinuity too.
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