vessel: humanities thesis
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Intro I
In this time that I’ve been ripped away from my life and watched my presumed visions of my future crumble before me, I’ve reverted to picking up past rituals to stabilize my life. When I left my apartment in Baltimore in March, I took my desk and everything on it with me in an attempt to establish normalcy while I completed my courses away from my professors and peers. Each object on my desk harkens back to my childhood or to my time at MICA in very specific ways, and they have been the thread on which my sanity has held onto for the past two months. My quarantine has given me newfound time to dwell on the state of the world at present, which is dangerous. I don’t like this empty time and I do what I can to take these objects and let them protect me from what I cannot handle. I’ve taken up journaling again, in the same journal I’ve been using sporadically since I was 16. I have my small collection of letters and papers from friends, gathered alongside maps of Disneyland and folded receipts from my last month at school that now hold more significance than I realized when I obtained them. My Hello Kitty alarm clock accompanies me as I still work late into the nights, just as it has done for me for my entire educational career. My framed photo of my best friend and myself at 8 years old still sits in the corner of my desk in a frame that I’ve desperately tried to tape back together numerous times over the past 14 years. It can’t hold itself up anymore so it stays propped against my aloe plant that sprouted from my main plant that I’ve been growing since my very first week at college. Everything on this desk holds stories of my past and I’m using this time to write about them now so that I can be reminded that all of it came from somewhere, and that my past has meaning that can protect me from the meaningless everything else seems to have right now. My nostalgia protects me, I protect my objects, and my objects protect my memories, which comes around yet again and protects my nostalgia. This closed circuit is what I intend to live in until the world allows me to adequately move forward again.
Why do we keep attics full of things? And basements? And closets? And in my mother’s case, a garage? We all hold onto the things that we accrue through our lives, even if they may provide no obvious use at the time we receive them. My father recently pulled out three boxes of shirts, jackets, and baseball caps he obtained from his first twenty or so years in the film industry, none of which I had personally seen before. They’re nearly all older than I am, and it took those twenty plus years for them to gain the nostalgic potency they hold now. Nearly everyone finds comfort in those things that they’ve held onto their entire lives, and we should acknowledge their power as vessels of our memories and emotions.
Show and tell never dies. A teacher no longer asks you to bring in objects you hold so dear, but instead you bring people into your life to share these objects with. We show off our objects in the rooms of our homes, on the outside of our backpacks, in the small artifacts we wear every day, and in so many other ways. These spaces are an adult’s version of show and tell, but we usually only get to tell their stories if we are asked. The photos that we line our walls with exist for personal enjoyment, but they also exist so that others may ask about the experiences captured in these frozen moments of joy, letting us briefly recapture the feelings from that singular experience.
Life moves forever on as our experiences become artifacts of our past. In holding onto objects of our memories, there is then proof beyond the abstractions of the mind that these experiences did indeed happen. Our memories get rewritten and lost over time as we recall, and fail to recall, what once was. In assigning meaning and memory to objects, our memories may become better encased in a tangible experience. There is ritual in our experiences, ritual in assigning meaning to objects, and ritual in how these objects exist to protect our memories. The objects that live on our shelves and adorn our walls and live deep inside our closets don’t exist without meaning. Even when forgotten, they hold power in the experiences that they both exude and beg for. The memories entrenched in our most precious objects provoke a succession of protection — protection for our memories, for these objects, and above all else, ourselves — as we move forward into our individual futures.
Intro II
At the start of my research, I began on a journey to define “home.” I was forever asking myself what I defined as home. While I have parents in two different states in two different homes, in addition to my apartment at school, that word had felt muddled for the past few years of my life. I wanted to understand the things that differentiated this word for people, and what was strong enough to make someone stay or leave a certain place. I began to use natural disasters to define these ties to home and place, focusing primarily on New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and Ellicott City with their numerous floods of recent years. I carried out the first semester with these concepts and felt that I was still waiting for a central thread to pull everything together—an interview, a specific story, a certain meaning of home. None of this came, and my research began to take its toll on me. I had answered my own questions about my own relationship to home. Subsequently, disaster is naturally a difficult topic, and it never felt fully intertwined with the idea of home like I expected it to be. These primary issues exhausted my research and I inevitably hit a dead end.
Through all my research, I kept coming back to themes of protection and childhood. When my previous research came to a halt, I took a weekend to recollect my thoughts and form a new central thesis. I let my mind work over the concepts I felt were salvageable from the work I had already done, and in this time realized that my own definition of home was rooted heavily in nostalgia. This was the topic that I was subconsciously trying to describe through all my early writings, and this shift in my direction allowed my paper to develop itself much more easily. The final product of my research is an exploration of what nostalgia can do for us and and explanation of how we interact with these objects, knowing that they’re vessels of our past. Additionally, it is a call for further research within this intersection of nostalgia and material culture, as this specific overlap has received little attention in academia thus far.
Part 1: How nostalgia protects us
Over the past two months in which a majority of our world has been forced back to our homes and restricted from the outside, many of us have returned to things we have loved in the past. In a time that does not seem to be progressing forward—where our lives feel like they’re in an unprecedented limbo—I’ve observed many of us picking up old hobbies and consuming media that has brought us comfort throughout our lives. With an inability for time to feel like it can progress, we move sideways. Nostalgia is not backwards, but it is outside of our current linear time. It doesn’t stop time or alter it, but removes us briefly when we call for it. This power to remove ourselves from our current place and time is what nostalgia is made for, and it can be found most simply in our memories, but also in the objects that hold our memories for us
Our nostalgia is a naturally protective phenomenon as it is intrinsically rooted in memories of home and its inherent protection. Nostalgia was originally coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688, and was considered a disease rooted in homesickness until further research was enacted in the 20th century (Hofer 1688, 381). Even though nostalgia is no longer considered a disease, it still holds strong ties to homesickness as our own feelings of nostalgia originate in the home. In his writings about deeper concepts of the phenomenology of home and imagination, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard relates the core of home to memory in explaining that, “we live in fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home” (Bachelard 1997, 87). Very simply put, we use nostalgia to comfort ourselves, and our earliest feelings of nostalgia come from the protection of home. Nostalgia can come from numerous sources in our lives—from both introspective experience and shared experience—but it’s origins are in our earliest places of happiness. In returning to the rituals we adopt in early life associated with our first homes, we can reproduce those specific feelings of comfort in times when we need it most. Architectural critic Kimberly Dovey notes that, “home finds its roots if not its forms in these universal structures of environmental experience and action” (Dovey 1985), implying that the home also builds off of routine and emotion. Action and environment are directly linked through concepts of the home. The spaces that we inhabit have a direct impact on our creation of memories and the lense through which we view the world beyond our bedroom walls, and thus our early environments are crucial to our own individual nostalgic constructs that we develop through life.
Our personal concepts of nostalgia are altered throughout our lives, but always retain threads back to the home. In eras of transition, there is a desire to create a space that somewhat mimics what we’re already accustomed to. As we’ve seen from Dovey and Bachelard, nostalgia is rooted in our surroundings and home, and thus what we’re accustomed to naturally aligns itself with our evolving experiences in and around home. In flux, we deliberately surround ourselves with objects that are familiar in order to help ground us. Imagery of our past homes let us hang onto our memories just enough to still let us establish this next space as our new standard of home. Dovey’s intelect remains present here in that, “as patterns of experience and behavior stabilize over time, so do the spatial arrangements and environmental props that support and evoke those experiences” (Dovey 1985). Our surroundings work to mimic our lives as they restabilize in new places. A new home used old representations of stability to influence new patterns of “experience and behavior,” which then in turn provides basis for an evolved environment of stability. This is particularly why in an era of transition, establishing a previous sense of normalcy rooted in nostalgic objects is necessary to create a new protective environment. In a space of all unfamiliar things, there are no ties to the previous home, and no thread back to the original place of comfort. Normalcy may be obtained, but the path is much less paved than one that involves nostalgic objects and the presence of a life already lived. Should we be so lucky as to have a stable home in early life, we may follow this road. In a life without a primary base of comfort, it is then much harder to establish the positivity that comes from these objects as there is no thread to follow back to any protective start.
In the absence of a stable home from birth, the thread of nostalgia is lost and the current space may suffer as a result. Daniel Miller’s accounts in his book The Comfort of Things commences with a story of a man named George, living alone in his 70s after a life void of valuable human connection. In a recount of his home, Miller describes George’s dull apartment in that:
“This emptiness in someone’s surroundings, that leeches away one’s own sense of being, was only enhanced by our experience of George himself. Even a space this empty wouldn’t have felt quite so disturbing if it had become filled with the presence of the man. His stories, his attachments and relationships could have re-populated the space,
turned this room back into a living-room.” (Miller 2011, 8-9)
There simply was no sign of life besides the literally person the apartment. There was no products of nostalgia to look back on because there was no thread back to a stable home life. His parents were said to have blocked George from ever involving himself in experiences that would allow him to become his own person, and those effects are evident in his empty apartment that cannot show for any type of life lived (Miller 2011, 10) . As noted in other studies on nostalgia and the home, specifically from Janelle Lynn Wilson, “some of the participants in my study indicated that they had made a conscious choice to not have objects around them that are reminders of home...Yet, this sentiment was not the predominant one among the participants” (Wilson 2015, 486). While there are people that recognize that their early homelife was not favorable and can provide no solace in later life, it is not of the overwhelming majority. The inability for some to use nostalgia to cope also does not mean that they cannot have a fulfilling life either. It may be more difficult for them to utilize nostalgia as a source of comfort and normalcy, but it does not mean that there can’t be other means of protective thoughts for these individuals to turn to.
While rooted in home and memory, our nostalgia comes not from a place of pure reality, but from an attempt of our minds to create something meaningful of our experiences. Our memories in themselves are not pure as they rewrite themselves with each time we recall them, and therefore our nostalgia is not pure either. In Freud’s writings on memory and melancholy, he concluded that:
Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves (Freud, 1899, 322).
The older a memory becomes, the more it can become glorified as a relic of our past. Our oldest memories have gone through so many iterations that they become further from their original truths each time. In this natural disintegration of memory, more room is made for them to become entrenched in a rose-tinted veneer as we attempt to fill in the missing pieces. Our minds pick out these memories and turn them into something more important over time. It also alters the thread along which all new memories are made, creating core memories and meanings that are able to fluctuate and adapt to new circumstances.
From creating meaning in memories, our minds glorify the past to make productive use of our memories in the future. This glorification can become dangerous if we let it consume us as living in the past has the effect of leaving us a step behind where we actually are. In a positive use of our past experiences, nostalgia can be an incredibly valuable component in how we proceed through life. We already use our past to inform our future as we look to past experiences to inform what we do next to get the results we desire. We can apply this same logic to nostalgia in looking back to how we felt in the past to try and inform our current state of mind, or how to emotionally improve our current unpleasant situations. In the words of Svetlana Boym, “the fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Considering the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales” (Boym 2001). We choose to bring up our feelings of nostalgia when they feel most necessary given their connection to our current situations, which may impact the way in which we can emotionally move forward. We “take responsibility for our nostalgic tales” in that we understand that what we’re experiencing is not our current truths, but they are still rooted in realities of our own past. We understand that not all experiences of nostalgia are shared, and there is some extra sense of significance in that. The thought that these memories can be purely our own, even if the experience was shared, lets it be a personal secret, elevating it’s individual importance for the current and future self.
The temporal aspect of nostalgia works largely as a conglomeration of eras, coming together to produce a singular experience at any given time. As described by Janelle Lynn Wilson: “the active recalling of one’s past enables one to see the self moving through time, begging the questions: How did I get to where I am? How have I become the person I am? How is my present self shaped by my former selves?” (Wilson 2015, 481). While Boym’s critique on the temporality of nostalgia focuses on its functionality, Wilson’s critique focuses on the personal reflection. Recalling our past in this way forces us to reflect on aspects of our life outside of just the memory at hand. It acknowledges that there is life before and after a single momentary memory, which provides further use in how nostalgia can trigger a realm of memories at once.
While drawing from the past to influence our future, nostalgia is naturally a utopian phenomenon that also allows us to temporarily live outside our current progression of time.
Nostalgia’s greatest ability is that it can take us out of our current emotional state and into the past of our memories entirely. As Svetlana so eloquently explains:
Nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and
space.” (Boym 2001)
The temporal aspect of nostalgia forces time periods to overlap. Nostalgia cannot literally take us back in time, but its imagery of the past takes us out of the present state of mind that is so often rooted in a concept of linear time. It encourages us to take considerations of our past to apply to current events, effectively blurring the lines between now and then. From Jill Bradbury’s findings on the temporality of nostalgia, its ability to take us, “from present realities may serve to induce a kind of romantic longing for the past or a passive waiting for a future that never comes, but it may also be productively galvanized in creating possibility, living a meaningful life, and provoking critical action” (Bradbury 2012, 7). Once again we see that our pasts have meaning for our current and future selves. Our nostalgia is often contingent on our past ideas of our futures, of which we are technically currently living out, whether that alines with our past hopes for ourselves or not. This notion is most effective in intertwining the numerous time periods in which our personal nostalgia exists.
Given its ability to hold on to and alter the past in this way, nostalgia is a form of subconscious self-preservation. Our experiences are at the core of what defines us as people, informing our future opinions, decisions, and whatever else that helps build our personalities. Memories are in their own right an attempt of our minds to decipher what may be useful for us in the future. The less we recall our memories, the sooner they may fade away as they reveal themselves as useless. Even in the smallest memories that seemingly hold little meaning, there may still be meaning simply in that they can exist as something to look back on. Our environments ensure that these memories are less at risk of being forgotten, and establish familiar environments that encourage our nostalgia to remain active in our lives.
Part 2: How our objects protect our memories
Any object, truly, has the power to become nostalgic. It is often not the object itself that is nostalgic, but the experiences that it represents that gives it power. That being said, the ritual of our experiences with these objects is also crucial in defining their nostalgic power.
The objects we hold onto exist either be interacted with or to force us to recall our memories. In hanging photos on our wall, each glance will bring up bursts of memory, even if only for a brief second. If we are not confronted with our memories, if they are not tied to something in the physical world, they pose a much greater chance of being forgotten.
Of the most nostalgic artifacts, the most poignant are the ones we’ve held onto for a long time. To lose the items that have accompanied us through our most difficult journeys over our years is unthinkable as they contain so many memories. This experience is noted most evidently in The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a stuffed rabbit feels the love and loss of being a child’s most beloved toy. Early in the book, before the rabbit becomes an object of great affection, he has a conversation with a toy horse that has already been loved. The rabbit asks how one becomes “real,” which is what the rabbit assumes must happen to him in order to be completely loved. The horse patiently explains:
You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." (Williams 1991, 5)
While a stuffed animal is one of the most common vessels of nostalgia, this meaning from living can manifest in any object. The objects that hold the greatest amount of memories are simply those evident of their time spent being used and loved. These objects aren’t exactly artifacts of a lived experience, but instead have lived experiences themselves. Ask anyone what their most precious object is, and they will probably be able to share a plethora of stories with you about said object. They probably have a story of how it was obtained, times at which it was nearly lost, or times at which it was able to provide great comfort. This object is special in that it is often the one that they have spent the most time putting their emotions and memories into, which is what ultimately defines the pricelessness of an object.
Besides those objects that experience life alongside us, direct productions of our experiences are some of the more common nostalgic artifacts. Something such as a ticket or a photo taken at an event don’t have to do much to become nostalgic. Their functions are inherently intertwined in the experience, and their inability to be separated from their experience makes them strong carriers of memories. Celeste Olalquiaga’s book The Artificial Kingdom addresses the history of kitsch objects, explores this concept to some degree. In her discussion of “the souvenir,” Olalquiaga explains that souvenirs, “stand in for events or situations they were contingently associated with or were supposed to represent, gaining a life of their own” and are subsequently “made static and glorified, [as] the experience of loss has been replaced with a symbol of what is being lost”(Olalquiaga 1998, 76 & 118). Because these objects are obtained as a specific component of an experience, they are inherently bound to the overall memories of that greater experience. They gain life in that they now exist as a vessel of the whole, representing more than just what it was originally intended for. While our original memories disintegrate and we interact with the memories through the object specifically, they become a conglomeration of memory and current experience that defines these objects as something priceless that transcends connection to one singular time or place.
One of the most profound aspects of this relationship with objects of the past is the ability to shrink time between right now and the time in which it came from. It condenses all that has happened to you from that moment until now into this one brief experience with the object. Adele Nye touches on this subject in a greater sense in describing her experience with ancient artifacts:
I think being able to turn up to a classroom with something that is 2000 years old, like a brick, hand it to a student and say: “Okay a Roman walked on that and you can tell by the hobnail imprints that you have in your hand right now” … And it is moments like that– they get that it was real, it is not modern or something on the television not something they have seen in a movie, it is real. These people actually existed. Holding a coin that is 2000 years old is one of those things that really makes them think. And when you are looking at the depictions on the coin – you know, you are trying to tell students that these things acted almost like a newspaper, in the past, it doesn‘t work until you give them the coin, they look at it they touch it, they realize it has circulated through people’s hands, it is not just an image on a wall. (Adele Nye 2015)
Objects of the past have an energy associated with them that comes from revisiting something and knowing that it's from a completely different time. Not something from yesterday or a week ago, but something untouched for years, whether it was once significant to you or not, can become significant just because it is of a past era. In the creation of something such as a time capsule, the main goal is to show people of the future what was culturally or personally important during its creation. These objects don’t have to have specific meaning in and of themselves to create a nostalgic effect in the future, they are nostalgic most simply in that they are a product of the past.
Through these objects, our memories remain intact. Commonplace objects can hold onto memories just as well as those intrinsically related to experience. The key to creating a nostalgic object is ensuring that we continue to interact with them. In spending time with our objects and appreciating the experiences we’ve had with them, they continue to evolve beyond memory and into creators of memories themselves. They take time and compress numerous experiences into one as we hold them. Without these objects, many of our memories are subject to becoming lost. Without us to interact with these objects, though, they may also be subject to losing our memories.
Part 3: How we protect our objects
I recognize that some of my claims in this final section are made with little scholar to back them up. While there is much research already done on nostalgia and material culture as separate entities, there is little in the field that ties these two together and looks at the precious measures we take to keep them safe. We have come to an understanding that objects can be nostalgic, and the reasons we display them, but I’d like to see more discussion on how people have historically and currently treat the things that hold the most memories.
Our objects do the job of protecting our memories, but we must in turn protect our objects to ensure their abilities remain adequately intact. Our objects live on shelves, in attics, and on our walls, but they are all united in the fact that they’ve been placed in these locations to protect our memories in their respective ways. There are rituals in how we treat our most precious items. In boxing and then unboxing things just to enjoy their emotional connotations, there is ritual. In taking a moment to appreciate the items you’ve placed around your home, there is ritual. In moving to a new place and taking the time to put photos on the walls, there is ritual. These small, personal experiences is how we protect our objects and ensure that they are given the chance of protecting us as well. They are our own small ceremonies to honor our own past feelings of warmth and protection.
We are the curators of our own environments and control the emotion that a space embodies. We decide what objects fit best next to each other and the emotion we want those things to exude, for both ourselves and for others. We present ourselves throughout homes and the spaces we inhabit. Our decorative decisions do not exist in a vacuum, but are the direct product of our individuality and experiences. Claire Cooper Marcus writes on this notion in that, “the colors we choose, the objects we select, the pictures and posters we put on the walls—all of these have aesthetic or function meaning from which we are aware. Many of them are also projections, or ‘messages’ from the unconscious, in just the same way that our dreams contain such messages” (Marcus 2006 50). We don’t tend to choose things at random. We don’t put things on our walls that do not bring joy or good memories because there is no benefit to that. We use our walls and shelves to benefit us. We adorn our lived spaces with the objects of our experiences to remind us of memories, thereby protecting them with constant reminders of our past. There is a ritual to taking things and putting them on display for yourself and others that further defines their power. If nostalgia, as we have learned, is rooted in feelings of homesickness and derives from the childhood home, it only makes sense for our nostalgia to continue to use these spaces to generate power. This is one of the most prevalent intersections of the temporal and physical aspects of nostalgia. The objects that fill our homes are primarily what we attach ourselves to as we age and transition. If we cannot attach ourselves to place as we make bigger moves and transitions in our lives, then we must attach ourselves to objects. In curating and displaying our most precious objects in our homes, we invite others to acknowledge that we have stories beyond what meets the eye. We present these things not only to remind ourselves of our memories, but so that others may be inclined as to ask us to share our memories with them. In sharing our memories over again, we get the chance to live through them as we tell our stories once more.
Some objects are not fit for display, but the memories they hold are still important and thus they live out of sight instead. In storing some of our more delicate objects, there is a conscious decision made of where exactly to place it. We use boxes in attics, small bowls on our nightstands, jewelery boxes on our dressers—so many specific vessels, to make sure our objects are safe. Sometimes these vessels themselves are able to take the form of a nostalgic object as well. The things inside these containers can impose nostalgia on them through our small rituals of putting new things in them. They may contain our memories, but each act of putting something new into it is a new memory that the object will also retain to some degree.
By using our objects, we imbue them with new memories to ensure their nostalgic potency. In establishing rituals with our objects, they are integrated into our daily lives and are protected in that they become integral to our routines. There is no fear that they will lose importance in our lives. We previously explored this notion through Olalquiaga’s concept of the souvenir, through which objects take on a life of their own as they accrue new memories. (Olalquiaga 1998, 76). Something such as a journal could never hold such a great amount of nostalgia if never used. There is a give and take to these objects because while they hold onto our memories for us, we must imbue them with our experiences to ensure that they don’t lose their potential.
While individual nostalgia depends on the impression of one’s own memories on an object, the object may persist past the individual’s life if given the chance to develop a shared sense of nostalgia. In Caitlin DeSilvey’s writings on material culture and memory, she notes a definition of memory from her dictionary that describes it as “the ability of a material to return to a former state after a constraint has been removed” (DeSilvey 2006, 325). We impose meaning on our objects based on our memories with and of them, but they live in the constraints of our own interpretations. Should these items become separate from the individual or should the individual die, the object will return to its original state of complete objectivity. If, though, the object was shared to some extent with others during the individual’s life, the object’s imposition of memory and nostalgia may be altered and it may be granted a new life with someone else. In this way the life cycle of an object has the opportunity to come around yet again to provide newfound protection for someone else.
Conclusion
Nostalgia has always struck me as a concept so deeply personal to the extent that it was beyond evaluation outside my own meandering thoughts. I live much of my life in a nostalgic state, and I take great comfort in the sensory experiences that every aspect of nostalgia brings me. In holding my nostalgic objects, in hearing songs tied to my formative experiences, in smelling such a specific smell that I could never place again no matter how hard I try—all of these experiences let me return to previous times and exist for just a second in a space that isn’t quite here. I often romanticize my current experiences so that I can use these moments one day in the future as nostalgic touchstones. If I can reenact or reincarnate those old memories in the form of new ones, I’ll always take that chance.
My intent of this paper was to take all of my deeply personal experiences and lay them out in a way that analyzes why I try so hard to hold onto things. I wanted to make sense of all the tiny scraps of papers I hung onto. I wanted to find a more universal understanding of all the things I’ve hung on my wall. Because I hold onto so much, interpreting nostalgia through objects felt like the most obvious way to ground my thoughts more directly. Through my observations of my own experiences alongside my academic findings, the life cycle of our objects has come to light. We have memories buried so deep that we could never expect to arouse them without the use of our objects. The sensory experience of holding something from deep in your own past can do more to take you into a different time and place than just memory alone. With an understanding of how our objects compress time, and of how our past and present and future ideologies intertwine, there is potential for us to further consider how to make positive use of nostalgia for our futures. We understand now how these temporalities overlap to influence the current self, but the next step in this vein of research is to understand the specifications of how nostalgia can actively structure our futures.
For now, using our nostalgia as a source of comfort is as much as our memories can do for us. While we keep pushing forward through the uncertainties of our current realities, we can move into the parallel world of our nostalgia that our objects and their rituals allow. We can establish new rituals with our objects so that they can better carry us through and out the other side. Our objects have much more power than we realize if we only allow them to do their jobs. They have always protected our memories, as we’ve done so much to protect them as well. That specific relationship between memory and space is where we must live to preserve ourselves until time feels as though it’s moving forward again.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. 1997. “Poetics of Space (Extract).” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. New York: Routledge.
Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia.” Atlas of Transformation, 2011. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html.
Bradbury, Jill. “Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future: Nostalgia and Hope.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18, no. 3 (2012): 341–50. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029069.
Desilvey, Caitlin. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 318–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808.
Dovey, Kimberly. 1985. “Home and Homelessness: Introduction.” In Home Environments: Human Behavior and Environment, edited by Irwin Altman and Carol M. Werner. New York: Plenum Press.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Collected Papers 4 (1917).
Marcus, Clare Cooper. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Berwick, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 2006.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011.
Nye, Adele. (2015). The Objects of Nostalgia: Embedded Historical Narratives.
Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: a Treasury on the Kitsch Experience. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1991.
Wilson, Janelle Lynn. "Here and Now, There and Then: Nostalgia as a Time and Space Phenomenon." Symbolic Interaction 38, no. 4 (2015): 478-92. Accessed May 9, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/symbinte.38.4.478.
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