Today we return to nostos (from Ancient Greek for “return home“) in my quest to reconsider implications and assumptions surrounding the term, nostalgia. Inevitably nostalgia suggests a double dose of sentimentality, as if yearning for home (or for the past) were an affliction or a symptom of feebleness. Perhaps it is. Or it can be. But it’s not only wistful to the point of becoming mawkish. Nostalgia has the potential to be more ample and more versatile. Perhaps even more romantic. To advance this premise, I’d like to propose that homing offers a tempting bridge. Homing delivers us from longing to homecoming.
On December 3, 2024 I wondered about — and wandered toward — the possibility of a more nuanced and less melancholy version of nostalgia.
I will try to untangle nostalgia from sentimentality… I’ll revisit several touchstones in my quest toward/away from nostalgia as a quick sketch or map in anticipation of better fleshing out the borders and byways anon. (Source: Nostos: Return Home)
A brief wander, at the time, but an enduring wonder. So I boomerang back today.
Consider with me for a moment what we might call an art of homing. A poetics of homing. What would it look like? Can you sketch it into existence quickly? Not too considered. Not too labored. Just a few sweeps of your stylus, contours and only a few preliminary details as if placeholders for what will coalesce once we’ve made progress in our journey.
Now, before we fall back on the familiar, let’s step away from the sketch. A faint suggestion. Less representative of the nostalgia with which we’re familiar. More representative of the heart quickening warmth we experience when we recollect some poignant artifact or place from our past.
Homing inevitably calls to mind pigeons, though I have no firsthand experience at all of homing pigeons. There’s something immeasurably appealing about a creature venturing off into the world and eventually finding his or her way home. We speak of a homing instinct. And it’s not just pigeons. Trout, salmon, and sea turtles are some of the animals that exhibit strong homing instincts.
And, I believe, so are human beings. We wander away. We wander home. Daily. Seasonally. And occasionally at notable moments in our lives.
Of course I’m speaking quite literally in this case. Our return home is all the more notable as we grow up and allow the tide’s of itinerant existence to move us one place and then another. And yet the umbilical cord of cord of home often remains quite important. Not for all. But for many. Maybe most.
And speaking less literally, allowing that homing might be as much a metaphorical experience as it is a return to nest after a day’s work, a semester’s study, a deployment abroad, I think it’s notable how many other ways that we weave homing into our lives. Music and movies, food and artwork, even smells return us home. Sometimes this is accidental. Unintentional. Startling. Other times it’s intentional. I prepare a dish that my mother made when I was growing up in order to relive for a while, the past, a place in the past, a sense of homeness. A song drifts through my open window as I pull up at a stoplight, and suddenly I’m in Paris in 2001 with Susan, head and heart swimming in infatuation for a woman who I was only just beginning to know.
Perhaps there’s a bittersweet feeling in these fleeting longings for the past, but I embrace this cocktail of contradiction all the time. By choice. By desire. And so too my appetite for homing, literally and figuratively. Even when I don’t recognize it’s face at first glance.
What do you think?