One could call it ante-chronological (against or opposite of normal chronology), one could call it asynchronous (lacking temporal concurence), but it doesn’t really matter. What it is, is out of place. Perhaps then, a better — less instrumentalist — term would be orphaned nostalgia. Because the feeling of longing that I am talking about is not one for things past, but for things that have not yet happened or perhaps never will; it has no origins which can be identified, other than that it exists.
The sentiment is not to be confused with desire, or want, or simply wishing this or that, because in many cases the patient (nostalgia, in the eighteenth century, like so many matters of the heart, was considered a disease not unrelated to that of melancholy) does not even yearn for something per se. He just feels the emotions that accompany a certain state of longing.
More »
Posted in Line F | 3 Comments »
For as long as I can remember, I have wished I was there. Nowhere in particular, just any place that wasn’t here. Not that I was unhappy or uneasy at any given location; here wasn’t an exact place, but a state, and it was one I simply did not want to be in. Mind you, this longing should not be confused with the urge to travel. As a child, I was dragged halfway around the globe already, so these days, I’m quite happy not to board a cramped 737 filled with low cost globetrotters. Travel should be endless: not a progression from A to B, but simply the act of being underway. It is a dilemma: wanting to be places but not wanting to go, and enjoying travel so long as you never actually arrive.
There is a line in David Lynch’s Lost Highway that struck me the first time I ever heard it and which hasn’t left me since. When the Madisons are visited by the police, after a number of disturbing videos have been left at their door, one of the detectives asks Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) whether he owns a video camera – somehow insinuating perhaps the couple may have shot the tapes themselves. The conversation goes like this:
Ed: Do you own a video camera? Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them. Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way. Ed: What do you mean by that? Fred Madison: How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Posted in Line F | 5 Comments »
One In A Billion - Coincidence brought us together.
