Remembering as Resistance

Some days, I feel like a resident alien in my own life. I recognize my furniture, the art hanging on the walls, my books, but beyond that my environment seems foreign. This is partly because I left my long-time home in the Berkshires a year and a half ago to live in two other places. It’s partly because I’m aging, leaving behind some of what I thought I knew about who I am. But mostly, it’s because of the near total disappearance of the familiar analog universe that I grew up in and its replacement by links and apps. This is not the Great Replacement that white nationalists like to talk about, but it’s still pretty big. In the new dehumanized culture, we do not meet one another in the marketplace. There is between you and me an elaborate interface of electronic signals, a noise that interferes with ordinary speech.  My fluency in the new language is limited, like the Swedish I was able to speak when I lived in Stockholm in the early seventies. I could buy a loaf of bread, but I could not get angry. I could not tell a joke or understand why other people were laughing.

I try to engage with the passing of the face-to-face world without lapsing into a sugary “good old days” nostalgia which is at best self-serving and at worst a near total distortion of history. In 2017, I wrote a piece that was a first attempt to engage this subject, Beyond Nostalgia. “The problem with nostalgia,” I wrote, “is that it's all about yearning. It wants what it can't have.” The focus back then was on claiming my experience of the hoopla of the sixties and its influence on the process of my becoming who I am. We seventysomethings came of age in a time of dissolving boundaries and unlimited opportunities for self-invention. Part of me wanted all that back.  In 2017, I was trying to figure out what to do with that electric tribal experience now that I was no longer young, now that the field of vision had narrowed. 

Seven years since writing the earlier piece, I find myself drawn to a different idea. The idea of generational transmission inspires in me a desire to share my “live in-person” understanding of the receding past with the digitally intoxicated younger people around me as a contribution to the work of collective historic preservation. I see myself as a conservator, certainly not a conservative. The past does not die with me if I become a bearer of its texture. Now, it’s not nostalgia for its own sake or for my sake, wallowing around in hallucinatory memories of banjo toting boys and girls massing in Washington Square Park to celebrate being young. Now it’s offering a glimpse of the vivid, pulsing pre-screen culture by embodying those times.  It’s not lecturing, it’s storytelling. It’s remembering as an act of resistance, a counteroffensive against the march of the memes.

Photo by Darshan Gajara on Unsplash

I had a boyfriend when I was in my twenties who went into the bathroom in our apartment and came out without his beard and mustache, revealing a face I did not recognize and was not altogether happy with. That’s what waking up in the digital now feels like to me. It’s as if the old boyfriend not only shaved but also joined the Eastern Orthodox church and spoke only Bulgarian. A friend of mine once went to Bulgaria and reported that nodding your head up and down means no, while nodding side to side means yes. You see the problem.

 Anything that we seventysomethings can do that breathes, that loves, that has a life of its own, bolsters resistance to the encroaching dehumanization, the assault on a way of being in community that is non-virtual, a community that might involve consolation and embrace. This resistance is contagious. Sometimes it presents in a hybrid form, elevating technology in the service of something older, more primal. Another friend recently said she needed the gorgeous pictures of fields of flowers she was posting on Facebook even though they crept up out of the swamp of the algorithm, because, she added, this is a deeply disturbing time to be alive. That’s actually not what she said. It’s my interpretation of what she said. What she actually said was…now. I need these images because of now and I knew exactly what she meant. It reminded me that we owe it to ourselves and to one another to witness the real world as often as possible before it vanishes on us. We need to witness many times a day the way Catholic religious used to observe the canonical hours. The goose drinking from a puddle in the parking lot is not generated by the algorithm. Children covered in birthday cake are not spawned by the algorithm. Nor are lovers in old age walking arm in arm. 

The image of the old couple - could be Frank and myself - gives rise to the idea that we, the aging, the ones moving more slowly and haltingly on the path, have a unique role to play in the resistance against dehumanization. We understand the greater yearning because we remember what it was like before. We are the people who knew the shopkeepers on the avenue by name. We are the people who caressed the spines of library books and inhaled their scent. We have both more time and less time. The DNA of the past lives in its fossils as it always has.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. In May, Many Voices will feature Peggy Reeves, a glorious artist in the Berkshires working in the area of alternative photography.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.