(no subject)

I heard it last perhaps a year ago in the strange, dirty Vancouver suburb New Westminster in a strange, dirty bookshop next to a etc. etc. strip club. It is the saddest piece of music I have ever heard, violin or led by a violin or violins. It sounds gypsy, Eastern European, shepherdy. It expresses millennia of pain and rain and night and hopelessness. And yet it is clean, it has that something at the heart of sorrow, that purest life. I have no idea how to locate it. The radio man had announced it ahead of time rather than after, so I hadn't been paying attention till the music started. I've heard it on radio many times, I feel. Perhaps it was someone's favorite at the station on my hometown. If I ever had it on CD that CD is long gone. I have no way of getting the name. In Vancouver there was a man in the glassed-off classical room at Virgin Megastore who they say knew everything about classical music. But before I ever got around to finding him and humming it to him it closed.

Maybe that part of Proust I apparently made up records its name.

(no subject)

Nostalgia's the come and go chemical that makes you miss all the past at once. It's like in A Christmas Carol when he looks in all the lit windows of the families while outside in the dark and snow. Except, with nostalgia, it's you and yours in each of those rooms, and for the most part in much better shape.

(When you ignore the plot specifics that story is astonishingly Wordsworthian. Falls into blank verse left and right, even. Something in it's greater than itself.)

Though there are other kinds, for the future, for remote or inaccessible modalities of the present.

Nostalgia hits at weak points, usually. It's an entirely different world from when you're strongest. The strong are always embarking, they devour so much of the country that they have no trouble at all with how much they can't have. They like that even, are friends with it, greet it. Nostalgia's hungers and envies are so intense they burn out at once. Each window goes black. But another lights up. Only way to deal with it's to sleep it off, like a migraine.

It's a way to stay lazy, but then what isn't. We don't even have a word for that concept, it so much overapplies. New work, faces, places cure nostalgia. Anything where your limbs and the world's are in contact--textures remind your skin where it ends. Anything where attention's turned out of doors.