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NOSTALGIA

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I sometimes ask myself:

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What, in a Darwinian, evolutionary sense, is the purpose of nostalgia? Why is it there? What function does it serve?

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The moments I remember from the streets of my Salfordian childhood that generate nostalgia, they are not made of anything that isn't available to me now. Streetlamps and overcast skies. Cars and tarmac, the smell of rain, a few pop songs and that cocaine ache for just a little something more that throbs off of the shop fronts and fills the streets.

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What I can see now, that maybe I wasn't so clear on then, is that the poetry I encounter in any scene, whether it's one of natural grandeur or of urban banality, is a poetry I placed there myself. Yes, I can talk of the changing of the light in the sky, or what ideas are carried in off the canal on the breeze. I can talk of yesterday's papers gathering where pavement meets wall, scuffed down by plimsole prints. I can talk of all the endless magical ingredients that gather and combine in a day in the life of a boy in the North, how they dwarf and encapsulate him.

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But the poetry there, I realise now, was put there by me, by my witnessing. A baby, a boy, a growing young man, as inarticulate as a vacuum; yet what magic he encountered is only what poured directly out of him, overlaid itself on the world before him in answer to his desires.

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We like to refer to the ineffable, the mystery that cannot be named, or contained by words, or comprehended by the mind of man. We see it as some kind of ultimate goal that may one day be reached and experienced, and we forget that, not only are we made out of it, but it is made out of us.
 

It is made out of us.
 

Humility is the beautiful other side of the coin from our greatness, though few on this planet right now believe in the extent of what they are.
 

We are the shapers as well as the shaped. And this is why the holosphere is more than just the atmosphere of a moment, because it is the result of the combining of what is pouring out of us with what is pouring in.