Nostalghia

Waxing moon, waxing tide, waxing Prussian blue.

Panasonic DC-S5M2, 35 mm, f/2.0, ISO 1000, 1/15 sec

Imagine naming a blog piece after a film you’ve never really finished… the impertinence! But I know Nostalghia, or at least, supposedly, the kind of nostalgia rooted in the woeful untranslatability of culture experiences, an term so insufficient but we nevertheless stick to in short of better alternatives. This insufficiency renders frustration of such magnitude when one fails to express the exact sentiments, impluses and the vibration of those tingling nerves he experiences without resorting to language and culture references native to him. That in theory all human languages are equally expressive but something’s always lost in translation, and if one’ve missed the critical period, the doors are closed to them in perpetuity.

In a sense, we are all so alone. The untranslatability gap divides not just between languages, but the whole setup that builds up to enable the particular pattern of nerve activation in my brain as I see the moon travelling - almost whizzing through the descending shrine of Prussian night. Tenderness encompassed the unnamed trackside town and held it in an extended, unheard hug. Coil whining from freshly lit sodium lamps, pulsing, flashing, sparkling, thick air stuck in my lungs, almost vapouring asphalt barely cooled down from August sun… all these can of course be expressed, translated, read and then re-constructed by another human, but never - never - feel as I did.

It’s of course, perhaps completely missing the point of the exchange of experience. We are after all not computer programs and it’s not the duplication of memory that we go after. Random, uncontrolled, unforeseen deviation from the original copy gave the basis of the enumeration of world we love and despise today.

But is it enough? Is it enough to defy the loneliness one feels, the failure of human words and the calls of the unportable heimat amid an alien land - home to which one finds himself an alien too now. Does it erase or at least mute the desire to be understood and resonated with despite endless failures - as pessimists amongst us would call - so deeply vested in our very build-up? And, quoting Haigh, is it enough to keep the vampires off our doors?