The Ruins of Nostalgia

The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher is a tract on nostalgia in 64 page-length fragments. Stonecipher picks apart the 20th-century phenomenon in all its guises, taking aim at the seemingly innocuous feeling that radiates warmth and longing even as it cloaks real harm and fosters inaction:

If we thought some aspects of the previous system were better than those of the current system, were we just “nostalgic” for the previous system? If we wished the empty lots would stay empty lots and not become luxury lofts, were we just “nostalgic” for empty lots?

In fragment no. 20, the poet considers the false comfort offered by nostalgia:

the stories had excited us into the aesthetic of the empathetic: we had felt the shocks of forms of injustice new to us, and had enjoyed bristling with outrage that need not become action. These stories had briefly become our stories […] It was only once it was no longer possible that we realized how good it had felt to nestle into the ruins of someone else’s nostalgia.

Throughout, Stonecipher historicizes the phenomena with the cool detachment of someone watching a circus. The prose poems read like spells, lulling the reader into a technicolor (if depressing) dream:

we cried each time we watched the video of the once-famous polar bear rotating in a daze from brain encephalitis before slipping from his artificial ice floe into his artificial ocean, […] we hunted for the bear’s stuffed hull in the museum […] oh what to do, what to do, with all this matter, piling up in all the side rooms inside us in the ruins of nostalgia.

Stonecipher’s diagnosis exposes the cuddly feeling as a sedative that trivializes anger, quells grief.

A roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of grief. Nostalgia, on the other hand, felt weightless, a tiny black-lacquered snuffbox inlaid with golden scenes, beautiful and detrimental […]