Nostalgia for a Time That Never Existed

Ruminations...

Le Fumeur by Vincent van Gogh (1888)

The following is an excerpt from a novel. Like everything else, this is an incomplete work.

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The protest was a period of disconcerting stimulation. He didn’t understand why Linda wanted him to join her in the first place, nor did he know what they were protesting for. Something to do with women’s rights, he was told. The reasons are inconsequential. Euywn was there because he needed a distraction from what happened last week. After getting off the train, instead of walking back home, he took a detour down an alley to calm his overstimulated senses. Alleyways suited him better than parks. They were more peaceful. His mind started wandering.

Nostalgia nourishes the soul. Euwyn realised that life is about an inexistent past and nostalgia for a time that never existed. Sentimentalism constitutes the human condition, and the life lived, no matter how lamentable, is more comforting. Being is a perpetual state of Stockholm syndrome. Yet sentimentalities dupe us all; the innocence of simpler times seldom existed, and the good old days were rare, but we still cling to them. While gladly welcoming the distractions, Euywn couldn’t truly partake in the protest; he felt alienated and a stranger among those he supposedly knew. Despite walking alongside the impassioned protesters, he wasn’t caught up in the event; he remained an outsider, not unlike the rest of his life. The person chanting inaudibly on the megaphone, Linda holding up a garish sign, and people blowing whistles appear to him not as comrades but as props and actors in a Tarantino film. He couldn’t help but treat the event as a spectacle, a simulacrum of an apparent reality. While his physical body persisted, he had left the protest; he found himself a bystander to a drama he had unknowingly been thrown into. His efforts to be involved were in vain, and he remained a spectator; by trying to be in the moment, Euywn discovers that it’s a lie. Moments aren’t complete in themselves—nothing is. The present is nothing but the inability to grasp an instance of time. It’s a failure to know what exists in a given moment, as something always eludes us. Euywn’s never stood in time and thought to himself, This is it. This is life! He felt life was either an overflowing vessel that one couldn’t drink from or an unquenchable thirst one couldn’t relinquish; the excess and dearth were concomitant. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both a particle’s position and momentum. Indeed, it’s yet another paradox that’s sent 20th-century science into a maelstrom. The upheaval ought to be expected, though, because isn’t this a finding of modern physics that rings so true to our existence? We, too, cannot grasp the entirety of anything. The moment we try to know a thing, a vertiginous absence torments us, an emptiness with insurmountable potency that taunts us with a nauseating glut, making one either want never to leave their bed every morning or go for a long run until one’s legs are numb. Hence, above all, animal rationale must realise absolute knowing is impossible. The moment you say you know a thing, you arrive at this knowing through the failure to know something else that eluded you.

Prior to the events that unfolded last week, Euywn decided to practise abstinence for six months. He felt wasting away like a public toilet in Catania and decided to deprive himself of all pleasure, learning to love the absence; no casual sex, no drugs and alcohol, only running, weight lifting, Jiu-jitsu, fasting and cold showers every morning. He admired ascetics and, occasionally in life, became one but equally envied them, too. Admiration is impossible without envy, and Euywn was resentful of his inability to adhere to asceticism consistently. His resentment, though, was not covetousness but rather the ultimate act of reverence. There was violence done to the self by striving towards the ascetic ideal, and punishing oneself when failing to reach it was even more enjoyable. Euywn knew of the vanity laden in asceticism, but he nonetheless indulged in such autocentrism.

On the other hand, a part of him loved self-destruction, loved to go off course and entirely sacrifice the ascetic for the hedonist. That is until he’s tired of hedonism and reverts back to the former state, but not for long as the endless cycle of ricocheting from asceticism to hedonism and back continues. Last week, the hedonist came into full force, and off he went on a lascivious frenzy—the details of which are better left unsaid. The discipline of the ascetic nonetheless seduced him; the ability to have one’s life integrated into a place of equilibrium is what Euwyn desired—that is, until his desires changed, and he desired the very opposite of his former state. Integrality is a fantasy that forever evades us; it’s a possibility that could be which seduce us, and such possible realities are the reason we do anything at all. Fantasy defines la condition humaine. Without fantasies, humans would never act; we would be dead matter. Indeed, one has to fantasise about another world. If not, how can we bear to live? Reality is unbearably dull and prosaic to live without fantasy. A part of every man and woman is a nymphomaniac fantasising about the highest moment of pleasure, or rather a pleasure so violent that one perishes into the emptiness of the universe, into the vast indeterminate space between subatomic particles constitutive of an infinite void. Nymphomania has little to do with sex but a need for a type of pleasure that’s never pleasant but painful. A pain one keeps coming back for as unlike biological needs, the need for pain is insatiable in the human animal. One may even rationalise it and believe pain sets us free, but it doesn’t; rather, it’s an empty affliction, the finest vanity. Indeed, the rationalisations are après coup the desire for pain is foremost.

Euwyn loathes a culture that demands authenticity because there’s no unvarnished truth to the self. The self is a half-naked woman. Any man who has been with three, maybe four, women knows that what seduces is not the naked body covered by lingerie but the fantasy the covering creates. The body laid bare and unconcealed loses all eroticism, disappearing into uniformity. Bare nudity is uninteresting, much like a gift: the point of gift-giving isn’t the commodity one gifts to another but the wrapping paper that covers it; the moment it’s unwrapped, the gift becomes unappealing. A gift is sublime not because of the inner but the outer. Could it be the case for human beings, too? There are only so many women one can sleep with before realising the naked body is a repetition that permeates one’s life with an insurmountable sameness, a monotony—unlike love—one seldom wants to repeat. Euwyn occasionally realised this datum but kept going back for more, even when he didn’t want to. Perhaps he enjoyed the discomfort of such a weight, the heaviness of tedium as a challenge to be surmounted by finding the body that would satiate his desire; not unlike Don Juan, the pursuit is the point for Euwyn, not the body being desired. Yet, seduction, he knew, lies not in the piece of lingerie either but in what exists within the concealer and concealed object. The ephemeral space that makes us ask, ‘What is it? What are you hiding?’ is the space of seduction. The self isn’t any different. A tad of eros touches every human interaction. Looking at a man or woman, you’re driven to wonder, ‘Who are you? Where is the truth you’re hiding?’ when in reality, there’s nothing once the veil is lifted. Could it be that love is falling for this nothing, and if you’re lucky, they fall for yours?

Hamlet asking, “To be, or not to be”, is the wrong question. We’re being and not being, dying and living concomitantly. Since Descartes, scientists have studied the living side of humans, hoping to know this elusive animal absolutely. Neuroimaging and MRIs, though, miss the contradiction of a self-conscious being. The positivistic sciences cannot capture the negativity immanent to our beinghood—albeit a negativity that paves the road to positivity. No one is truly themselves, and saying ‘I am who I am’ is a contradiction. The protest Euywn was at pertained to rights, and in our polite liberal society, rights are always intertwined with identity. However, identity is the most stupefying notion, as when we articulate our identity, this very identity is undermined. Indeed, he knew every zealous demand for rights was a tacit plea to justify one’s identity, yet identity remains perplexing and out of reach. If a man or woman is complete in themselves, articulating identity wouldn’t be necessary, perhaps impossible. Speaking makes hypocrites of us all. The moment we speak, we negate otherness. Every utterance Euywn makes nullifies a reality alien to him that he can never capture and tame, saying, “I am not this, nor am I that.” When he inevitably speaks of himself, he negates this self, too, because we are a stranger to ourselves. Aptly, Euwyn’s ascetic doesn’t know what the hedonist wants, and the hedonist doesn’t know what the ascetic wants either. The alienation he felt during the protest is what he feels with himself in vita et aeternitate, and was not dependent on a time or place. Truth be told, does anyone truly feel at home anywhere? Don’t we all feel like a puzzle, unable to find the final piece to complete it? If Euwyn had found the piece that completed him, he wouldn’t have needed to step outside of this self that he thought to identify with and go out in the world to find this elusive piece. But like the rest, he never finds it, so to utter one’s identity is a hypocritical act, as if one truly had that identity, the utterance wouldn’t be necessary. The human condition is not suffering nor the pursuit of pleasure but hypocrisy, the downright pretence of something existing behind the mask. Nostalgia conceals this datum; we look for our lost piece in the past, or we hope to find it in the life to come by being nostalgic for the future. One who yearns for bygone times succumbs to vacant reminiscence as none of us can face the fractured self of the present, cleaved and marred through self-consciousness. Does anyone escape this primordial castration? Euwyn was consumed by this question all his life: “What if I don’t speak? What if I choose a life of solitude? What if I escape a society that puts me in chains?” Alas! If only resignation were the panacea to our predicament. If only escapism worked. If only life were that easy. But it’s not. The refusal to partake is an act; the refusal to speak is a stance one takes. Thus, you speak, you always speak; you’re condemned to action. Indeed, the unsaid haunts us more than the said and the undone more than the done. To be fragmentary is to be human, not entire, discontent, pulled from all directions and jostled by the changeable past and an unchangeable future. But Euwyn knew otherwise. At least, he thought so.

The alley smelt of piss and neglect. But he didn’t mind. Cogitations began to flood him, and he couldn’t contain them, so he took out his notebook to keep writing so as not to drown in his own thoughts. Euywn didn’t write as a hobby; he wrote to save his life. Like many who lived and died by the pen, words were his opium. Those who treat language as solely a means of communication miss its essence and, ipso facto, forfeit the essence of being, too.

The self is relational, but these relationships aren’t harmonic; on the contrary, they are a rupture in our being. We’ve perhaps misunderstood what the Buddhists said about Nirvana. If anything, the nirvanic state should not be an idyllic place free from suffering but the ability to take upon the chaos of a fissured reality, the ability to steer a ship through a typhoon when one doesn’t even know how to sail. It’s not a place of peace but an immediate grasp of the pandemonium of being. ‘If finite being is a wound and eternity is unhealed, one cannot truly live without asking the question asked by poets and philosophers since time immemorial: is self-consciousness a curse?’ He’d seen these words in his diary from last week, realising Nirvana is what Euywn experienced then; for that matter, he faced such fissures most of his life, but as we’re all aware, certain Nirvanas are more nirvanic than others. The overdevelopment of consciousness has made humans maladaptive to evolution. Despite Euywn’s desire to dissolve into the senselessness of inanimate objects, feeling no pleasure or pain, he’s mired in humaneness. Human beings are a biological paradox that has emerged from matter but cannot be reduced to it; aren’t we an anomaly of nature? Or perhaps an error? Nietzsche believed that the onus is on us to decide whether life will be a fruitful error or a resignation to solipsistic melancholia; indeed, the German romantic would tell us that one should never heal from wounds but make it a work of art! But can we, though? Does one dare to be such an artisan moulding a life out of the muck of dead matter?

On reaching the end of the alley, he realised he had no recollection of the past ten minutes. His notebook contained words, but he wasn’t sure who had written them. Euywn had reached the end without a beginning. He’s forever arriving somewhere unbeknownst to why he embarked in the first place, only arriving, though, not embarking, as he’s unsure who embarks on these manifold journeys in the first place. Like any pensive soul, he, too, is unaware of the desires that cause him to act in this world. A question that frequently visits such psyches is, ‘How did I get here?’, unable to pinpoint the chain of decisions that led one to a given time and place. These souls recreate the past through the current situation, not the other way around, where the past determines the present (as we’d expect causality to work). Euywn found himself at the protest and, afterwards, felt teleported to the piss-smelling alley, where his ruminations began. It was as if nothing had happened between these two places. Time was real only in these two points, and whatever transpired in between was insignificant to the point of non-existence. Linda’s invite hadn’t happened, nor did the train ride; he couldn’t recall how he got to the protest or ended up walking down the alley. Time truly remains ungraspable. It isn’t mere transient moments, but even the significant events like one’s wedding or the birth of a child are meant to be forgotten. They may remain a date on a calendar, but these are empty habitual formalisms. Time flows only in our forgetting, and life begins with our unconscious acts. Indeed, none of us truly start anything in life, and we don’t end things either; we rather find ourselves thrown into a juncture, a crossroad that is not our doing. And yet volatility, not volition, is our only freedom. The abyss of Euywn’s being, the engulfing disjointedness of existence, is the fissure he creates in the natural order of things. His extirpating unpredictability and maddening passion for annihilation are what make him human and not a chunk of meat in the universe or a cog in a castrated social machine working, consuming, voting and withering away. He reasons about life only in retrospect after the acausal act. The act itself is caprice and nothing more. If insanity leaves the human body, so does humanity, leaving only a bare conglomerate of organs, bodily liquids and faeces. He’s a zealot only for madness, not for politics, nationhood or religion, but for the passions of the soul that consume all of being in a vortex of paroxysm. But why does he embark on these journeys? Is it out of terror? Is it disjointedness? Is the self uprooted because the vast array of choices is paralysing? Or is it because the self is afraid to call a place home? “I’ve got many places to be, but the problem is, where do I stay? The moment I arrive somewhere, the immediate need to leave consumes me,” is what Euywn thought to himself last week when she wanted him to spend the night at her place before everything went berserk. If he had the ability to call anywhere his home, most of his ordeals would evanesce. However, such wishes remain a sheer impossibility, for like all human beings, the only place that Euywn feels at home is in perpetual homelessness.

At a certain point in the development of consciousness, a crater is carved into the human soul, a hole that needs filling. We desire a place, a person, a thing that’s stubbornly eluding us. Pascal was wrong. The hole isn’t God-shaped; if only it were, life would be simpler. Euywn recalls his foray into church-going and coveting the congregants he saw with a God-shaped hole; they knew exactly what would fill it. They could have the most tiring week beaten, maligned and oppressed by the vicissitudes of modern life, yet the Evangelical knows a Father in Heaven will right and wrongs and heal unhealable wounds. If only he had that kind of assurance—Euywn has begun to believe that Christ on the cross was the surest sign that God is more wounded than we humans are. If only one had walked this earth knowing where he was going and why he was here, what an effortless life it would’ve been wondering earth like Japanese deers in Nara Park bowing their heads and eating crackers fed by tourists. If only one could let faith alone buttress one’s existence, life then would be innocuous and seamless. People become atheists not because God doesn’t exist. One doesn’t need philosophical machinations to prove or disprove God; these are silly games. God isn’t hidden; he exists or doesn’t, period. God’s being, or lack thereof, is palpable; there’s no arguing about it except for intellectual indulgence. Indeed, the thinking mind is never satiated, but theologians have a peculiar sickness to theirs; they think the question of God is a mere game. True atheism results from knowing God too in pain. He’s a wretched creature like the rest of us. But perhaps wretched is too harsh. It’s unfair to bestow such supervillainous status on him as that implies God is a supreme being characterised by omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, qualities we impose on God. We have put undue pressure on him; it’s a mistake to think of God as a powerful father who watches over his creations. A more accurate picture would be to see God as a stray dog in an abandoned town wandering a dirty street, shivering, whimpering and desperate for shelter on a rainy day. The true God, not the one conjured up by humans, is confused and helpless, much like us. God, too, is looking for belonging, not unlike his creation. And yet, one can’t help but wonder if he feels nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for a time before humanity? Euywn wagered not. Because of boredom; an unspeakable cosmic boredom constitutes every conscious entity, especially God, and even for him, life is a constant battle of unmet desires and on a rare occurrence when having a desire met, realising the fantasy was better than the real thing. If God created humanity out of love, he preferred the ideal of what we could’ve been instead of what we’ve actually become; thus, God’s pain. The wrathful God of the Bible isn’t exhibiting his absolute power and authority as the pious tell us but is acting out due to his insecurity and angst, much like a chauvinist performing his masculine prowess due to his innate impotence. God is the rich man with a sports car and an expensive watch to compensate for his lack of virility.

Peace is elusive to Euwyn; after a tiring day of work in the city, he hopes for a quiet commute on the tram ride back home, but someone’s always talking a little too loudly or decides to let out a thunderous sneeze, making the whole carriage rumble vexing him and possibly the other fatigued commuters. To distract himself from his own vexation, he ruminated on the mind, too, working like a city. When flying into Melbourne, it looks handsome and orderly from a bird’s-eye view; you’d see vehicles moving seamlessly, creating patterns of lights and buildings lit up that convey civilisation and roads cutting into patches of trees, forming a snug tapestry that creates a semblance of everything running smoothly the way it’s supposed to, where each part has a purpose in the whole. But once the plane lands and one starts walking around, the masquerade of orderliness disappears. You realise it’s yet another city that, despite having its own character, is still being built; it’s still fragmentary, and there’s always something left out, much like Gödel’s first theorem in mathematical logic, which says there are truths about a formal system that cannot be proven within the very system as somethings always left out—an uncanny resemblance? Perhaps not. The roads in Melbourne are under construction, causing a myriad of detours; a pedestrian crossing light will most certainly be broken, the inner lanes smell of piss and hedonism, and more than likely, a homeless man will yell at you next to Flinders Street station. Like every other city in the world, this one, too, is still a work in progress, no different to the human mind. Philosophers and scientists have contended over the essence of the mind since time immemorial, but the answer is simple: it’s a work in progress, never complete, never whole and impossible to be at one with itself. There’s no fullness to the mind—or anything else in the universe. If the second law of thermodynamics means anything at all, it must be most pertinent to the mind. Entropy is essential for the mind’s capriciousness, its inability to be by itself. In an entropic universe, what’s perplexing is that we aren’t blown apart into minuscule pieces. A glass ornament falling off a shelf shatters. Once poured, a cup of coffee cools down. An incomprehensible amount of stars have burnt out into the crevasse of the cosmos. Order inevitably leads to disorder. Nature is cruel. Life is the exception, and death is the rule. Animals have no say in their destiny. A deer may live off a grassy forest, eating leaves and twigs all its life, only to be mauled to death by a wolf. The predator is indifferent to the pain of its prey. Such is the order of nature, or should one say disorder? Indeed, the worst thing for a human to be is one with nature because we are the exception. The human emerges the moment nature ceases to become itself. We’re stubborn sons of bitches who refuse to fit in, and our emergence changes the natural order that gave rise to us. Reality is traumatised by humans.

How does the body that houses our minds not blow apart into utter chaos? Death certainly awaits us all, but before the dilapidation, we seemingly get by fine. If we’re lucky, our lives tend to resemble a kind of order. Except for the days he’d intentionally sabotage his routine, Euwyn would be woken up by an alarm every morning. If there’s a woman next to him, he’ll fondle her breasts, and if she reciprocates, they’d have sex. He would orgasm; she rarely would. Afterwards, he’d drag himself out of bed to get the usual satiation of strongly brewed coffee, pausing till the caffeine kicked in to wake up for the second time. He’d chuck a piss which gave a slight yet oddly gratifying pain, then do fifty pull-ups, a hundred pushups and pistol squats. Strength matters to him as man has to overcome his weak constitution. Life gives no other options but overcoming or suicide. Finally, he’d brush his teeth, shave, shower, and get on with his regimented day. But this isn’t natural. In the universe, things aren’t supposed to be in order. A morning routine like Euwyn’s is the exception.

Determinism is yet another fantasy, a desperate search for an oasis of peace in an inherently violent universe. We are decaying beings that resist decay and finite beings that persist through time. What is it about us that seemingly defies thermodynamics? Schrödinger called it néguentropie; we resist the forces of entropy physiologically and culturally. Life maintains its inner state fighting the discontents of the universe, and the homo sapiens goes a step further; we build culture. The cultures we build don’t merely allow life but also death. Culture doesn’t protect us from death but rather changes its meaning. A society that desires to escape death paradoxically ends up committing suicide. A place for grief, funerals and disease is immanent in all cultures, at least the ones that last. Humans attempt to symbolise everything, notwithstanding our ultimate failure to grasp being. Even suicide has a designated place. The act of infinite resignation, of trying to step outside of the social order by ending one’s life, makes us intertwined with it much more acutely. Oedipus is us; we’re desperately trying to break free of our fate, only to be deeply intertwined in it. Such is why suicide is too optimistic. If you were a true nihilist, you wouldn’t kill yourself. You would keep living as a posttraumatic being. We humans truly are the strange ones. We come from nature, but there’s no going back to it as our emergence has changed nature itself. Science might call such phenomena néguentropie or natural selection, but Euwyn called it madness. The primal rupture between human beings and animals is not reason but a maddening passion to achieve the unachievable, making us perish in our pursuit of the impossible. Indeed, Euwyn knew this was the only life worth living if one were to be called a human being.

While walking reluctantly to catch a tram back home, it struck him that last night he was restive before Linda called. In fact, though vexed at first, he was glad she called; it pulled Euwyn out of an engulfing labyrinth he’d been thrown into. Perhaps he didn’t want to go home as he didn’t want to reenter this labyrinthine morass, which he could feel acutely but not grasp. He was being intruded by gratuitous moments; they were molesting him, and the apparent sense of normality he had was disturbed. Melancholia for the past crept in, and anxiety about the future paralysed him; he felt conquered by everything that wasn’t here. The presence of absence pervaded all being. Where do moments exist? Are they a part of the world? He was doubtful. Moments don’t abide by the laws of nature—unless the objective laws are themselves evolving as we do, giving birth to newer realities? Moments don’t follow causality. An event in the physical world is predictable. Euwyn could be walking down an alley tired and disconcerted after the protest, causing him to trip over the pavement, rolling his ankle, and a shock of pain would immediately shoot through his foot. It’d be unpleasant, but he’d know what caused the pain. Physical pain is the best kind because it’s intelligible—we even desire it. This type of pain has a timeline, and human beings need such predictability—mostly, that is. Moments, however, stand outside of time, and yet we’re intimately made of them. One experiences life much more through moments rather than atoms, neurons, and cells. Passing moments is what makes life sensible. Unlike the physical world, though, moments from the past continuously reach us, defying the linearity of time and the causality of space.

Betrayal shot through Euwyn’s body. How do past events still exist within us? Why does the past feel more real than the present? It’s been four years since she left him—or, more aptly, he forced her to leave. At the time, he knew it would pass; as conventional wisdom goes, time supposedly heals. Utter bullshit! Time did nothing but add salt to his wound. After what happened, he moved houses twice and got rid of everything that reminded him of that wretched year. But he desired the wretchedness. Despite an innumerable number of women being in it, the bed he slept in smelt of her. Despite Euywn preferring it black, he’d still have a dash of milk with his coffee because she liked that, and they’d have imaginary discussions about the books he was reading and the recent philosophical conundrum he’d found himself in. But we shouldn’t reduce these to mere illusory phantasms of a broken heart, as the discussions he had with her were more real than anything else in his present life. The woman he slept with last Friday was a mannequin, a sex doll he used to pleasure himself. It was masturbation with a human being as the object of pleasure instead of his hand. The sex was tiresome and monotonous; in fact, he recalls thinking about Kant’s analytic and synthetic judgements in the first critique during penetration, and once his attention was back on the woman, he couldn’t orgasm, nor could she, so they abruptly stopped amidst the act. The past and future have an uncanny resemblance. One could call them the same reality with different flavours lacking linearity. The future reaches out to him, defining the contours within which he can act. But how can something that hasn’t happened yet have such absolute control over us? Whenever he thought of her, it was never saccharine reminiscence but a deliberation on a palpable future they would have together. He would run through the myriad possibilities of their life: the good, bad and the ugly, and all of these futures have more control over Euwyn than the present. They are more real as, in time, inexistence haunts a human being more than existence. The person he is today is nowhere to be found. The moment he thinks of himself in the now, it eludes Euywn. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it is that the now is a lie. Living in the moment is impossible. Moments only exist in the past and the future, possibly as a distortion, possibly as an apprehension, and one is constantly moving away from or towards them. The present is nothing but that which slips out of our hands. But we try to hold on. What if the nostalgia for a time that never existed is what sustains us? The only reality beating within his heart are the times he cannot go back to. Kundera is wrong. Could it be that quantum mechanics tell us the lightness of being is heavier than we realise? That’s why it’s unbearable. Everything lingers.

*I made updates to this piece on 27/12/2024