#3 On the nostalgia of things disliked

(or tapping into the sacred to capitalise)

I woke up and cold had transformed, taken on new dimensions. As if slipping on the first additional layer—maybe not a coat yet, but a jumper, entirely too warm for the actual weather, but just right for the weather inside my head—the morning had also decided to wake up as an autumnal one, with all this metamorphosis brought along. Nostalgia had already begun to swirl about in my head, giddiness fuelled by warm drinks, even warmer bakes, and crisp leaves—the whole Christian Girl Autumn package delivered to my mental address with next day delivery—taken temporary residence in my heart until the wet mists of November replace it for contempt and a new desire for change. And thus, ad infinitum.

To consider nostalgia purely retrospective would be to disregard any notion of man as an prospective animal. Every time we look to the past, we inevitably turn our attention to the future and all the possibilities it holds. When we think about our late grandmother’s cooking, we think of what could—and what could never—be, the anticipation of a taste and a taste that will never be felt by us; a taste we have managed to forget perfectly in the hopes that one day we might find that one tiny grandmother selling even tinier jars of homemade walnut jam in some remote village in the mountains that we are almost sure we will never visit. But in those odd cases that we do, we will no longer want it. We will not even have to talk ourselves out of buying it, we simply will not. No real taste will ever compare to the perfect balance of notes forgotten residing in our memory, so we will stay completely unwilling to trade a fleeting moment of pleasure for the eternal anticipatory sweetness of a taste that could, but will never be again.

But through our rose-tinted, homemade jam-scented glasses, we get something terribly wrong. We live our lives convinced that we can only be nostalgic for the things we loved, the things that marked a special time in our lives, spilling out like light through the cracks of every memory of that era. The nostalgia industrial complex with its endless power over us, however, does not work like that. Man plans and nostalgia laughs; man curates his memories, putting them neatly in a box and nostalgia stomps on any sad attempt of man to be in control of the emotional charge of his own core memories. Man begs to be allowed to be nostalgic for warm crêpes, misty mountain mornings under a rodopsko odeyalo, and his grandmother’s silhouette as she stirs a big pot of soup just as he himself—or rather, his 6-year old self—stirs awake, sleep still heavy on his child eyelids. Nostalgia will allow it, throwing in a complementary sunset or the smell of peppers roasting on the chushkopek, but it will also let man know that he is now expected to get nostalgic over white bread dipped in vinegar and the most unnaturally pink processed kolbasa. That’s how the package deal works, you see—you suffer through the present day to later on be perplexed by how fond you’ve become of the worst meal of your life, almost wishing you could taste it again, convincing yourself that it is “just to make sure it’s still unpleasant”.

Earlier this month, I was made aware that a café here in Paris was now serving syrniki; objectively—little cottage cheese cakes served with jam or cream, subjectively—pocket-sized clouds of childhood memories and the bliss of not having a single care in the world. Excitement was bubbling as I (and half of ex-USSR expat Paris) made my way to this coveted treat, certain that I would adore it (spoiler alert: I did). The problem was, however, that I never really liked syrniki in my childhood. Though I was never terribly fond of sweets, growing up in the Bulgaria of the early ‘90s—aware of the neon lights of capitalist abundance, yet not completely illuminated by them—a certain curiosity had taken me over, much like it had every child, and instilled the desire to consumed the packaged, the shiny, the Western. The definition of the “we have X at home” meme, I would constantly be made aware that I do not need a chocolate bar, because we have palachinki at home, that McDonald’s was not a viable option for lunch when one had pile s oriz at home (admittedly, my parents did allow me to consume a fair amount of McDonald’s meals that I have also become somewhat nostalgic for now, especially as someone who no longer consumes meat). Syrniki in all their pasty white glory were never preferable to a Twix bar, so why was I craving them to the point of becoming giddy now, some 20 years later? Was it contextual nostalgia, driven by the sheer absurdity of consuming this childhood treat in the heart of Paris? Was it the expat’s fatal attraction to everything that brings even the slightest feel of home, lest they become so entangled in the consumerist reality of their new country of residence that they completely forget where they’re coming from? Or was it rather the collective unconscious reminding them of the importance of the things that were for the people who came before?

Though I would be inclined to deem it true in some instances, the nostalgia of things disliked is a monster way more complex than that. When I first lived in Japan, I vividly remember the way I would wince at the smell of miso soup (yes, you read that correct—I did not simply not eat it, I could not even tolerate its smell). Looking back, this dislike—though I never conceptualised it as such in the same way I’d conceptualised my disdain for the two food I refuse to eat to this day, sun-dried tomatoes and pickled red ginger—is almost perplexing, as I was never one to be especially picky when it came to food, regardless of whether it was foreign to me or belonged to my own cultural background. What was even more perplexing, though, was the absolute irrational certainty with which I had proclaimed (to myself) that I was craving a bowl of miso soup as soon as I stepped foot back in Japan on my first trip back. Had my dislike for its smell been so strong that in a warped way it had become a symbol of my life in Japan, latching onto my conceptualisation of that era to such an extent that missing Japan and missing miso soup—which I had never eaten—had almost become synonymous?

Granted, we change as so do our tastes. Things disliked can morph into favourites (like many people who grew up hating mushrooms—I’m not including myself into this slightly blasphemous circle, though I am using this as an opportunity to foreshadow a future essay on mushrooms, maybe—can attest to), but once nostalgia is thrown in the mix, such changes of heart end up speaking more about the volatility of human memories than they do taste. We like to think of ourselves as “the masters”—of our fate, our emotions, our memories—only to constantly be reminded of the sheer cosmic randomness of it all. Maybe this too is what it is to be human—to be imperfect, constantly reminded that sometimes we’re more the meat suit than the ersatz homunculus inhabiting our (un)conscious.