All nature resists change. We know we know the devil we know and we know we prefer it to the one we don’t. We also know that something is seriously up. We’re not quite sure what, except that many of us would rather not think about it. But it’s happening anyway and, as was the case with 2020, things will look very different again by the time 2021 has finished with us. We are, apparently, getting a thousand years education condensed into fifty. Everywhere there are indications and intimations of imminent, profound change. Now it’s announcing itself, it may feel sudden but it’s been coming for a long time; it’s always been coming. 

Any kind of change casts a shadow and we respond in many different ways. One way is to turn away from it, collectively or individually. Cultures bathe and trade in the reflected glow of past triumphs, ancient or otherwise and similarly old people reflect on their lives and warn us not to take a moment for granted. There’s a beautiful discussion right there.

It’s funny how we hardly ever have conversations that get to the heart of very much. On certain occasions, when the opportunity arises, it’s such a relief to get straight to the things that matter. Even with strangers. Especially strangers. And really, why wouldn’t you? Saves years. What’s the point of tiptoeing around the edges of your own life while the days quietly slip into decades? We desperately want to connect on a heart level but our heads get in the way. The frightening thing is not dying; the frightening thing is not living. 

Aside from sex & drugs & rock’n’roll, the most widespread form of escapism is the past (wherever that is), and particularly – only – the good bits. It’s a funny old business, nostalgia. It’s been with us, in one sense or another, ever since the good old days. Was there ever a time when people weren’t nostalgic, when they broke their fireside reverie to tell their grandchildren that ‘fings really was just like wot they used to be’? But then I guess nostalgia only works if present prospects are uncertain or don’t match up to perceptions of the past.

Caught between a senseless, fracturing present and a future where all the lights have gone out, nostalgia is the defining symptom of the post-industrial world, and it is big business; so much so that we are in danger of getting a collective cricked neck from looking over our shoulders so much. For all our gazing, though, we can’t actually go back anymore than, we can return to the real or imagined safety of childhood. And there’s the thing: nostalgia is an understandable, but essentially empty, exercise in pure selectivity and therefore of little or no use. Margaret Thatcher, for example, used to bang on about Victorian family values but forgot to mention the rampant hypocrisy, syphilis and poverty. But then she would, wouldn’t she?

The darker the hour, the faster the clock hands run backward and the brighter the beacon of the past burns, calling us back to the old vicarage, to a home we can never return to, until the church clock really does stand at ten to three and there is honey still for tea after all. And here we all are, sitting in the attic of the past, leafing to remember and sifting to let go, getting all misty about what is, after all, only the last nanosecond in history. Our immersion in nostalgia shines like a lacquered displacement activity but it’s really just leaving behaviour; what we do before it is time to go. 

And so there is loss. We are adrift in it and have been for a long time. In culture, so much of what moves us is not the art, music, literature or cinema itself, but a tangible sense of loss that pervades it and resonates with us. It can stimulate a deep, residual sense of beauty, time and place in our lives but also far, far beyond the here and now, to another dimension of being, almost beyond memory and articulation. Yet we all recognise it when we feel it. It’s what makes all art art and what makes it ultimately useless too, and attempts to intellectualise it futile. I could go on….

We find ourselves in a strangely-lit, post-cultural non-space where nothing is sacred, and liberté, égalité, fraternité are mere bytes, where inversion of every kind is the norm, but where the norm no longer exists. We are more unsure than ever of our identities, roles and it seems that there is no longer a path, so nostalgia comes on like a fool’s amnesty. The pull is sometimes so strong as to invoke a desire to return, not just to a selective past, but beyond, to one which never existed. The past may be dead but it won’t lie down.

In pop culture there is a fascination with the selected highlights package of the past as a body of work to be revisited, plundered and celebrated time and again until any remaining magic is wrung out of it or seeps into tradition. No new ground is being broken and nothing much new is being said. Pop music has been ransacking itself since the 90s, if not before, and the screen too, both silver and small seem content with a diet of rehashes and remakes. As things stand, we’ve run out of ideas.

There seems to be no limit to the number of times the same story can be reworked and no limit to the number of times we will buy into it, such is our need to imagine, escape or navel gaze. And like music, it doesn’t go away anymore either. Whatever you saw and whenever you saw it, or not, sooner or later it will end up in virtual landfill, where the endless effluence of today and yesterday, yesterhour and yestersecond finds its final roosting place. It is truly a Pandora’s box of phantasmagoria which reveals the seething maelstrom of modern life. 

Loss is the inseparable companion of change and its analgesic is nostalgesic. If we ever get to the point where we are nostalgic about the present, we’ll know we’re really in deep doo-doo. But while nostalgia looks back in time for a place to hide, its saucy counterpoint, pop-talgia is a mash-up, a summoning up of that same past for one last, giant, gratuitous, chorus line curtain call. And we know what happens after that: when the music’s over, turn out the lights. 

All that progress, and it’s taking us to a place we can’t even name. And there is no name because we have no more to learn from this paradigm and it’s time to move on. And that’s progress even if it doesn’t feel like it close up. The coming demolition of the old order is well overdue and certainly nothing to be afraid of even if we have to live in the ruins for a while. Given that we have no choice in the matter anyway, better to take a deep breath, face forward and smile, cos that’s where we’re going. Ever onward and upward, like a lark ascending.