on nostalgia

Music: Milton Mapes: Westernaire (2003)

What ever happened to Eddie Money? And why don't I read more Derrida?

I was rereading Derrida's Archive Fever in the waiting room before I saw my "primary care physician" this morning. When I read, I use a small ruler and red pen to underline parts I might want to return to later. I found myself scribbling in the margins, too: "Freud's signature," a placeholder for both the biographical Freud and the entire enterprise of classical psychoanalysis. There he is, staring back. I've also been reading Jeffrey Masson's The Assault on Truth: Freud's Supression of the Seduction Theory this week, so Archive Fever is reading very differently for me this time. I'd like to be able to write like that one day: poetically, so that my own work has different meanings emerge for readers in their different life stations.

Derrida's later work is so much easier to read (and enjoyable) than the early work. He's one of those thinkers whom I used read because I needed to, but now I read for enjoyment. That's never going to happen for me with Foucault; Foucault is always agonizing for me to read. I'm not sure why. I think I like writers who fuck around with language (Lacan; Joyce; Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen)

Anyway, smelling a bald guy with whips somewhere below, I must confess that reading about the "death drive" and the aggression of the archival impulse made me worry a little about my medical record. What kind of violence is that sort of archive? Twenty-five dollar co-pay, up front, nice lady in purple scrubs doesn't even draw blood. It's an archive that should be protected, of course, from Health Care Conglomerates; not my lovers. There are some things they need to now in the untimely event of my death.

When I interned at the CDC in the division of AIDS surveillance, I got to see medical company memos and documents that would anger any sane individual: in the early days of the AIDS crisis, the CDC recommended anonymous testing because insurance companies would drop your coverage even if you simply got tested. That was a commencement and a command, to be sure, a law of certain death. Thankfully, we have a pharmakon now. And the people who work at the CDC, most of whom were do-gooder idealists, MDs with hearts of passion and care who sent me to do the dead logging. After going through those files for a week I would break-down. It was a sad job. Those people are gold, I tell you. You should admire the CDC for all that they do to keep people alive.

What a mood to be in when the nurse weighs my portly ass (didn't gain, didn't loose)! My feet got cold on the scale; my feet are often cold, in general. The thing about spending a life in front of screens is that you can wear house shoes and don't have to go outside if you don't want to. "Sedentary" is the name, and it is a frequent fount of evil. I saw a sign at the video store yesterday that read, "you can't get instant satisfaction on-line." That seems something akin to the truth.

I like my doctor, though, he is always in an upbeat mood, sends you on your way with a new positivity you didn't have before seeing him. Nice guy, from Louisiana. We talked about Baton Rouge today and missing the culture, but not the weather. Health wise, things are looking good all over, with the exception of my right foot. I've been feeling guilty for not working-out since last Friday; the doctor assured me that is the best policy until I can actually put a shoe on my foot again. He likes to visit with you; we probably turned a ten minute visit into a half-hour talking about Louisiana, the weather, and whether washing down an NSAID with beer will damage your kidneys. Probably not, he said. I left with a new positivity, and until writing this, forgot about death.

By the way, I might gaze at my navel in a minute and write about that too. Hang on.

So I'm dealing with memory and the subtle aggression of filing. Of putting things away and their inevitable return, at least until you pour on the stiff stuff. That too will come, about 3:30 p.m. today (lets call it the bon voyage hours).

There is a name for this mood or, better yet, this tone of thought: nostalgia. The OED defines the term as an "acute longing for familiar surroundings, especially regarded as a medical condition; homesickness." The word also connotes sentimentality, but that's not what I'm going for; I'm thinking in particular of a film I like by Andrei Tarkovsky titled, Nostalgia and its haunting imagery of unsafe, leaky, decrepit buildings. The etymology is some Greek term I cannot reproduce here meaning "return home." So I'm thinking about nostalgia as the counterpart to Derrida's archive, or perhaps as a form of achiving. Nostalgia-archiving---or nostalgia/archiving,---as the beginning of a certain form of self-estrangement, a commencement of not-being-there.

Until I looked up the etymology, I supposed nostalgia was a temporal term, but apparently it is spatial, and this is curious to me because of Derrida's notion of "toponology," the place of law. Nostalgia might be said to be a miniature, as another counterpart to what Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immensity," not quite the universe of the house but certainly a point of return. Christmas trees and record shops; a familiar dream of sleeping with the enemy; the content and smiling face of a friend under the stars on Tuesday night.

Killing time en route to one of my other doctors yesterday, I was in search of color changing, LED cube string lights that I once saw at Toy Joy. For those of you not in Austin, I assure you Toy Joy is not what you think it is. Anyway, apparently they don't make these lights anymore. I was looking for them because I'm thinking about putting up the Christmas tree this week. It's a little early for that, but things around here are about to be empty---phones, buildings, bars---as most of the people I love are moving west, toward San Diego. Apparently there is a conference, an annual return in time, not place. Without the usual affections of friends and colleagues, I'll be at home with myself. A lot. One can really only download so much porn before it gets old, so putting up my festive, aluminum tree seems like a good alternative. So does egg nog while I attend to such a laborious chore. I can envision---er, in-hear---playing James Brown's Funky Christmas while I sip nog and hang mirror-ball ornaments. I should have bought that Elvis tree-topper.

Coming from Toy Joy empty handed and with a half hour to go yesterday, I dropped into the Vortex of Money Disappearance (VMD): Antone's Records. Nostalgia is what the store sells, really, as bin after bin of dusty long players move briskly at three bucks a piece. I really wasn't in the mood for record shopping, but for some reason the Eddie Money records found my fingers and open ear. Eddie Money had his biggest hit in the mid eighties with Ronnie Spector. It was titled "Take Me Home Tonight," and I remember the video played relentlessly on MTV. My favorite Eddie Money song, however, is "Shakin," and the video is fabulous because Money is coked-up and twitchy:

I looked and looked for the album "Shakin'" was on, and finally found it misfiled under a different artist's name. $2.99. Why the hell not? I've not heard "Shaken" probably since the sixth grade, just a year after Rob Hendrix's father taught us how to play the song (along with Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants You") in my first and only rock band. We played the PTA talent show. We won, but the parents were laughing so hard you couldn't hear the amps. I was the vocalist, naturally.

So last night, before bed, I played my new Eddie Money and was startled how overcome I was with memories and emotions; the voices from the groove enliven the dead. They do that for a lot of us, but not all (certainly not this generation of iPod-sucking isolationists). There's something about playing records on a turntable that takes me back to the pre-teen years. I had just read an article yesterday about a documentary film about a bunch of evangelicals who recorded the stories from the bible in fifty different languages. Copies of the records are archived somewhere in Tennessee. The word is alive (PIL riff, anyone?), the song is inscribed, dead for immortality. I thought I bought the album for "Shakin'," but was then reminded of another of Money's hit singles, "Think I'm in Love." This is a fantastic song for all sorts of reasons, but the most compelling is the simplicity of the lyrics and the way in which it really does capture the onset of affect, or rather, the realization that you've fallen: "Oh, fuck! Am I in love? What the hell is this? How did I let myself get to this state?"

I was amused. I remain that way. I could even plug in someone who still manages to elicit such doubts "in my heart," and she ain't Jesus (or Jesús). Keep in mind one of the central metaphors of Archive Fever is the heat, the fire in the catacombs, the "old flame" and the "burning bush." And Eddie Money doesn't sing, "I'm in love," he's all like, "I think I'm in love." That's what I like about the song; one is never quite sure.

It always seems to me that certitude in love is a little zealous, a form of overcompensation. The true standard of affect worth celebrating is the making of a decision of definition and sticking to it. Money dare says the L-word; that's a good first step. Honor comes with moving from thinking to confession. A signatory, a name, a loyalty to the signifier of caring. What seems to happen is that you make a decision to commit---to go with it---and then let that affect get defined in a certain way, something we call "feeling." Eddie Money, the archive. You can file it away, or open the folder and ruffle though the pages. You can go public and unsecret the secret; the institution may drop your coverage as a consequence. And then you might die. Take warning, though; the archive is also a prison.