Nostalgia: a non-starter

I have been accused of romanticizing a past with, I think it was implied, a wish to return to the "way things were". This is not true. Or, to be more precise, this is true, however, the past to which I wish to return (if that was even possible!), is not even my own. Is this nostalgia?

Like Paris, circa 1930. Or medieval England. Or Guernsey during the Occupation. (Ok, granted this last one may be a bit romantic. Blame this.) These are not part of my history. Seriously, what is these days? As a child of immigrants and a first generation Canadian, I am torn between many histories.

What is a history, really, but a narrative told about an assemblage of evidence? Take this, for instance:

What narrative does this assemblage suggest? When this blog is found on the internet, hiding under a pile of digital rubble, and some tech-achaeologist unearths (?) it, dusts it off, and finds this photo, what will she think? Of what will she imagine this is evidence?

Will she realize, with sudden clarity, that the writer of this blog has been struggling with her historiophilia in the age of digital technology? That I have been trying to reconcile my love of old things with my love of coding, hypertext, and (certain) social media?

Will it become ever so clear that I had recently read this:

and this

and that OBVIOUSLY, in my own effort to bridge the gap between what was and what might be, I am looking for my own optimistic crescendo by creating a bread starter that flies in the face of all the advice out there: My spatula is not plastic. My flour is common. My jar is glass, this much is true. But I have not only used plain old tap water but—horror of horrors!—the water has been residing in my currently-being-used drinking glass. 

I have also stored the starter next to my compost, just to give the bacteria a ready-made community. Save your breath, it's a non-starter. And by this I mean, I am not going to follow the ultra-antiseptic rules touted by amazon linked social media mongers just because. I want to do it the way it used to be done in the olden days. When methods were not foolproof and things were sometimes dirty. Is this my history? Yes. Let's be honest: I never wash my veggies. 

But seriously, even with my romantic nature, I don't actually want to go back to the ways things were. Sure, I would love to sit at a table with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, smoke Gauloises, and drink Pastis. But I am under no illusion that my French would be good enough to decode the finer points of existentialism, and I know I would be looked at with curiosity—if not out and out revulsion—in that place and time. I am very clear that I would have been one of the first people on Guernsey in 1941 to be rounded up and sent to Ravensbrück. 

No, I do not want to go back at all. I do, however, want to counter the prevailing narratives and their assertions of the best way—past or present—to live and to go about the doing of living. I want to oppose the narrative of progress as a singular path trodden by the Enlightened. And I want us to embrace ways (all of them)—even those we can only imagine...even those which may have been overlooked because they were but marginalia or footnotes in a dominant narrative. 

Not everything needs to be improved. And not every improvement is a result of progress. Progression suggests a hierarchy. What if there is no hierarchy? What if there are just ways and other ways.

So, my non-starter began its story today with some germ-laden tap water and a wooden spoon. I may have even used a dirty finger to clean the lip of the jar. I guess we will see what happens.