The Ruins of Nostalgia 54

Is the ruins of nostalgia a place, or a vanishing point? Nostalgia, writes

philosopher Barbara Cassin, is written in the future perfect tense. When the

future is perfect, will we know if our heart is a ruin or a vanishing point?

Brunelleschi invented perspective in 1413; before that, all vanishing points led

straight to the navel of God (in naves of churches). When the future is perfect,

we will have understood whether modernity incurred perspective or perspective

incurred modernity, reflected in mirrors set up to echo Euclidean laws of optics

for the sovereign eye peering through a bored hole. The viewer is mirrored in the

vanishing point, and thus constructed by it (Hito Steyerl). When the future is

perfect, we will understand why the cities we love are all moving inexorably

along the vector of the vanishing point, mirrored but deconstructed. When the

future is perfect, Brunelleschi’s lost paintings inventing perspective will have

been rediscovered, but we will know that Brunelleschi’s invention was only a re-

invention of Lorenzetti’s painting of perspective in 1342, its ornamental floor

tiles receding into the pixelated future it helped construct. When the future is

perfect, we will understand why even with perspective and modernity and post-

modernity and the internet and God, we understand nothing, not even our

hearts, unto infinity, not even why nostalgia is written in the future perfect

tense, which is a contradiction in terms, like a nostalgic futurist, or a constructed

or deconstructed self. When the future is perfect, we will have understood why

nostalgia is not written in the past perfect tense. And when the present is

perfect—and when the present is perfect—and when the present is perfect—will

we no longer be so ravished to vanish into the ruins of nostalgia?