The Ruins of Nostalgia 35

We felt nostalgic for how we used to get obsessed from time to time by a snatch

of song playing over and over in our heads that we could not identify. We might

hear the snatch of song float from a stereo through an open screen door, or drift

over to us from the window of a passing car, and we’d enter into a state of

aesthetic tension. The snatch of song would creep into and conquer our heads of

its own accord, a song we’d heard once, or many times, a long time ago, or last

week. The snatch of song we could not identify was like an itch we could not

scratch. The itch was erotic, as all itches are erotic. The notes would play over

and over again in our heads like a code offering and refusing to be cracked at the

same time (to reveal what?), or like a half-voluntary, half-involuntary soundtrack

to our own emotional volition. What internal drive was playing the snatch of

song in our heads over and over? Knowing we did not know the name of the

song, knowing we had no way to hear the song as a function of our will, knowing

we were at the mercy of a sequence of notes either obsessively repeating or that

we obsessively repeated, a formulaic key to fit the dark lock opening up all

forms? One snatch of song would be replaced by another snatch of song in due

time; and thus we moved through scenes with fits and starts of fragments

injecting phatic sense into our lives. * Now all you had to do was type in “sure

+ hell + retaliate,” and the internet would promptly scratch your itch, and an

entire structure of desire deliquesced into the ruins of nostalgia.