On Nostalgia in Creativity and Art
Is the heart of a creative work found in the intensity of the moment? Or is it only on looking back that we discover our artistic merit?
I recently saw Josh Ritter and The Royal City Band play in Dublin at the National Concert Hall. His tour was in celebration of the 20th anniversary of his Hello Starling! album — an album which he revealed was mostly written in Ringsend, a part of Dublin. It seemed like a full circle moment for Ritter, filled with nostalgia, old stories, and remembrance. He even admitted he needed to start the show with a few of his more recent and popular tunes because he felt “shy” playing the album straight away. Of course you’d never notice his shyness since his show is filled with positive energy and exuberance, though he did share several stories from his early days, before anyone knew him or he had many songs to sing. (He even admitted to writing one of that album’s songs on the way to do a radio interview in Galway, entirely because he didn’t have a new song to play for the station!)
For context, Josh Ritter is an American singer/songwriter who first got noticed by Glen Hansard (a well known Irish Musician) at an open mic night in Boston. Hansard then invited Ritter to Dublin to open for his band, The Frames. Ritter first got popular in Ireland before his home country.
Ritter’s ‘big break’ story isn’t one I knew before that night, and it had me thinking of my own creative path. I’m a Canadian who moved to Dublin, lived in Ringsend and wrote most of my first novel in a Ringsend cafe. The similarly seemed more than a mere coincidence, and for days after the concert I contemplated the role of nostalgia in creation and art. So I suppose this week’s long read is comprised of my thoughts around that theme.
The weekend after the concert I took a walk through Ringsend, past the coffee shop I used to write in, past my old house, past the pubs I once frequented several years ago. As much as I’ll always have a soft spot for that area of Dublin, I found the intensity of feeling around my memories there has faded. It, much like many of the places I’ve lived before, has turned into a space I know like the back of my hand but carries no emotional weight. These former ‘homes’ are now like paper maps I keep in a mental drawer. I can take them out and have a look, but they’re just paper, 2D remembrances of the real experience.
This reminds me of writing, where writers are told to always leave a first draft in a desk for for a while, let the intensity wear off, and then return to it with fresh eyes before starting the editing process. With art and in life, do we need to allow for time and distance in order to see the truth of the thing or to see it clearly?
Ah but what is truth? I think there’s an argument to be made that the truth in found in the moment. I love what writer/musician/comedian Lane Moore said about this:
“It’s very powerful when you feel like you can’t articulate something but then you write it and years later you come back to it and remember exactly how you were in that moment. It’s a way of not only figuring out how you feel, but making sure you can’t look back on it with rose-colored glasses years later and pretend you felt differently.” — Lane Moore
There is significance to creating in the moment. Perhaps this is why so many great works or art, be it a first draft of a love story or a musical heartbreak anthem, were likely created in the moment. There is a record of the feeling in that sort of immediate creation, and also an accuracy of that feeling. How many times do we feel passion, embarrassment, shame, head over heels in love, only to look back and think it really wasn’t worth so much drama? But maybe it was. After all, those highs and lows are part of our collective human experience, and what is art if not a reflection of the human condition?
I know as a fiction writer I’ve been given the advice to ‘write my crazy out’, which meant to write into my characters’ lives whatever was going on inside me that wouldn’t go away. And the advice wasn’t given solely to let those trapped emotions out or to try and sort my own feelings, but because readers identify and relate to those things. They feel real, because they are.
While I’ve never been able to regularly keep a journal, I assume those who do are also ‘writing their crazy out’. This time it’s not for an audience, but it is a recording of the experience and feelings in the moment. There is truth and accuracy in that, and one cannot convince themselves that whatever they were feeling at the time was wrong, or bad, or and over exaggeration. The truth is recorded so it can be worked with. And I wonder, if in a somewhat different way, whether social media is serving a similar function.
While posts and photos are often curated before being shared, there is an immediacy to social media. Even excluding those platforms meant to be used in the moment, there is still a chronological timeline of a user’s creations. I can see my pictures and share them as soon as I take them. Most photos I put online are still posted with a few days of them having been taken, even when I’ve spent time touching them up. I can scroll back through my nearly two decade old Facebook account and cringe at posts from an earlier version of me. Now compare this to how we used to keep photo memories, before we all became chronically online. You’d use a film camera sparingly because film was expensive, you’d wait for the film development once the entire roll was spent, and then probably look at the photos once or twice and stick them in a shoebox. Occasionally, once we’d gotten enough ‘nice’ photos, we might curate a photo album or build a collage. However, the time and curation here was never immediate. There was a built-in cooling off period so we’d have to look back on our memories with less intensity of feeling.
So is this an argument for artists to work in the moment? I think it’s more complicated than that. The younger generations who barely remember when everyone owned a 35mm film camera have grown up with the immediacy of social media. They know they could be filmed or recorded and put online at any given moment. Perhaps this is why the popular buzz word ‘cringe’ has become a staple of generation Z. No one wants to be seen as ‘cringe’, maybe because a silly moment or experiment gone wrong could be preserved forever online. As a result, young people already have a super high level or self awareness, leading to a more controlled and less experimental youth than what their predecessors had. And yet, if you’re unable to try things without fear of making a mistake, how do you figure out who you are or what your strengths are? How do you create authenticity? Instead, I wonder if the opposite effect is happening and that this generation could be a lot less creative than the ones before it. I’d be very happy for someone to point out that I’m wrong about this, but perfectionism and fear of making mistakes are the enemies of creativity.
Previously, it was mostly artists and innovators who had their pasts preserved in the public sphere through their artistic creations. After all, it takes bravery to present your creative work to the masses. Even if what you’ve made isn’t about yourself, your name and individual stamp will still be a part of it. And yes, it is uncomfortable knowing that some of my early, less polished, short stories are published online. So why haven’t artists suffered the same fate of perfectionism and fear? Well, they do, for one. However, I think most creatives find a way to work with those things. We are perhaps less afraid to be ‘cringe’, because we know the rewards for working with our fears rather than letting them (or other people) stop us. To paraphrase that famous Rumi quote, the risk of staying tight in a bud becomes too painful not to bloom. But there’s more to this because, once again, artists may create in the moment but they are often afforded that cooling off time and can return to edit. No books were published on a first draft, performers experiment with characters and rehearse, sculpture can always be remolded. There is an element of control, or knowing that major mistakes can still be corrected.
And yet, when you really think about it, there is still an immediacy to editing an artistic creation. We can only go back and examine/fix/change a work of art from the perspective of where we are on our current path. I suspect Josh Ritter may have had very different feeling about performing a three year anniversary concert as opposed to a twenty year anniversary concert. It’s also why I feel uncomfortable about those early short stories of mine. They would have been rested and later edited. Yet now I’m further along on my artistic path with different life experiences, and so of course I feel differently about them now then when they were published.
The question, though, is why do I feel some sense of embarrassment about my early work? Why are we all so afraid to have a record of artistic growth? More than anyone else, artists should understand that they will all produce a public record of growth. Just look at any long running band. I bet their early records are different to their later ones. Yet there seems to be pressure, especially among young artists, to be a hit right out of the gate. But how do we improve and grow if we’re afraid to put ourselves out there, not just in art, but in life in general? There’s no shame in growth. We are all still on the path.
I’d much rather feel sentimental nostalgia for my past work and past self instead of embarrassment in the moment. Shouldn’t it feel like visiting my old house in Ringsend? Familiar but without feeling? Or perhaps we’re back to the concept that art is able to somehow preserve that intensity in the moment. It’s what allows an outside reader/listener/observer to connect. I also wonder if creative people can jog their memories back to a particular time with more intensity that others. Had I had a coffee back in that cafe in Ringsend and allowed my mind to drift, I know old memories and feelings would undoubtedly come flooding back. I think most people experience this to some degree. Think about a time you’ve run into an old friend, or attended a school reunion. Forgotten memories do return.
The brain is a funny thing in that it dulls our experiences upon remembering. It’s a protective measure. No one wants to relive their worst days. It does also dull the joy, though. But just maybe artists’ brains don’t dull their experiences quite as much, or at least we’ve found ways of accessing those experiences to a greater degree than a simple memory. I know novelists will understand this. It takes a lot of time and planning and hard work to write a novel. It’s impossible to complete one in the heat of the moment, or even stay in an intense emotional state for long periods of time. It’s just too exhausting. And yet, as someone who has written a couple novels, I will say that each writing session is tiring. There absolutely is an emotional toll.
So is part of becoming a better artist learning how to better access our emotional memories? And how accurate are those memories? Would they be the same tomorrow, in a year, in ten years? There is an argument to work in the moment, to not look back, or to at least find a way to access the raw universal feelings that connect humans. But then again, sometimes it’s only in the looking back, with perspective and logic, once the emotion fades, that we can truly see the connections.
Memory is faulty but emotion is not. And yet emotion can blind, where calm logic can understand the message. So is nostalgia in art really just about wrestling with the head vs heart debate? Or maybe the secret to good art is about knowing how to use both.
But back to Josh Ritter and his shyness around performing an old album. Was that shyness because he was embarrassed? No, surely not. He organized this tour! I’d bet it was more to do with the memories, the nostalgia, and the ability to feel from a new perspective. Regardless of what the truth was for him in making that statement, he was unafraid —not only as an artist, but also unafraid to look back and celebrate just how far he’d come.
