NOSTALGIA

I’ve just seen A Complete Unknown, the biopic about Bob Dylan.  I loved it, not least his soundtrack of songs from the mid-1960s.  The way that I claimed his music in my head, The Times They are A-Changin’, Blowin’ in the Wind, etc. you’d have thought I was one of the flower-power devotees at his concerts. In truth, I was about 14 at the time, still at school and finding Dylan’s voice abrasive. 

Nevertheless, nostalgia rewrites history and I came out of the cinema ‘reliving’ it all as though I had been there.  It is true that his songs lived on for another decade or two but I only started going to concerts in the mid-1970s, catching up on counterculture music with a more musical boyfriend in my late 20s.  

What I remember more distinctly from flower-power time is an atmosphere of freedom and experimentation for which British and American folk and rock music provided the soundtrack.  I benefited from sexual liberation and joined in with the demo’s and protest movements that changed race relation laws and attitudes towards lesbians, gays and women, progress which still requires our constant vigilance. 

But the partial memory of a socially progressive time obscures the fact that there were many assassinations in the 1960s and ‘70s (two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Bloody Sunday and IRA bombings) and many young women, myself included, suffered rather than thrived on the ‘free love’ available. Whilst the music scene reflected and promoted new thinking, it was also male dominated and sometimes only accessible to the drug-fuelled. 

It is in thinking about the paradoxes and distortions of my own memories that I wonder whether nostalgia is a form of grief - a yearning for something that we think has been lost.  Now that reactionary forces have re-emerged in the world, I would love to see a progressive movement materialise amongst the young, restoring trust in our institutions and providing a vision of social justice again. Perhaps a film about Bob Dylan symbolises that yearning.  

I also wonder whether a natural mourning for my own life nearing its completion makes me cherry-pick my memories - really, it is not the social mores of previous times that I long for, but an extension of my own time.  In conversation with friends I notice there is far more past-referencing … “Of course I grew up on a farm….”.....”well, my mother was Irish”..... “we moved around a lot when I was young”... all ordinary bits of conversation you might think, but there’s more of it now :  it as though we need to remind ourselves (and everyone else) of where we’ve come from, giving ourselves a coherent journey to make sense of where we are now, and preferably all turn out to be heroes.   

We are not the first elderly people to tell stories of former days and bygone times but as I listen to friends rewriting their own histories, I see that some of it is just acknowledging the luck (good or bad) of growing up in a particular place at a particular time, but some of it is a form of older people’s bragging - not quite so laudable - and we (I) should stop doing it.

If there is any use for nostalgia, it is that our age group remembers a kinder, more thoughtful society and that this memory will allow younger people to imagine a different future for themselves… a kind of thought-guardianship from the old to the young.  The poets and song-writers who have left their words to an uncertain future ask us to remember:

“The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fadin'

And the first one now will later be last

For the times, they are a-changin.'”