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When poets knew what side they were on.

"The Ruins of Nostalgia 15

If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, i.e., if a beautiful moment we experienced but were not able to apprehend could be apprehended post-hoc, then the impossibility of living in the present could be slathered over with a layer of gold-suffused salve, SALVE, as the blue-and-white tiles spelled out before the door to the barber shop in the city of our youth, for which we feel nostalgic. Repeat. The barber is dead; long live the barber. The city of our youth no longer exists; it exists in our minds. The barber's pinup calendars are smoldering their way down the landfill. Johannes Hofer believed that nostalgia could be cured with opium, leeches, or a trip to the Alps, but we know that the only cure for nostalgia is nostalgia. There is an illness informing the illness, and that illness must be mined to extract the exquisitely atavistic elixir. We kept walking through the beautiful city in our minds saying, Stay, thou art so fair, but the city did not comply. We walked and walked through the city in our minds infecting and healing ourselves at the same time, infecting and healing, infecting and healing, until it was impossible to tell the difference, until we were totally infected, and totally healed. But as soon as we left the city in our minds to come back to this city, we knew that the healing was temporary, and the infection forever. * If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, then it is also unstable, and if we get attached to beautiful images today, we might spurn them tomorrow. We might love the beautiful images because we can't apprehend them, 'the beautiful' always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds. And it's why we slather salve over SALVE, suffuse it, why we gold-leaf gold leaf. It's why we ruin the ruins of nostalgia."

--Donna Stonecipher

C o m p u t e [s] \ R s.

"What an eye among the rungs and hordes
of angelkind would turn and find
my long call through the storm of time?"

— Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Guy Davenport) (via @isidro_li

Milou Margot.