Nostalgia for the 1970s
I've recently moved to Markt Schwaben to be closer to my beloved Barbara. During the time of the move, and now, here for a week, I've been gripped by an intense nostalgia that has led me on a few adventures.
It's centered in some way around "Ommadawn," the 1974 album by Mike Oldfield. I'm very much in awe of this music. I think it's likely the greatest work of the 20th century. It seems to reach beyond time with it's ethereal voices, synthesizers, guitars and drums. It restores the ancient pre-Christian past, conjuring the holy places of Druids into fresh existence in the mind. It connects this feeling to the "present" of the mid-1970s, by which time any truly committed hippies had found their way into communes and communities, there to live fitfully, but perhaps fruitfully for a time. The electric guitar and prominent electric bass guitar remind us we are very much in the "now," and a charmingly dated now it is.
All of this atmosphere recalls the "me" of the days when I first heard the album. It was as vinyl, on my fathers very good hi-fi system. I think the receiver was Pioneer. I dutifully cleaned the records as I played them, and I always returned to this one. He recorded the album for me on a Maxell tape, and we often listened to it in the car.
I am, sad and ashamed to say, estranged from my father, since 2004 when my children were born. It is far more common for this to happen between fathers and sons than I thought, and I may as well get it out there. We never understood each other. But this album, and a detail and care about music was shared between us. I'm grateful for that.
But the "me" of that time was an eleven year old boy with no friends. Maybe one now and then, but it didn't last. Either I would move away or there would be a situation where I had to be able to play sports in order to fit in the larger group, and that was simply never something I could pull off. My friend would be forced to choose between my companionship, and the friendship of a half-dozen kids who seemed strong and sure of themselves.
And so it was. I learned to enjoy my many days alone.
There were many good things! Books and toys were concentrated on with sufficient energy that I am sure small sparks of budding consciousness bloomed in them. The joy of being alone is that you are never alone for long. You will make your friends, if you must.
And now...almost 40 years later, I have this rich sense that the world was at the top of it's game in the early 1970s. I, in 1982, grew up in the penumbra of that fading energy. There were many forms of technology that were still charming instead of pervasive. Compact Discs would be coming onto the scene soon, heralding the end of an age of care and the beginning of a gluttinous lust for efficiency that leads straight to the present.
Wow, now that must be a listening experience. :) I think the key is that it doesn't have wi-fi.
Our magic elixir, Oil, never recovered from the peak of production in the USA experienced in the year of my birth, 1971. Almost immediately, the grumbling in our society began. New York City was bankrupt, and handed it's administration over to the control of financiers. Union membership began it's long, sad decline. The "Left" rolled over and pursued wealth, abandoning the working class.
It was the peak. It's taken a long time, and we've been granted a few slowdowns to the decline. But it's very real.
A few years ago I visited Portland, Oregon, where I had my first job after college. Kris and I were impressed by this clean and beautiful city. On my return I walked the famous Burnside bridge to see hundreds of homeless people getting out their mattresses for the night.
There were children among them. 10 years before this would have been unthinkable.
And now, driving on the freeway in Germany, the "Workers Paradise," I saw a 6-room homeless camp in the trees, newly visible with the falling of the leaves.
The society is hitting edges.
Is this what governs the intensity of my nostalgia? Is it the things I've seen and felt over the last years? Is it the urge to say goodbye to what was?
I don't know. I only know it's nice to sit in it's embrace. The funny thing is, the nostalgia is not for a life that I lived, but only one that I perceived with my imagination.
It has a geographical location, too, this magical place in my head. It's generally the UK. Scotland and Wales. But also, western Germany. When I think of these places in the 1970s I imagine people who had more time than we do today. They, with their felt and muted colors, seemed to honor the inner life of children. They would protest if something needed protesting.
Wisdom, to me, has far more to do with stillness than with knowledge. I think it rises above a human comfortable with and desiring of solitude...it doesn't matter if they are alone, they may be with others. But they will be of like mind...feeling the stillness and each other too, with a subtlety of rythym and appreciation of the patterns of existence in a community of humans that we don't give ourselves the time to perceive today.
We get too many things done.
We succeed far too often. And each success breeds the requirement for more.
Soon our hole of achievement will be so deep we'll never acquire understanding anymore.
So...maybe it's simple exhaustion that has me searching for another way of holding the world, and finding it only in the long quiet of childhood, when I didn't know or care who I was. I only experienced, and was content.
Three days ago, I entered a record shop for the first time in 30 years. It's run by a former journalist, a kindly man who maintains two turntables at the front of the shop, crammed with records of all kinds. I had found a used turntable, but I didn't have a needle. He told me about a place behind a Turkish grocery store, where an ancient man sold needles. "I'm sorry I don't know the exact address. But you'd better hurry...today is the last day of operation for the shop."
I quite enjoyed this. I'd found that putting together a working "hi-fi" system from used gear required going all over the city and having a conversation at each point. I bought the phono preamplifier from a man who was getting out of vinyl because of a new baby. The record player, a Dual 1218 manufactured in the year of my birth, had been lovingly restored and provided with a new unfinished maple shell. I'll have to apply varnish once I learn how to do that.
And indeed, finding the needle was interesting, too. In the Innenhof behind the grocery, there was a long window through which I saw a tall cabinet with tiny wooden drawers, like a card catalog, and a man studying something beneath. He gave me his card, as happily, he'll continue to do business by phone (not, I was gratified to see, by email).
I took the needle and my new records home, and began to play. I'd bought "Crisis," another Mike Oldfield album and listened to "Moonlight Shadow," sung by Maggie Reilly, who I fell in love with right away from the sound of her voice (here is a link to a charming "old web" fan site for her). I don't know what she looks like, but I picture her as Sarah Jane Smith, the plucky companion to the 1970s Dr. Who, Tom Baker.
Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who.
How glorious, I'd think, to be married to this fine singer, who looks like Sarah Jane, and with whom I'd record songs on an unwieldy reel-to-reel tape deck...dividing our time between a flat in London and a rustic country house in Wales.
Found at this cool site vanchitecture.
Ha! Did anyone ever live that life? I suppose a lot of people did.
It sounds wonderful.
It's not my life at all. My life rocks pretty hard, I must say. However, I feel the pull of "that place."
I guess the healthy way to answer the Pull is to slow down. See, I think I don't "miss" sitting under the summer moon at the cottege of my imagination...what I miss is the long, slow, meditative unrolling of thoughts that happens only in places like that. It's the state of mind engendered by a particular mode of life that I'm seeking, and for that reason, I can laugh at the surface details of the vision, while taking seriously the need that lies at the base of it.
I'd say to you, reader, that if you read this far, then I'd like to impart with all the energy I can muster that you must, in some way, provide a "life" for those dim wishes inside you. They may wear the clothes of the past, but they herald your future. Wishes from childhood are, I would say, especially trustworthy, because they grew in a space when you were bathed in the protective love of those who watched over you... and you knew nothing yet of the world's expectations for you. After only a few years for most of us, that window of time where desire was unmarred by expectations would close, and you begin auditioning for the adult role you will soon occupy.
I have my records. I sit in my attic apartment and listen. When I turn a record over I hear the wind outside. Here, east of the city, it's very strong, and I love it.