Nostalgia inception: Started listening to American Music Club, Over and Done; sought out via computorial interface lyrics to Over and Done and read them; lyrics mentioned Capp Street, which was in San Francisco of course, but where; in The Mission naturally, Google Maps had revealed; which triggered that sense of “we live in a dream,” — that nostalgia, out of which arose a series of images impressed with feeling, such as David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel coming out from a not yet opened bar, the concrete outside ripe with stale beer in the morning sun, the staff shouting to each other within. I wanted to be in those places, see those people, hear those songs, see the world as I did then. Back in San Francisco. Nostalgia.
Looked up caritative (which I first had as caritive.) Caritative means charitable. While having this phrase of Shakespeare’s on my mind: “the gilden puddle that beasts did cough at.” (Somehow, if I “wrote something” I would escape this pang of nostalgia, this disbelief in my present life. All that longing would be sequestered in the finely wrought box of this something I’d written, if only I could write it.) Recalled l’etang was the French word for pond. (And I felt, after all this looking up, I of course hadn’t made myself the least bit cultured or knowledgeable or capable of writing that something. Somehow the information I’d gathered never penetrated to develop me. I was Howie on ‘The Fall Guy’, a Jeopardy! contestant….)
Feels good to punctuate correctly… Looked up Longmen Grottoes (a quite old religious site in China) curious about its English sounding name (Longmenshan is a mountain range in China.) Gross fixed capital formation: having read the definition twice I am still not sure what it is — will come back to it. (Am not yet persuaded that the understanding of it is “out of my star” so I will come back to it.) Checking my blog stats again which have been kind of ruined by what I’m guessing is some kind of bot: on roughly a weekly basis it will randomly hit twice on one of my weird blog posts, then leave a bunch of hits.
Next time I’d found myself in The Mission there had been a tectonic shift I can’t describe. Not reducible to a gentrification of the place or of myself yet I’d found absolutely nothing there of that spirit that inspires my present sense of nostalgia. Caritative was a word that arose in the book of a long time acquaintance of mine, a scholar. Amazing how much reading has gone into the making of this fairly small book. How is it, I’m made to wonder, that people who are not historians think that they know things about history? The ignoramuses at the store, for example, who think they know something about history, but who haven’t even a proper idea of what it is to really know, it often seems. Unmeasured claims.
That episode from Star Trek is suddenly recalled, when the crew is caught in a time loop, and the way to get out of it is if they communicate a message from one loop to the other. Can history do such a thing and does it know what message to send? My own days, too, are like such a loop.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 