For class today I had my students break into small groups, go outside and read a passage of text by Nadia Seremetakis from The Senses Still, and then write a 300 word blog post about how Seremetakis's ideas about nostalgia, maturity, memory, and physicality connect with Rudolpho Anaya's Bless Me, Última.
Here is the Seremetakis passage I had them read:
The memory of Aphrodite's peach is nostalgic. What is the relation of nostalgia to the senses and history? In English the word nostalgia (in Greek nostalghia) implies trivializing romantic sentimentality. In Greek the verb nostalghó is a composite of nosto and algho. Nosto means I return, I travel (back to homeland); the noun nostos means the return, the journey, while a-nostos means without taste, as the new peaches are described (anosta, in plural). The opposite of anostos is nostimos and characterizes someone or something that has journeyed and arrived, has matured, ripened and is thus tasty (and useful). Algho means I feel pain, I ache for, and the noun alghos characterizes one's pain in soul and body, burning pain (kaimos). Thus nostalghia is the desire or longing with burning pain to journey. It also evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement; it mixes bodily and emotional pain and ties painful experiences of spiritual and somatic exile to the notion of maturation and ripening. In this sense, nostalghia is linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey.
Nostalghia thus is far from trivializing romantic sentimentality. This reduction of the term confines the past and removes it from any transactional and material relation to the present; the past becomes an isolatable and consumable unit of time. Nostalgia, in the American sense, freezes the past in such a manner as to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present, preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history. Whereas the Greek etymology evokes the transformative impact of the past as unreconciled historical experience. Does the difference between nostalgia and nostalghia speak of different cultural experiences of the senses and memory? Could a dialogical encounter of the terms offer insights for an anthropology of the senses?
It was a perfect day for this activity. Spring has decided to come around again, and students could be outside, feeling the sun on their bodies (and in their eyes) while they talked about the importance of feeling to memory and knowledge.