Time travel, future fear, and the banal indignity of nostalgia

I may finally be ready to sell my soul to the devil if the bargain is right. Enjoy your nostalgia. I want progress.

Yesterday we found ourselves, very unusually, in a large and shiny bar, the kind where they have too many beers to choose from and dozens of huge glaring television screens that endanger people who get photosensitive seizures. While we sat at the bar Fleetwood Mac performing Go Your Own Way from the 2004 Live in Boston film came on the TV in front of us and its music filled the space. You should watch it beginning to end very carefully.

That looks like some kind of quasi-pagan ritual for boomers. The music is a dismal performance unworthy of the original. Lindsey Buckingham’s behavior is not that of the band’s guitarist and he is instead some sort of spastic dancing priest whose task is to work the audience into an ecstatic lather. Stevie Nicks keeps her eyes averted and her back to the geriatric indignity.

Watching it reminded me of the Words of Advice for Young People by William Burroughs. There are several versions of it including this wonderful old film but I like the version on the Material album Hallucination Engine.

Now, some of you may encounter the Devil's Bargain, if you get that far. Any old soul is worth saving, at least to a priest, but not every soul is worth buying, so you can take the offer as a compliment. He tries the easy ones first. You know, like money, all the money there is. But who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetery? Money won't buy. Not much left to spend it on, eh gramps? Getting too old to cut the mustard. Well, time hits the hardest blows especially below the belt. How’s a young body grab ya? Like three-card Monte, like pea under the shell, now you see it, now you don't. Haven't you forgotten something, gramps? In order to feel something, you've got to be there. You have to be eighteen. You're not eighteen. You are seventy-eight. Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.

That’s right, you are not eighteen, ladies and gentlemen. But did they pay for this performance with their souls? Probably just some cash.

William Burroughs reading Words of Advice for Young People

At the center both of that 2004 incident in Boston and of Burroughs counsel is the yearning to be adolescent again and repeat the experiences that later became so significant. Memory exaggerates and romanticizes these things so that when you’re old the stimulus (e.g. a pop song) can have a potent effect. Memory also exaggerates negative experiences, by the way, and forgets the usual. This has to do with how consciousness needs to discriminate and organize foreground from background in order to build the mental maps we rely on to navigate life.

What is it worth to you to participate in one of these rituals in which you scream and dance around like you were a teenager again in the 60s or 70s or whenever your favorite pop music was top of the charts? I don’t think many of you would pay for that with your soul. But what if the devil offered you to go back and relive it as a teenager again? to reset you back to your salad days so you could do it over. How much for that?

During the pandemic closures I was in a meeting with a group of former college radio DJs who had been reactivated in order to remotely produce radio shows that were uploaded to a server at the radio station, which was locked up (or down, Idk). They enjoyed the experience but were not satisfied with the current aesthetics of the station compared to what they had known three or four decades prior. A lot had changed since then, which was truly the heyday of college radio, and they planned to start an independent online station. There are a lot of difficulties with projects like that but regardless, you gotta ask: What are you doing this for? What ultimately motivates this project?

People who have to put up with me will confirm I’ve been saying since forever:

There’s nothing so enduringly fashionable as nostalgia.

It seems to me it’s gotten more so this century to the point now that it’s extreme. Why is that? If people can’t believe in a better future, I mean truly believe as a gut feeling and not just in some intellectual way, then we should not be surprised that they prefer to relive, reuse, and recycle the old culture that exaggerated romantic memories associated with the best of times in their youth. Creating and selling genuinely original culture is hard if people are traumatized by realistic talk about the present and future.

But I still don’t want it for myself. Sure, I look at and listen to plenty of old culture and can enjoy a nostalgic bop around a wedding reception to Dancing Queen but it doesn’t bring me much comfort in the long run. “In order to feel something, you've got to be there.” Nostalgia doesn’t cut it. Old movies, TV reruns, favorite old albums are principally anesthetic, a palliative for our painful times. If there is going to be a better future, we must build it. To do that we must, with courage and a clear eye, question the value of our past models and mental maps to our progressive goals.

If the devil ever comes to me to bargain for my soul I would demand political power, a lot and for a long time.