Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "hiraeth-nostalgia-the-1990s"

No man ever thinks of himself as anything but twenty-five years old. -- Robert D. MacDougal

Hiraeth is a Welsh word which translates rather poorly into English. It is often defined as mere sentimentality or nostalgia, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. Deeper definitions would start here:

A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.

Not bad, but not deep enough. Let's try again:

Homesickness for a home to which you can never return, a home which maybe never was. A nostalgia, a yearning, a grief for the lost places of your past.

Very good. Perfect perhaps. But note the caveat: "which maybe never was." The human heart is an infinite mystery, but few of its secrets are more, well, mysterious than the longing for something which perhaps never existed.

I was thinking a lot of hiraeth today. It was an absolutely lovely evening, temperature in the sixties, cool breeze, fiery orange sunset in a sky of pale, dusty pink. I came home from my evening hike, ate pork tenderloin and green beans, and watched a few episodes of Millennium, a half-forgotten jewel of a television show created by Chris (X-Files) Carter, which ran from 1996-1999. I will visit this show in my Memory Lanes series at some point in the future, but for now I wish to explore the feelings that revisiting this series kindled within me.

To begin with, what initially stood out was how little the world of the late 1990s differed from the world of today. I saw no egregious changes in fashion, be it clothing, makeup, hairstyles or automobile design. The technology was recognizably the same -- cell phones, computers -- just clunkier in design. Pop cultural references were infrequent and did not seem the least bit dated. There was a decided (and wonderful) absence of references to the yet-unborn phenomenon of social media, but this was noticeable only by said absence: it was not obtrusive. In short, Millennium has aged superbly well, and for all gross intents and purposes, might have been filmed last week.

Nevertheless, when I watched, what struck me was the keen, piercing sense of nostalgia, of yearing, of longing I felt for the time period in which it was shot and appeared on TV: the 1990s. I am somewhat sentimental by nature, but the intensity of the emotion rattled my cage to the bruising point. After all, what were the 90s to me? A seemingly endless, often troubled ramble through college (several colleges, actually). A professional job I strongly disliked, which led to a different professional job I soon actively hated. A period of extreme financial hardship that included privation and hunger. A relationship that crashed and burned like thermite just as the decade drew to a close. So despite the manifold experiences, the occasional dizzying triumph, many wonderful individual memories -- and let's face it -- some spectacular sexcapades, it was hardly a period of unblemished joy.

I noted above that I am prone to nostalgia, and nostalgia has been defined as a form of self-pity. If that is true, why was watching the grim, stylishly written, atmospherically-lighted investigations of Frank Black such an emotional tumult for me? Why did it make me feel sorry for myself?

I came to a realization as I watched the sun burn down over the three-way streetsign this evening. As much as I like the show, it isn't about Millennium. And it isn't about the 90s, either, because clearly the past I was yearning for did not exist in the way my emotions insist upon remembering it. No, it's not about the decade, folks: it's about who I was in the decade. Who I used to be.

I don't mean in a creative sense. Creatively I was frustrated beyond belief, a "writer" who couldn't write anything. Nor do I mean as a human being: I began the decade callow, selfish and superficial, and ended it battered, embittered and even more selfish, albeit in a more refined way. The fact is that my hiraeth is rooted simply a longing for the physical properties of youth, i.e. the lost places of my path. My mother recently found a picture of me from 1990. When I showed it to a female co-worker half my age, she signed and murmured, "A young Rob Lowe." That is an exaggeration, but not by much. I was imperially slim. I had an impossibly thick head of hair, a Hollywood jawline, and a twenty-nine inch waist. I tipped the scales at 155 lbs. Now, when I catch glimpses of myself in mirrored surfaces, what I see is someone who could be that boy's father. Indeed, I see more of my father (and my uncle) in my 2023 face than I do myself. The boy has been consumed by the man. And not to put too fine a point on it, and though I have lost eight pounds since last December, I also note that the boy could fit inside the man with room to spare.

Now, I'm not as stupid as I probably come off in some of these blogs, and I am not exactly stunned by the fact that, as a man of fifty, I feel a certain jealousy toward who I used to be, phyisically. Nobody likes to be shown up, nobody likes competitions they can't win, and nobody likes to be the butt of dad jokes when one is not even a dad and still thinks of themselves as being firmly in the game. In short, nobody likes to watch Millennium and remember exactly what you looked like when you first saw episode such-and-such in 1999. Because to do so just reminds you of all the follicles you've lost and all the pounds you have gained. And yet there is comfort in hiraeth, too, because this intense longing for the past is mercifully bound up by a cold awareness of just how shitty the past was to Miles Watson. 1999 sucked. The full head of hair, the flashing smile, the leading-man jawline and unquenchable sex drive masked tempestuous inner turmoil and pain. I was unfulfilled, frustrated, constricted, cramped. A big fish in a small pond, swimming in futile circles. And I was permeated with fear: the fear that I would never do anything, never amount to anything, never achieve any of my goals, ambitions, dreams. I looked good, but I often felt rotten. And in a sense, I was. Every young man is. Outside is muscle and white teeth. Inside is Hamlet, stuck on repeat.

As you grow older, and thoughts turn to such things as "I need reading glasses" and "I'm shaving my head because women like that better than a fucking combover," you also realize that as false as ordinary memories can play you, emotional memories can be even more brutally dishonest. They attack suddenly and piercingly, and fill you with longings which, upon close examination, do not always hold water. The quote with which I began this missive was delivered to me many years ago by a World War Two veteran who was well into his eighties when I interviewed him about his life. During our conversation, he casually dropped that remark, which I have never forgotten. At the time, of course, it meant something very different to me than it does now, when I realize that it was aimed at me personally -- not the man he was speaking to, but his future self, the self that sits here now, writing this. "No man sees himself as anything but twenty five" is literally true, and a rather eloquent comment on the male mind, but it's also an explicit warning against the perils of self-competition. And it's a warning I'll be thinking about tomorrow, when my barber shaves my head, and with it, the last remnants of 1999.