PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE IMAGES: ISTOCK
Brendon Holder is a Canadian-born writer based in New York.
Twenty or so years back, there was a bedroom that peered onto a modest lawn of bleeding hearts and hydrangeas with a view of a basketball net that loomed over a parked Honda Civic. This bedroom was inhabited by the only child in the household. On weekends and evenings, if not outside upon his bike, the child could be discovered in the room with his nose in a novel – A Series of Unfortunate Events, perhaps? – or looking up cheat codes to advance his gameplay in the latest Zelda. The altar of the room was a five-shelf mahogany bookcase that was twice the size of the boy, who couldn’t have been more than 10 years of age.
If you glanced at the shelves, you would have observed dozens of worn-out spines of fantasy novels and a cabinet stuffed with stacks of music magazines and manga. The crown jewel of the bookcase was a three-disc JVC CD player that sat firmly on the first shelf. The boy won the stereo at an elementary-school raffle, his first memory of winning anything, and he spent his days rotating through an assortment of CDs, some burned and some purchased legally, that went on to score his youth.
At least, this is what I remembered.
Not too long ago, I returned to this room whilst visiting family and, in my boredom, decided to forage through the wooden cabinets in a shallow attempt to get closer to the boy who used to live there. I leafed through old issues of Vibe magazine, perused faded high-school yearbooks and read through my old diary. The gel pen-inked entries helped to cobble together memories of an adolescence that was cloaked in a certain nostalgia, threading the needle between the video games, the sprayed-gold tae kwon do trophies and concert-ticket stubs that decorated the room. However, not all of the room’s objects could summon memories with similar ease. Whereas the journal, the photographs and the signed yearbooks readily beamed me to a specific time and place, turnkey in their analog nature, the dead MP3 player, the burned discs labelled “Brendon’s Party Mix,” and the Game Boy cartridges, with no Game Boy to receive them, simply could not be accessed. The contents and the memories that were buried within them could not be unlocked. The technology that held its key was either misplaced or defunct.
Strangely, this distance – between me and the out-of-reach memory – brought comfort. I was content with being left with only the shell of a memory, its murky vacancy leaving space for my imagination to colour inside its opaque lines. I had not felt this distance in a while. Nostalgia is described as a “wistful yearning for the past,” but recently technology has made my past accessible through an effortless click of a button or tap on a screen. I don’t need to exert much brainpower to reflect on my year as I have Google’s Year in Search campaign to remind me of every newsworthy moment – triumphant and tragic. Spotify Wrapped automates this reflection further, its algorithm concocting a medley of my most-listened-to songs, with each hit conjuring a visceral memory imbued in its instrumentation. The digital display on my bedside table carousels through the past month’s images without instruction, pirouetting through frames of friends, meals and outfits-of-the-day. When it comes to remembering, it’s as if technology does the heavy lifting for me.
And yet, even with my slackened muscle memory, this automation has altered my behaviour. In minute, subtle ways I have leveraged technology to dictate the memories that remain present and suppress the ones I wish not to revisit. I find that I am beginning to take more photos – pictures of the city landscape, shots with friends, or being that annoying guy at a concert recording a video, content that I rarely return to on my own – solely for them to be served to me later through an automated slideshow called “Two Years Ago Today.” Toward the end of the year, I make a point to stream the artists I wish my year to be associated with, rather than play what I naturally would want to listen to. All this, so when I play back my Spotify Wrapped it’s oversaturated with soundtracked moments I’ve chosen to remember and none of the ones I don’t. With this rewiring of memory, we allow technology to manufacture what remains in our lives. But what happens when technology fails us? When, like my stereo, it becomes defunct and obsolete? What happens to those memories when technology can no longer hold them and my mind has forgotten how to?
Nostalgia is powerful because it functions partly as a dream. It’s visceral but not clear and leaves an incomplete puzzle for you to solve. There are pieces that you may “remember” that never really happened, and pieces that you at first recall but become blurry over the course of time. However, the feeling the memory gave you never diminishes. What makes nostalgia so seductive is its ability to evade. In its place, you’re left with fantasy.
This fantasy is deadened in the digital age. With technology, however, I can uncover how I felt, what I did, what I listened to and who I was with when I first heard the news about the pandemic and what recipes, at-home workouts and movies I consumed in the days after. Sure, it’s nice remembering things exactly as they were. It’s gratifying to send a screenshot to a friend of a photo of where you were last year or location-searching a restaurant to pinpoint exactly when was the last time you visited. But as satisfying as these “receipts” are, they are less fun and romantic than straining to piece together a memory on your own.
We are endlessly entertained by memory and its malleability. We cling to our moth-eaten memories and turn them over for significance, debate what really happened and interrogate scenes in our mind for new truths. We reward musical projects such as Silk Sonic’s Leave The Door Open or Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia because their melodies dance around a past that is mostly unreachable to us. We longingly stare at these memories through a foggy window with our noses pressed up against the glass. We obsess over the intricacies of film and television such as Atonement and The Affair that expose the fragility of memory across perspectives and challenge the binary of what is true and false.
Last year, Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, a 10-minute rerelease of her standout ballad from a decade ago, toyed with what attracts us most to memory and its fickleness. Ms. Swift conjures up symbols of her past – a scarf, autumn leaves from a trip upstate, the colour red – to revisit a power imbalance in a relationship long ago. With this rerelease, she is not only recounting her own memory of an entanglement, she also unlocks the memories the listener wove into the fabric of the track 10 years ago. We all hear the same song but see different narratives, a miraculous nuance that is lost through technology and its historical accuracy. We can’t bend the facts to comfort and amuse us. Without the impenetrable, unreliable witness of nostalgia, the romance is lost and we are left with the truth. How boring.
Back in my room, I return to the journal. On the inside cover, I read that it was gifted to me in 2001 for my birthday. Pedalling through its entries again, I’m taken by how little I have changed, how the patterns of my adolescence are the undercurrents of my behaviour today. I can only imagine that those patterns will continue to exist in me another 20 years from now, but wonder if the methods I have to document them – my Instagram, notes app, this essay – will become obsolete, much like my stereo. And maybe that’s okay. Perhaps in 20 years, I’ll give myself the liberty to allow my memory to be fluid and flexible, to let it take shape of whatever I need it to. Not to function as rock-solid evidence that an event has occurred and I was there for it, but as evidence that I have felt it and came out alive.
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