Are the Dead Nostalgic?

I was asking this question recently when the nightmare of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians greatly disturbed my reflections and took me in another writerly direction. Now I wish to return to this matter that seems perpetually pertinent, a pertinence, of course, not unconnected to the dead in Gaza, Ukraine, and everywhere else. There are so many ways of getting dead – and living – that complicate my question.

I am certain of this, however, that there is much to be said for talking to the dead, even asking them if they are nostalgic.

I have just awakened from a night of dreams in which I was cavorting with a bunch of the dead and they told me many things, one of which was to pursue my question into my daydreams, which this essay may be called, in the etymological sense of that word – to essay, that is, to try, to experiment without knowing where one is going. Surely one does not want to forget that life is an experiment into the unknown, as is its companion – death. And that all travel ends in the enigma of “arrival.”

Michel de Montaigne spoke for me when he said: “I am by nature not melancholy, but dreamy. Since my earliest days, there is nothing with which I have occupied my mind more than with images of death. Even in the most licentious season of my life, amid ladies and games. . . .” So too for me, no matter how fiercely in my youth I competed on the basketball court to win accolades and the admiration of the ladies, I always felt I was performing for a deeper reason that I couldn’t articulate at the time but which I vaguely sensed.

I got a hint of it once, when after a game in which we won against our arch-rival and I played very well, a visitor to the locker room congratulated me by saying, “Great game,” and I responded with false modesty, saying “It was okay,” knowing that I did play very well but was unable to accept the compliment. I have never forgotten that incident that suggests to me that there was something deeper than playing well and just winning a game that I was after, and that my stupid response to the compliment revealed – or did it conceal? – this from me.

So I wonder: Why am I writing this essay? To win your applause? Something more? I know I am writing it for myself, but I could keep it private.

Perhaps you will agree that the question about the dead’s nostalgia is a touchy philosophical question that might have no definitive answer. Even if we could, in modern data-driven fashion, construct a sociological survey, how would we choose a “representative” sample of the dead? Where would we find them – up, down, way out there, next to us? The thought of it seems flippant in an impossible way, which it is, but its flippancy holds a secret message.

So I asked the dead who would speak to me and got a few mixed, muffled replies. You can understand their reluctance to say anything.

If I heard correctly, one of them said, “You should ask the living.” Another, who seemed offended that I considered him dead, said, “Why are you asking me?” Most didn’t answer, which had me wondering why. Were they disgusted with us?

But then I wondered: Who are the dead? That too is a touchy question.

I have always heard that nostalgia was not good for you since it kept you rooted in the past; that this ache for home (Greek, algos, pain + nostos, homecoming) – the good old days that may or may not have existed but you miss them nevertheless – prevented you from living Zen-like in the present or looking forward to the future.

Yet the English writer and art-critic John Berger suggested otherwise when he wrote that, paradoxical as it seems, there is also a nostalgia for the future that is hopelessly desired, not hopelessly lost. A journey, propelled by an “indefinable ache,” to an imagined future created out of recollected moments of love and beauty. While often found in the work of artists of all types, it is available to everyone open to revelations from out of the blue. But one must imagine, as John Lennon sang.

So I wondered if nostalgia could be a form of utopian hope at a time when humanistic utopian thinking is at a nadir, overwhelmed by constant bad news, subtle propaganda wherein contradictions and truths coexist in chaotic indifference, and the machine dreams of people like Elon Musk and the digital devils like those at the World Economic Forum and in Silicon Valley.

The denigration of nostalgia assumed you were alive. I was wondering about the dead. What did they think? Did they wish they were alive? Was being alive the good old days for them, or did they feel they were finally home and that life had been a dream?

Or did the dead have no future, no nothing, or perhaps some afterglow of sorts, an everlasting rest in peace, whatever that may mean, a phrase that always seemed to me a bad knock on life. Who wants to sleep forever as cemeteries (Greek koimeterion, sleeping place, dormitory) remind us by their eerie silence?

If sleep is peace, why bother to wake up in the morning?

But what about the other dead, the living-dead? Had they killed all livingness in themselves in order to avoid another death? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot – Were we led all this way for death or birth? Yes, the enigma of arrival.

I guess I was thinking that if I could get in touch with the dead and get them talking, they might also tell me what it was like to be dead. Although I am no statistical whiz, I figured there were a lot more of them than the living, and the odds were pretty good that someone there would spill the beans.

I thought of this recently when watching the new film about Bob Dylan’s early years, A Complete Unknown, when his film girlfriend, Sylvie Russo, based on the real Suze Rotolo, gets angry at him for concealing his true past and identity, and he replies, “People make up their past, Silly, they make up what they want; [they] forget the rest.”

This has a ring of truth to it, whether it’s from memory lapses or some sense of wanting to fictionalize their pasts for reasons known only to them. Our memories and forgetteries are interesting creative faculties.

But as I said, I was interested in the dead. Did they also do that? Were they nostalgic in the looking-back sense?

Yet their silence was deafening. I grew very frustrated. I felt my proclivity for abstruse questions might be leading me astray, away from my own nostalgia, an easier question to answer.

This thought came to me when I just heard the bell ring on my Hermes manual typewriter, and I returned the carriage to type these words.

Ah, the bells, the calling of the bells, their tinkling and tolling, the bells for meals at the Edgewater Farm of my youth, the bells of St. Brendan’s grammar school calling us to freeze our positions as we played in the street during lunch break, my tinkling of the bells in the sacred hush as an altar boy, the church bells still ringing at St. Peter’s church in town, Bob Dylan’s song Ring Them Bells, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells and Phil Ochs’ version in song, Leonard Cohen’s vesper bells in When Night Comes On, ringing for me, calling me somewhere, resonating “to the tintinnabulation that so musically wells” up thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears or laughter.

I hear the bells, but I still do not know if the dead are nostalgic.  It seems like the wrong question. For this daydream in words has brought me to that enigmatic place of arrival where I am nostalgic for my dear departed dead loved ones.  They still talk to me, but don’t answer obnoxious questions.

As for the past, I can echo the concluding words of Don DeLillo’s alter-ego, Nick Shay, in his great novel Underworld:

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real.  This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

As for the living, John Donne summoned it up:

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.