Ideals and projective nostalgia

In Chinese Humanities Lecture today,
Prof. Hyong Rhew lectured on
Song Poetry: Appetite for Olives and Nostalgia for Litchi

The title gets its name from this passage from Lun Song shi (On Song Poetry) by Miao Yue:

Tang poetry is superior in resonance, and thus is exalted. It prizes suggestive charms and nimbleness. Song poetry is superior in ideas, and thus is shrewd and intense. It prizes deep twists and penetrating thoroughness. The beauty of Tang poetry lies in words of emotion, and thus it is voluptuously rich; the beauty of Song petry lies in its forceful bones, and thus it is lean and vigorous. Tang poetry is like peonies and wild roses, flowers of lushness and rich colors; Song poetry is like plum blossoms in winter and Chrysanthemums in autumn, flowers of hidden elegance and cilled fragrance. Tang poetry is like eating litchi. With one in the mouth, the sweetness and fragrance fill between the cheeks. Song poetry is like chewing olives. Astringent at the beginning, but its aftertaste is deep and long-lasting. ...


Hyong began the lecture with a question,

"Have you ever been nostalgic about something? What is nostalgia?"

---longing for something based on a memory-- we cautiously agreed

"Memory?" He asked again, "Or SELECTIVE memory?
Partial? Incorrect? maybe a distorted form of memory...

So maybe
it's more about the present than the past."


The Tang poetic tradition preceded the Song, and, the way Hyong spoke, shadowed it in the similar way that a son aspiring to be a young man might feel overshadowed by the great name of his father. The Song tradition was a very different style, but nonetheless, Hyong argued that the Song poets were "influenced by the nostalgic memory of what SHOULD be the poetic ideal"


I thought it a curious tool to think with -
that the scribes of a different style of poetry would look back upon the previous as the ideal of what poetry should, or could, be. It's not so odd - looking back on the past as the 'good old days' is a familiar idea. I am reminded of a comment made by a friend of mine who took the class the previous year regarding how the old days are always better since it is the good which is more easily remembered and contrasted with the way things are now.


If I may project my thoughts of this lecture to a more general scale, asking an old question with some new terminology,

Are our ideals and hopes for how the future could be based only on a selectively recalled past? ... we cannot "go back" ...


I did some more thinking on paper later:
(edited)

"I'm still thinking about this idea of our ideals just being idealized selective nostalgia,
about how we can't understand or describe anything that isn't in terms of what we already know, how new experiences can only remind us of previous experiences, how our dreams of utopia will never stop becoming distopian because all we know how to do is take an old setting and push it to the limit of what we think is best. We'll never think of how to jump that gap ahead of time.

In the meantime, we'll fume over watching all our alchemy crumble heavily because we tried to label our imagined toys with the shining lie of something true and real.

All we know how to do is polish lead and try to call it a gold we've never seen.

If we ever get there,
it will be by nothing that we could have planned ahead of time."