Episode 23

Nostalgia is a way of relating to the world that exaggerates what the current situation lacks—it helps us become aware of the cracks in the fabric of the world. Its tendency is to focus on something that is not: I have no home, or life is not as simple and sausage not as tasty as it was during the Soviet times. If we, however, do not think about these phantasms, if we do not question them and test our longing for them, we end up denying life. nostalgia can be frequently misnamed and easily manipulated. It takes no effort to be carried away by its backward-running currents. Yet, when ap- proached creatively, nostalgia’s phantasms allow us to become receptive to that which exceeds the existing order of the world. nostalgia’s pain can reveal the world as more than what it is, or appears to be right now. nostalgia makes manifest the “not-all-human” in us, to use Žižek’s term. It destroys the present self by demolishing its “all-too-human” boundaries and, consequently, allows us to create a different self. nostalgia can become a jour- ney not to a preexisting, lost home but toward a new—always temporary— dwelling place. It can become a journey to the home that never was. What is more, although nostalgia proceeds through violence and destruction, this violence need not be literal. It can be the violence of art, as opposed to that of war.

From "Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: A Journey to the home that never Was"
JULIA SUSHYTSKA

Mostly we talk about Moscow Zero. There is no academic writing about that.
Yet.
Y'all slept on Scott's Moana cover last episode.

The excellent John Cribbs from The Pink Smoke came by.