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We felt nostalgic for libraries, even though we were sitting in a library. We looked around the library lined with books and thought of other libraries we had sat in lined with books and then of all the libraries we would never sit in lined with books, some of which contained scenes set in libraries.
Donna Stonecipher, “The Ruins of Nostalgia 59,” via the Academy of American Poets
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Content, it turned out, was not synonymous with form; some forms of content blew some forms of form to bits. Empty form was just formal. A surplus of people wanted surplus space and time, which swiftly used up the surplus space, which meant the surplus time was gone, too; never to return. And so it goes in the ruins of nostalgia.
Donna Stonecipher, from her poem “The Ruins of Nostalgia 26” (published in BODY, June 5, 2019)
donna stonecipher / the ruins of nostalgia 42
The Ruins of Nostalgia 42 by Donna Stonecipher
We were nostalgic for the time when the pointillist paintings had looked like autumnal birch trees, rather than for the time when the autumnal birch trees had looked like pointillist paintings. We were nostalgic for the certainty that the bird we heard singing sweetly in the suburban forest was a recording, rather than being certain that what we thought was a recording was actually a bird. We were nostalgic for the care that had gone into the realism of the polyester lilies we had placed our foolish noses in, spoiling for perfume. We were nostalgic for foolishness, because it meant wisdom might matter. We were nostalgic for fakery, because it meant realness might matter. We were nostalgic for trompe l’oeil, for fool’s gold, for crocodile tears, for Mercator globes, for mimeographs, for velveteen, for signifiers unmoored from signifieds. We were nostalgic for the hand-painted cracks in the artificial marble in the ruins of nostalgia.
““Summer afternoon,” wrote Henry James, were the two most beautiful words in the English language. But for the heartbroken, the overworked, the underemployed, the grieving, and the lonely, “summer afternoon” was not two words but a sentence. And the schadenfreude they exuded on a cold and rainy July day hovered over the city like an extra layer of cloud.” -Donna Stonecipher, from Transaction Histories
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From “Model City” by Donna Stonecipher
Model City [1]
It was like taking the train across a border between two countries with disparate languages, one built like a fortress and one slinky as a river, and thinking about how orderly languages are, keeping within borders.
*
It was like anticipating how the station-names will change abruptly from words stout as fortresses to words slinky as rivers right after the border, as if each language lived in a world untroubled by the existence of the other.
*
It was like crossing the border and trying to feel it underneath the train, to feel this instance of division, of order, of force, of fate. But the border was an abstraction ordering other abstractions, like stout and slinky languages.
*
It was like noticing the train had stopped at the border and seeing a man outside with the wrong passport apprehended by police—and remembering the luxury of forgetting the brute ordering force of abstractions.
Model City [2]
It was like going to see “The Unbuilt City,” an exhibition of architectural plans and models for transforming your city—grids, towers, monumental ministries, vast plazas—that ultimately came to nothing.
*
It was like wandering through the exhibit looking at futuristic drawings that figure the erasure of the nineteenth-century four-story architecture you love, and feeling pleased the plans came to nothing.
*
It was like taking note of a resistance in yourself to the futuristic, the futuresque, the future—while not denying a certain nostalgia for antiquated visions of the world of tomorrow.
*
It was like looking at the futuristic models and thinking about the unbearableness of the present and realizing there are two kinds of people: those who can’t wait for the future, and those who can’t wait for the past.
Model City [3]
It was like moving into an apartment for the summer furnished only with a bed, a desk, a chair, and an old “world” radio in a brown case, its luminous dial turning to Moscow Berlin Paris Skopje Budapest London and Tangier.
*
It was like lying in bed at night next to the world-radio, etched with distant cities, which now only gets local stations, and imagining lying in bed in Skopje in the middle of the last century listening to music from Paris.
*
It was like lying under the open window thinking the apartment is not big enough, the summer is not big enough, the world is not big enough for the world-radio with its etched cities and its luminous ideals.
*
It was like leaving the apartment at summer’s end and sneaking the world-radio out in your suitcase, for you know that only you understand the radio’s faith in a grander, more worldly world—and its inability to transmit it.
Model City [4]
It was like taking a taxi one night through the streets of your adopted city to get home to your rented apartment and passing new hotel after new hotel in every neighborhood.
*
It was like seeing the word hotel echoing through the city and feeling the urge to take off your clothes in the taxi, and then to see how much if any of your skin you can take off, to get down to something you own.
*
It was like wanting to take off everything, clothes, skin, down to the heart working inside your body, and thinking about how our bodies are hotels for guests we may know but have never seen.
*
It was like arriving home and entering your rented apartment like the hotel guest that you are at heart, knowing that you own nothing, not even the vacant body you offer to your loved one.
2013
from Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance (5) by Donna Stonecipher
5.
He was surprised to find out that the new language he was learning had only one word for both “history” and “story.” It also had only one word for both “luck” and “happiness.” All the guilt-ridden people sitting in therapy week after week, he thought, could learn something from languages, which don’t ever apologize for their deficiencies and their insufficiencies, for their omissions, obsessions, obscenities, flagrancies, fallacies, or farragoes.
7.
But wasn’t it—at last—time? The grandfather clock ticking in the mirrored hallway “tells” time, as if time, too, were a story, and time is a story, it is a ghost story that keeps adults wide awake in their beds at night like children while snow falling outside renders the city sugary and skeletal. The doubled grandfather clock required two keys. The new language had no word for serendipity, no word for jet-lag. It had no words for disoriented or sentimental.
-Donna Stonecipher
