Corresponding With Nostalgia

Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).

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In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.

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I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.

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I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.

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One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.

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Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.

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A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):

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Corresponding With Nostalgia

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The correspondence used to be

Composed of pulp and ink,

Now seems elaborate and slow,

Indeed antique, I think.

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The mail comes digitally now,

Encoded on the air.

Yes, personality persists.

And no, it itsn't fair

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To say we write robotically.

The wait and weight of post--

The palpability of what

I read, I miss the most.

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Yet now I'm totally plugged in,

Am tethered to my screens.

I send and post, receive and text.

("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

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A letter to Nostalgia, yes:

I think that's what I'll write.

It will come back: "No such address."

Electrons are Nostalgia's site.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Head Officer

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Head Officer

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His head was his office. Each

day he opened an imaginary door

and entered to go to work. It was

a well appointed space, with tapestries

made of dream-threads, shelves

and cabinets full of memories,

bright synaptic lights, and windows

looking out on undulating land,

clustered skylines, and upholstered

boulders. He loved his job.

The pay, however, was sub-optimal

in the sense of nothing. So one day,

to support himself financially, he had

to get a job located outside his head.

He closed up the office in his mind. He

went to work with people on tasks

deemed socially appropriate and worth

traditional remuneration. Sometimes

he steals away to the office in his head,

that wondrous interior, and thinks what

seem to him to be marvelous thoughts,

some of which are accompanied by

unusual images: pink ferns, dolphins

broadcasting news, demitasse cups

full of melted gold. Returning makes

him wistful. The world outside the

Head Office is hard: steel, concrete,

that sort of thing. Deep sighs within these

headquarters seem to to have a salutary effect.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Chocolate-Poem

I went out for pizza with some students the other evening. Some of them ordered dessert, so we got on the subject of chocolate. I opined that I thought women seemed predisposed to like chocolate more than men liked it, but such assertions carry less weight than a mousse. Even if someone launched a proper statistical analysis that showed more women liking chocolate than men do, the preference might be cultural or physiological or a combination of both--or, heaven's, even neither.

Nonetheless, I'm sticking with my unsupported hypothesis, partly because the stakes are so low, partly because I can't remember meeting a woman who didn't like chocolate, although I have met some to whom chocolate sometimes gives a headache. I did poke around on the Web and found that one researcher--Anthony Auger--contends that chocolate affects women's brains differently than men's brains, particularly a place in the brain called the amygdale. I didn't know there was a village in the brain that went by that name. Of course, the village appears in both male and female brains, so why chocolate affects the zone in women differently is anybody's guess, or rather Auger's guess.

Anyway, I've been working on a poem about chocolate.


Chocolate

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After the moon has set but before sunrise,
sweet breezes issue from dark brown corridors
of a warm, fronded forest. This is the hour of
chocolate, when the mind is weary of merely
thinking and wants to dance with ancient
instincts, to self-induce a swoon by
indulging in lore from forbidden precincts.

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Inside cacao beans lies a secret
that survives translations of growth
and harvest, roast and grind, concoction
and confectionery concatenation. After
tasting chocolate, tongues transmit
the news by nerve-line, enzyme,
and bloodstream to mahogany-lined private
clubs in the brain. There receptors
luxuriate on divans and thrill
at the arrival of tropical gossip.
After the messages from chocolate
arrive, brown damask draperies vibrate,
and pleased devotees purr pleasurably.

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My darling, I wouldn't choose
between chocolates and flowers,
so I brought both. Let me put
the latter in a vase as you open
and taste the former. Yes, I agree:
chocolate is film noir watched
by taste buds in the mouth's
art-house theater. Barbarously

suave, chocolate is an unabashedly
debauched foodstuff--cad and coquette
of cacao. Darling, you're making
those noises you make when you eat
chocolate--the secret language of
satisfaction, the patter of pleasure,
your mumbled homage to this,
the moment of chocolate.

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2008