"Nostalgia is a Dangerous Drug" ?

Those are the words of Roy H Williams, the Wizard of Ads®, in his latest Monday Morning Memo.

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Williams starts with a few observations on nostalgia but focuses largely on hero worship. This is the first Monday Morning Memo I've come away from a bit dispirited. Not because of Williams's comments on hero worship (which are spot on, IMHO), but because of his treatment of the imagination:

"You do realize that Lake Wobegone and Mayberry and Little House aren't real places, right?"

A writer knows this tone, and Williams is talking to a particular audience; he reinforces it in the next sentence, "let's not pretend." He may be talking partly to himself, as many writers do, but this is an email with a wide audience, so I presume he's talking to a lot of people who just may forget Mayberry isn't real (or believe that it is).

Like me.

Now, I like Williams's Memos. I read them weekly and enjoy them. But this week he did more than discard harmless conceits like Mayberry; he sterilized them.

There is a place old memories go to die, and that is where Williams sent Mayberry.

Why isn't Mayberry real? How real is Erie, PA, my boyhood town, and my experiences growing up there? The nighttime thrumming and whistling of distant trains? The bay and barges and tugs and fishermen? Christmas lights through frosted windows and wild grapes in the neighbor's yard?

Nothing physical of those things remains today except the patterns of synaptic connections that define them. Those are the same patterns that hold Mayberry (and kisses and smiles and twinkles and sinking stomachs and weak legs - a few images suitable for Valentine's Day).

Please don't misunderstand, I know that the Mayberry I know is not Erie, PA, but it was in some respects Mount Airy, Andy Griffith's boyhood town[1], and there is no reason why my memories of a very real Erie should have any more substance than Andy Griffith's memories of a very real Mount Airy (or the team of directors, writers and actors that interpreted them).

All human expressions are reflections of the experiences of those that express them. Some are difficult to penetrate, but others are not. The expressions we most enjoy or that transform us are intimately accessible. In that regard, Guernica and Mayberry are a lot alike.

I can't go back to the towering maple tree in my backyard from which I surveyed an entire neighborhood. That tree is no longer physically present, but in some way it's still there, as real as Aunt Bee's apron.

As an aside, dangerous or not, nostalgia is as much a part of our DNA as our need for fats and sugars. And I choose that example deliberately, because even though we are programmed to consume those things in massive quantities when available (and copulate and kill and many other things), we can't excise bits and pieces of our nature we don't care for.

They all combine in myriad and ultimately indefinable ways to make us what we are.

[1]
Some aspects of The Andy Griffith Show were based on Griffith's childhood growing up there.

Started: 2012-02-13