Archive Highlight - “Keyword Search: Proactive Nostalgia”

May is almost gone, which means we are rapidly approaching the halfway point of the year.

If that makes you feel uneasy (or downright physically unwell), know that you're not alone in screaming. As the days fly by, they're catching me hard at work on a few projects, for which exciting updates are forthcoming. That said, for this highlight, I'm chasing the deep, subtle, complicated shades of feelings that can only really come out when they're given some time and space. Let's take a look at one below, and see where it takes us.

(Some baseline familiarity with The Telelibrary or [MISSING] would help you, but isn’t strictly necessary)

“Keyword Search: Proactive Nostalgia”

One of the most interesting tricks I pull off when performing The Telelibrary is providing “keyword suggestions” when a User brings up a topic they appear interested in or connected to. This is done almost entirely intuitively and associatively, but I try to ground the offering in the language and “capacity” of the system. Specifically, I offer the potential selections as being attached to specific “Keywords'' that I lift as close to verbatim from what someone has described or evoked: “KW: adventure - 1 credit;” “KW: expressing affection in terms of time of death - .5 credit;” “KW: gradualling developing a sense of intimacy with a discrete unit of foliage - .5 credit.” I also try to challenge myself to never offer less than two related selections, along with the option to return to the main menu, so that a User doesn’t feel they are being pushed too far in one direction. In terms of how I do this, I’d describe it less as a skill and more a natural result of constantly traveling through the excertps and materials in question; they’re always somewhere on my mind, and so over the course of hundreds of calls I began to get a sense of which selections might speak to what at a given time. If you ever have the experience of thinking of a quote or section of a book and remembering vividly which part of the page it was on, then you can simply think that, but across about 100 books or so.

And so when a User added the following comment to the User Logbook, the “map” in my head began to light up:

"There should also be a category for concepts and words that should exist but don't.

The one that I think should exist that I don't know —but if it did exist it would probably be German, because they are very good at these compound words—is a sense of proactive nostaliga, when you're already missing something that exists because you don't think it can last very long."

User Comment 17, User Logbook Volume 7

User #227

As it happens, I’ve got a selection that I think speaks beautifully to this unique feeling they are describing (“KW: something that exists, imagining not lasting long”), along with a few that speak to various shades and styles of missing. There’s even an entire “Lost and Found” Users can explore. But not everything that lights up in my mind is helpful. Some selections are things I haven’t got permission for, and may never (please notice me, Matthew Olzman senpai). Others are things I know are perfect, but I don’t have on hand — in this case, a beautiful interview from my research project titled [MISSING], which I just knew included a detailed discussion of “missing the future.”

Given that I am literally tied to a microphone stand while performing, I couldn’t go chase that excerpt down in my records—nor would it have been an easy task to explain where I was getting it—and so for the purposes of the call I let it drop and moved on.  But afterwards I dug through my notes to find the interview. What I found took me on a surprising journey, and ultimately may challenge my ideas of how useful these Keyword Associations can be.

The interview in question was from my 9-month research project on “what missing means.” Somewhere along the way, a collaborator introduced me to a Portuguese word for missing which is famously (allegedly) untranslatable: Saudade. I decided to sit with 10 different Portuguese speakers across the university to see what would happen if I pushed for more details beyond the general approximation: “the presence of an absence.” Which is how I ended up sitting down with P, a professor on campus. We had a far-reaching conversation, discussing how recent losses in his family have changed his relationship to missing, as well as his life as the son of a diplomat, uprooting every three years, and the ways that does and doesn’t form a unique relationship to loss:

“P:   I think in a weird way I was sheltered from .. the more permanent kind of experiences of loss, because .. you know .. as I say, if you grow up in one place, if you're connected to your extended family, at some point someone's gonna die, you're gonna go to a funeral, you're gonna go through these experiences. And I hadn't really been through something like that [...]  I'd been very sheltered from that kind of experience of .. but in a different way I had been constantly .. um, wrenched from social circles and um, put in different social circles. And every three years, when your parents have to move, um … yeah. I—you know a lot of the diplomatic kids or missionary kids or whatever complain about it, but in a weird way I think it just formalizes something that probably would have happened anyways. I mean, most people—[...]— most people change, the—or whether they're changing it consciously or it happens organically because you move, the reality is people are not .. with the people that they were, within kindergarten, or within high school, or within undergrad, you know it just .. in a weird way moving formalizes things, but it also —I don't know, for me in a weird way it makes it almost easier. Rather than sitting around thinking "Oh why am I no longer close to someone I was close to when I was 6?"

#00:22:51-9#

Yannick:  You know.

P:   Well, I have this excuse. I moved. (laughing) [...] That's what I mean by making it easier, in a weird way?“

Reading this now, more than 10 years later, I’m struck by how much the conversation captures so many of the specific, complicated feelings I was having at the time, and that I was going to have. I was in my fourth year at NYUAD, which meant for four years I had been constantly moving about, changing locations, classmates, even countries. The school was still small, and an even smaller group of us had been there since the beginning, watching everything change. Soon we would be leaving that direct community. We all had futures ahead of us we were eager to start, but in exchange we would need to release our shared present. P. found a way to put this to words:

P:   [...] I mean you guys are gonna go through some of that stuff now, right? And it's gonna be very weird. But in a weird way you've already gone through so much of that. So I—but I think it will be even weirder, if a bunch of you ended up in the same city, and you just found that … you find yourself that some connections will actually be very important to you. And then maybe some will not be as important as they seem now. And that's a weird thing. If that makes any sense. right?

#00:25:26-5#

Yannick:  Do you- do you think Saudade sort of—uh, is revelatory in that respect?

P:   (inhale) yeah I think any kind of cognitive difference, or dissonance can be, can lead you to a.. to a.. make connections or reveal things about yourselves, or other people, or how you feel about other people. Certainly, yeah. It probably—one of the ways to know about people is to move away from them (laughing).

Eventually, I pushed him to try again to define Saudade, which brings us to the excerpt that had lit up in my mind during the Telelibrary (you know, back at the beginning of the essay):

#00:31:30-8#

Yannick:  So all that in mind, how would you translate Saudade?

P:   How would I translate Suadade? I don't know [...] there a—there are a couple of songs that came to my mind that have contrasting uses of Saudade in Portuguese. [...] one of them is a very famous song, it's called "Chega de Saudade"

[P. takes out his phone and plays the song -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzxVBXCP1jg]

It's an old Bossa Nova song. According to wikipedia some people argue it's the first official bossa nova song—I don't know what that's supposed to mean, exactly. But … a translation of this I found (reading from phone)… so "Chega de Saudade" would be like "no more Saudade" .. and it was translated as "no more blues" [...] as "a melancholy that doesn't - um, não sai de mim - doesn't, doesn't escape me or get out of me. So I was thinking this is an example of a very wistful, melancholic, nostalgic, .. conception of - of um, .. does that make sense?

Yannick:  Yeah.

P:   Sorry, I was just listening a little bit to the lyrics as well.[...]  what she was singing, she's saying "we have to end this business of you living far away from me, I'm tired of being away from you" —so this is a certain notion of Saudade, and .. probably closest to the conventional way we have of thinking of it. and uh, you know, obviously these are lovers and she was singing about she misses being held by him, so on and so forth, the little kisses and things like that. But I - I like that way of describing it—as a melancholy that .. one can't .. that doesn't escape one, or that it doesn't—that one can't get rid of, or can't get out of one's system or something like that. Does that make sense?

#00:34:12-4#

Yannick: yeah.

P:   [...] So this was Bossa Nova, this song is from 1959, it's not from my generation, it's from like, my parents' generation. (inhale) um, but it's also wistful and melancholic. right? It's something that you experienced, something in the past, you miss it, and it has that sense. right? And then I was thinking about .. saudade the way it was used in the kind of music that I might have heard when I was in Brazil. Which would have been, ah, kind of Rock Music, influenced by U-U2, or the Cure, or the Smiths, or .. so, Brazilian bands, but they were responding —fusing different kinds of musical traditions than these earlier musical eras. right? Which I didn't really get to experience other than as my parents' music. (inhale) And what struck me is that there's a song that I really liked when I was like 14, and it was about the Saud-the Saudade—”que eu sinto de as pessoas eu ainda não vi” The um, the Saudade that I feel for things that I have not yet seen. Saudade that I feel for the things that haven't happened yet. And I was just thinking about these two songs, and I was just thinking, well, the different kinds of musical genres but also I think [snaps] rock music articulating more—I mean the musicians themselves must have been in their twenties when they wrote this song—uh, it's so happens that the band "Legião Urbana" um, that wrote this song, half of the musicians [...] their parents had grown up elsewhere they had moved around a lot (laughing) so, I don't know if that inflected this particular lyric of Saudade or not, [snapping] but it's a very different kind of thing it's almost like a youthful, sort of impatience and fear that one is not gonna experience everything that one should. you know? [...] it's a very young feeling of like, "I'm twenty, and I .. I-I can't wait for these other vistas, these other experiences, these other loves." And that's a very different use of .. Saudade than this classic Bossa Nova [...] which almost speaks to maybe being a little older, and having had “that relationship”. [...]  and maybe I think in my life I've experienced both—both kinds of Saudade. That—I'd probably like to think that I still do (laughing). But it's partly this sort of like, this hunger for —as the song puts it—for what one has not yet seen, right? Which is very different I think from growing up in one place and going "oh, I miss Rio." Whereas what they're really expressing here is like—and perhaps because some of the band members had grown up in different countries, they're like .. "wow - once you realize what the world is like you just wanna see more of it" right? So then it's a weird—it's almost like a Saudade for novelty. It's almost like um.. one of the band members his name was Dado Villa-Lobos, and it's almost like Dado came back from a, from living abroad in different places, and that is his notion of childhood and belonging… is “moving.” (laughing) So what he misses is [...]—"I miss every few weeks or months traveling somewhere new." And in—"being intoxicated by a different environment, or the sound of a new language, being thrown into a different place, which I-I have to figure out" and .. that's a kind of unique experience. So one misses that, and not just the actual .. because you can have the people. You can be hanging out in Beirut or New York together wherever you are. But you won't necess—unless you're still living that way, you might miss that yearning—you may have this yearning for what you haven't seen yet. Does that make sense?

#00:38:44-4#

Yannick:  mm

P:    So I don't know, I like the idea of maybe playing one of these songs or the other, and realizing how different the yearnings that are bracketed under Saudade can be. right? Everything from .. from "I'm wistful for the past" to "I have this impatient yearning to live life to the fullest, and have new experiences. Now" And both of these things can somehow fall under Saudade. Does that make sense?

Something I love about these long-form interviews is the chance they give me and participants to really look closely at a particular shade or flavor of a feeling. I find people are able to look closely at and express something so specific that sometimes they don't even have a name for it. It feels like a moment of discovery, and clarity, and wonder.

I've found that the Telelibrary sometimes provides Users an altogether different route to reach a similar experience. In these cases, I wonder if Keyword suggestions may not always be helpful. On the one hand, identifying some concepts from what someone has said is a form of listening, and demonstrating that the User and their thoughts have been heard. On the other hand, I worry that trying to express similar concepts can dilute the specificity of what someone is feeling. It may be that the better offer is to provide choices that veer away from what they've discovered, or to highlight how a similar selection is different, so they can better appreciate how particular their own perspective is. Reading it again, this excerpt above is almost the opposite of what the User comment described; rather than preemptively feeling the loss of what you are certain cannot last, you are feeling the absence of what has not yet begun to be.

Perhaps it would have been a good offer after all—I can’t really say. I can only notice that I’m missing what I’ll never know for certain.