Open Journal Montreal

Good people of Open, I’d like to introduce to you Yohei, our first official Contributing Editor.

We’re still taking people on, but there’s one less poetry-literary-theorist spot left to be filled.
It turns out Yohei and I bumped around the old grey buildings of McGill together for a few years, back when both of us were wide-eyed and busy undergraduates. We were even in classes together, although Yohei remembers this better then I. I have a whole fuzzy realm full of McGill faces in my brain, and Yohei’s glasses and serious gaze are certainly in there, but for the most part, those large McGill classes are a blur. In crowds I seem to see the few people I already know in technicolour. Other potentially interesting faces are quite dim.
Yohei’s face would have, in all likelihood, stayed dim if I hadn’t been out here in public with Open, and if he hadn’t been out looking around to find us, or if he hadn’t been awesome enough to jump in when we threw up our call for contributing editors. There are strange old links being remade all the time.
But don’t worry, I didn’t choose to welcome him on board just because we share an alma mater- you can’t trust someone just because they’ve haunted the same halls. No, what won me over was the small collection of thoughts and observations about the whole feeling of homesickness that he sent me along with his introduction/application. Especially fun was finding out that we had both stumbled on the strangeness of the French verb “Missing” and stopped to write something down about it.

“Homesick”
by Yohei, originally published on The Red Line Review.

Cliche or thoughtless counterintuitive logic seems to intrude on an otherwise pretty Kings of Convenience song, “Homesick.” At first blush, there is something off about the song’s sense of causality. :

Homesick,
‘cuz I no longer know
where home is.

It hardly needs pointing out that one’s homesickness is contingent on a strong notion of home, on knowing where home is.

One needs a home first,
toward which longing can be directed,
to be sick for.

Homesickness, as we might imagine it, thus matches particularly well with the French verb
manquer
and the syntactical reorganization the verb requires,
for both emphasize the central source from which homesickness originates and pulls.
The object or site of remembrance takes priority over the subject: Tu
me manques.

The state of homesickness is often suggestive of

spatial remove,

in contrast to a related
kind of
anxious
remembering,
the act of nostalgia which implies a

temporal distance.

In addition to their common reliance on the enduring nature of memory, however, nostalgia was originally synonymous with homesickness: “acute longing for familiar surroundings, especially regarded as a medical condition; homesickness.” Such a definition allows, then, we can assume, that homesickness, like nostalgia, most likely involves some degree of idealization. One remembers familiarity, perhaps at the expense of home as it really is:

when away at summer camp for the first time, one hardly remembers Dad’s austerity or Mom’s temper; rather,
one extrapolates from frozen, quotidian happy moments —
what Virginia Woolf called moments of non-being– a
more or less
complete picture of home.

Homesickness and nostalgia also leave open
the possibility that one’s pang for a sense of familiarity
need not be for home at all,
but simply familiarity itself, imagined (deja vu)
or real.

One can be nowhere near home as long as the surroundings effect intimacy.
And in fact, one can feel familiarity not only from the truly familiar,
but from the comfort provided by one’s mistaken sense
of forgotten familiarity:
thinking that someplace was once familiar and now forgotten
when in fact it is — and has always been — entirely foreign:

“I would define nostalgia as an affection or desire, not for what one remembers, but for what one feels one has forgotten….Nostalgia in this sense is… well-known in a number of contexts. In a relatively bald form, for instance, it is often used by advertisers. (The television campaign that urged viewers to ‘Come
back to Jamaica’ was clearly not aimed at native Jamaicans, nor even at those who had ever visited.) In a more complex form the implication of forgotten knowledge is typical not only of Virgil but of what we call “the classics” in general.”

Erik Gray, Nostalgia, the Classics, and the Intimations Ode: Wordsworth’s
Forgotten Education (Philological Quarterly: Spring 2001.Vol. 80.2)

A false forgotten familiarity — that is to say, complete unfamiliarity —
merges into familiarity in homesickness and nostalgia;
we might be reminded of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny.
Unheimlich, in literal translation denotes the opposite of heimlich;
unheimlich is “unhomely,” frightening, and novel,
heimlich: “homely.”
Yet, as Freud comments, the uncanny absorbs both contradictory definitions:
the uncanny is “the notion of the hidden and the dangerous” (unheimlich)
but precisely so only because it is
also familiar.

“German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the’ homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’) for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.”

The Uncanny, trans.
David McLintock.

Homesickness, like nostalgia, then, might actually require not knowing where home is.
Familiarity and unfamiliarity — and home or some specter of it — are closely related.
Homesickness does not need to focus its desire on home
so much as something, perhaps home, that is felt to be missed:
either because it has simply become strange
and unfamiliar or because it seems
forgotten,
even if it was never experienced or remembered in the first place.

to read my ideas about ‘manquer’, you’ll have to read this piece, originally published in the Duck and Herring Summer Pocket Field Guide, called “Language Lesson 1″

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[ originally posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Contributors, Everything, On Places and Identities, Our News, Yohei. ]