The writer's life is a grumpy one.
Gaze upon my moody pout and despair.
A Thought That Preoccupies Me From Time To Time...
What, in a Darwinian, evolutionary sense, is the purpose of nostalgia? Why is it there? Just how has it served our survival? The moments I remember from the streets of my Salfordian childhood that generate nostalgia, they are not made of anything that isn't available to me now. Streetlamps and overcast skies. Cars and tarmac, the smell of rain, a few pop songs and that cocaine ache for just a little something more that throbs off of the shop fronts and fills the streets. What I can see now, that I didn't see then, is that the poetry I encounter in any scene, whether it's one of natural grandeur or of urban banality, is a poetry I placed there myself. Yes, I can talk of the changing of the light in the sky, or what ideas are carried in off the canal on the breeze. I can talk of yesterday's papers gathering where pavement meets wall, scuffed down by plimsole prints. I can talk of all the endless magical ingredients that gather and combine in a day in the life of a boy in the North, how they dwarf and encapsulate him. But the poetry there, I realise now, was put there by me, by my witnessing. A baby, a boy, a growing young man, as inarticulate as a vacuum; yet what magic he encountered is only what poured directly out of him, overlaid itself on the world before him in answer to his desires. We like to refer to the ineffable, the mystery that cannot be named, or contained by words, or comprehended by the mind of man, and we forget that, not only are we made out of it, but it is made out of us. We are the shapers as well as the shaped.
