The phrase "new normal" is, for me, quite striking. First, is how it is understood, second is its composition, and third is how its done. When I think about these elements I can only come to one conclusion: what is the role of nostalgia in its formation? What comes to mind is the sitcom "Happy Days" and how reruns of older sitcoms, dramas, even the novels and essays depicting~capturing~interpreting times past flood the present with a nostalgic homage to it and offering integers for calculating the future. Nostalgia has become more of a science and less of a means of reminiscence of the bucolic remnants of days gone by. Current events, current ideas weaponize nostalgia, turning and twisting to create identities it never embodied in ways that the history it reflects can be translated or transferred into what can even be considered normal or new.
Nostalgia is a longing for a past wherein normal could be found, a blessed assurance, even in the midst of abounding uncertainty. Nostalgia offer up borders and boundaries, a segregated space unified by a singular memory signified by a primal hope that was greater than any fear. Nostalgia is a signification which points to an unbreakable triumphal continuum of joy that has existed and is readily passed on from generation to generation. Not a curse, but a blessing.
The new normal is merely how we think about things that have already been done and the desire to them again - maybe better~mostly worse. It is a falsity we chase like a high achieved from narcotics. We are caught up the perverse love affair, addiction, to what was first - without a connection to it for ourselves. This is the essence of addiction: the idea that you can re-create the virginal experience of that first moment of discovery with chemically induced euphoria. Chasing nostalgia is no less fiendish than chasing the elusiveness of the quintessential high. We do it to escape and in doing so repeat cycle after cycle of doing over what has already been done. A new normal is not any better: it is merely then as it is now, escape. Yet, nostalgia reveals that escape is unreachable - if its use is to attain a new normal.
The wrong attention is paid to predicting or doing something like a "new normal". There is nothing in revisiting the old and the ability to create something new is novel arrogance at best, with money and time wasted. Instead, new normal is nothing new and is therefore composed not of a new normal, but of people experiencing being under this sun. We are not clever enough, nor have we come to the knowledge of a technique that allows us to endeavor beyond the fact that nothing is new under the sun. Maybe then it is not that nothing is new, but how we construct the idea of the new using an addict's use of nostalgia as narcotic and not the right nostalgia.
Nostalgia requires looking back. It requires managing what is melancholy and a skill of recall the essence of the thing beyond what is distilled by memory or what we picture it to be. The tendency to romanticize nostalgically is the metaphorical trap we most often fail to recognize and most assuredly do not overcome. New normal is the "what if..." that never was or forever will not be. And yes, there is a wrong use of nostalgia. The addiction to the idea that a rose by another name came be something other than what It is for what what we think it should~must be makes nostalgia an enemy of reality rather than glorious remembrance of its greatest triumphs, horrid failures and ability to make peace with what was in the now of what is. Addiction has found its way forward as a virtual narcotic that is fiendish in every way. It is seemingly inescapable, situational, tragic-comedic...the new normal. Happy days? What the appalling dope~consciousness of this life does to nostalgia is render it dangerous for anyone who seeks to rightly use It. It is a use that is completely disconnected from lived experience and belief, ergo dope~consciousness. The new normal is the new high.
Dope~consciousness only a temporary retreat from reality. It is an escape from engaging in the work of moving forward with a memory of things past versus an erasure of it all. Faith cannot be built on the rocky soil of a re-worked past that creates an incongruous relation to the truth held within nostalgia. The new normal is not immune from nostalgia.It can't create nor can it sustain anything new. Its alterations, however clever they may be, succumb to nostalgia. They die on the vine of that remembrance and bring to mind the weirdness of what we is call new and normal. Ah, dope-consciousness, weirdness, the cutting off from, the re-naming of, the re-ordering by, all in attempt to wrest faith from the heavens and place it into a new normal.
To build faith...to make faith in the new normal. Faith conforming to the unreasonable, now that is dope~consciousness personified. And it takes faith to create anything new. And it takes the right nostalgia for love to emerge for faith to work to build something new. We live in a world where nostalgia is abused and that is the way of addiction. This addiction to new normal has created a perverted view of nostalgia in the present, because it is disconnected from the past. Ah, dope~consciousness...
All of those who have experienced nostalgia carry a certain immunity to malformed theories of what was ,what is,and what will be. This is not meant to negate the new normal, far from it. It helps to keep compassion in the world and a deepening need for faith to abound with love. At some point the world will need the truth of nostalgia, at the least to understand faith. As new meaning fades away and the alliances they create diminished, the desire to hear someone waxing nostalgically will be highly sought after They will not be carried away with the faith in the "new normal" or the misappropriation of the nostalgia it uses and often seeks to escape. They will be old and wise enough to tell you the truth.