a founder of the codex

Nostalgia

Nostodynia praesentis·the Homeward Ache

From Greek nostos, homecoming, and odyne, pain, and Latin praesens, present, for an ache of return felt even for the present.

Level: Conceptorganism
Book: Humoresthe apothecary's book of humours
Phylum: Pathimage schema
Class: Outputits tincture
Niche: Decomposerwhat is dead
Mode: Attachmenthow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ruin

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Personal Affections · Wilkins, 1668: Spiritual Action · WordNet, 1990: Feeling · Llull, 1308: E · Man

Homeward Ache, the whole specimen — Plate XXIII. Nostodynia praesentis, the whole specimen.

Longing to return to a home or a time that is gone smooths the past into a place worth going back to, and the ache can turn even on the present as it slips away.

The past pulls hardest once it has been softened into a home.

behavior Walks forward with its head turned back, and slows wherever the ground looks like somewhere it has been.

provocation

Which moment of this week will you one day miss, and what will you have left out of it?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its output, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Nostalgia — Fig. 1. Kernel
Ithaca
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Its premise is that a place or time once lived can be longed for as a home, with a pain that wants only to go back.^{2, 1}
drawn as: essence · view: pressed

Boundary of Nostalgia — Fig. 2. Boundary
Rear-view mirror
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set apart from hope by its direction. Hope leans toward what has yet to come, and nostalgia leans toward what has been, even a home that never quite was.⁴
drawn as: meniscus · view: detached

Intake of Nostalgia — Fig. 3. Intake
Madeleine
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on memories, most often of moments shared with close others, and it wakes in loneliness and low mood, or at a smell or a song.⁵
drawn as: wick · view: pinned

Mechanism of Nostalgia — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Rosy retrospection
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
It smooths the past as it recalls it, keeping the warmth and letting the strain fall away, so the lost time looks whole and worth rebuilding.^{4, 5}
drawn as: still · view: microscope

Output of Nostalgia — Fig. 5. Output
Bittersweet
❦ dominant organ
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives a bittersweet feeling, sad for the loss and warm with the memory, and it lifts self-regard and the sense of being loved.⁵
drawn as: tincture · view: at work

Dispersal of Nostalgia — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Reminiscence bump
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels through what a generation shared, its songs, styles and objects, so that a whole cohort longs for the same years.³
drawn as: scent · view: in situ

Decay of Nostalgia — Fig. 7. Decay
Pillar of salt
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It fails when the backward look stops a life in the present, as Hofer's homesick patients wasted far from home. Hardened, it becomes a wish to rebuild a past that never existed.^{2, 4}
drawn as: sediment · view: magnified

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Fear, Fear's Breath

same kind in Wilkins Faith, Fear, Silence, Volition, Knowing Trust, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Fear's Breath

same kind in WordNet Fear, Vertigo

same kind in Llull Echolalia, Memory, Placebo, Presence, Prophecy, Solitude, Volition, Knowing Trust, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Commemorative Revision, The Shared Cell, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology

same phylum Entelechy, Memory, Music, Prophecy, Ritual, Wind, Tongue Horizon, Afterlistening

same dominant organ Apophenia, Chiaroscuro, Echolalia, Emergence, Erosion, Mimesis, Placebo, Rain, Babelhum, Afterlistening, The Festival Calendar

Genome

return also in Commemorative Revision, Equinox, The Festival Calendar, Rain
longing
idealization
home
loss

III In the world

Echoes

Odysseus weeping on Calypso's shore
the Portuguese saudade
a photograph filtered to look old on the day it is taken
a song from the year one turned sixteen

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 1, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	humores
symmetry	helical
organization	segmented
silhouette	spire
scale	immense
proportion	even latent
growth	moulting
articulation	sutured latent
openness	hollow latent
skeleton	unmarked latent
locomotion	unmarked latent
pattern	plain latent
coloration	disruptive latent
substance	tincture
surface	pitted
palette	vermilion
luminosity	points
transparency	clouded
gesture	pulses
unity	fragment latent
modality	possible latent
causation	unmarked latent
determinacy	dissolving
fusion	nested
anomaly	none
graft	origami
technique	hatching
viewpoint	profile
value	high key latent
balance	top heavy latent
density	sparse latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	muted
appendages	petals, tendrils
anchor (body)	an aurora, hanging curtains of coloured light
anchor (detail)	a compound eye, a dome of many small facets

Sources

Homer, Odyssey, book 5 (c. 8th century BCE)
Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (1688)
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (1979)
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001)
Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge, Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006)

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