Nostalgia

In the last year I have been reminded time and again, by smells and various other stimuli, of a period I spent in Holland when I was five. It was a young age for roaming alone in streets and woods, but that’s what I did. I’d been dumped with an unwilling bogus “aunt” in a country trying to recover from the ravages of Nazi occupation. She chucked me out of the house at every opportunity and I wandered free. And when I started school I was taken the first day but after that, with my little tin of jam sandwiches for lunch, I went on my own.

Wandering alone in the last year has evoked moments in which the calendar has backtracked 60 years. I’ve recalled the remains of a chicken stolen by a fox; collecting pine cones and being instructed by some bogus cousin how to make the pine needles into little woven mats; a flat field full of fragments of mirror and perspex and strange little pieces of metal (it must have been where a fighter or bomber plane had been shot down); a wharf where sacks of chicken-feed were winched up off barges and into the upper storeys of tall warehouses; a forge where a blacksmith shaped horseshoes and nailed them to the hooves of a carthorse; finding bitumen which had been used to waterproof a drainpipe on the school wall and playing with it, to the fury of my “aunt” when she found the pocket of my shorts stuck tight with hardened pitch. And much more, with complete vividness as if it were yesterday.

But this does not account for the special quality of those memories, something that we ourselves brought to the scene. It appears to me that the experiences which inspire nostalgia today are ones which were also especially luminous at the time: luminous, as if lit from within. And it occurs to me that they are remembered for that. And when they occurred the first time, aged five or whatever, it was as if that child remembered something from an even earlier existence: which logically speaking must therefore have been a previous life.

I know that to most people, previous life necessarily entails acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation. Personally I have come to reject that notion, as it entails the doctrine of transmigration of souls.

It seems absurd and unlikely, now that we understand a little about evolution and the inheritance of DNA from our two parents, that we should also inherit from a soul which has just wafted into our body (at conception or first breath, who knows?) much as you would pour wine into a wineglass. Imagine the mix and match combinations! Not just the merging of two DNAs and chromosomes and all that, but a soul placed into the mix, not randomly but by some spiritual law.

I certainly believe in soul, but as a description of experience and not a theory. Even if my soul is a hand-me-down from some dead person or animal, I don’t believe that the soul’s memories have been handed down too, like a hard disk whose contents have not been completely wiped clean when it’s put into a new computer.

But what does make sense is that species-memories, or memories of my specific lineage, are passed to me in my genes. Chicks are born with a species-memory of snakes, so that they will be terrified of anything which looks like a snake; and of course every bird knows how to do its mating rituals and build its nest and find its food and migrate sometimes a thousand miles to a particular spot, there and back, without being taught or with only minimal tuition from its parents or peers.

Our brutal conditioning at home and school may have all but wiped these memories from us, I mean our human equivalents of the nest-building, food-finding and so on. The child brought up by wolves walks and eats like a wolf and may never learn to speak.

But I feel these days I am living proof (to myself at least) that the primitive survival-mechanisms so deeply imprinted in human cells over hundreds and thousands of years can still be felt.

Memory, nostalgia, intuition. I think these may be more reliable guides to fulfilling our yearnings for God, Divine Love and so forth than any doctrines we may learn from preachers and teachers and holy books.

When we delve deep, we find much. What do you think? What can you reach? What can you tell?