Letter from the Editors, LIT 43
photo by Andrew Velzquez
The word “nostalgia” is derived from two Ancient Greek words: nostos and algos. The former word can be translated to the concept of “homecoming” such as that of Odysseus in the Odyssey, but overall describes the journey of a hero to their home. Around the same time that Homer was writing down his version of The Iliad and The Odyssey, other rhapsodes were writing their versions of the Trojan War down as well, resulting in a full cycle of epics starting with The Cypria and ending with The Telegony though Virgil would later cap off the Trojan Cycle with his Aeneid. Six of the eight original epic texts in this cycle have been lost to the sands of time with evidence of them existing in later Attic tragedies and ancient Encyclopedic entries. One of these texts is The Nostoi, or the Homecoming of the Greeks. This epic tells the sometimes successful and oftentimes disastrous journeys of the Greek heroes’ journeys home. We get The Oresteia and The Old Man and the Sea from this epic with these two stories told in summary in The Odyssey as foils to both Odysseus and Telemachus. This story marks the kleos, or glory, these heroes may or may not receive upon returning from war.
Algos, on the other hand, translates to “suffering” or “pain.” Therefore, the word “nostalgia” means the suffering caused by returning home. For everyone who has ever had to leave their hometown or homeland, whether by choice or by force, knows the pain of returning far outweighs that of leaving; our homes in rosy fingered snapshots of memories, golden and unchanged. Upon returning, everything feels different: houses that should be filled with people sit empty, our parents growing older and more unfamiliar, corporations buying out land for strip malls. It’s hard to reconcile with the fact that time marches forward, especially when we feel the same in our own minds.
It makes sense that in recent years nostalgia has been pushed and sold to us at an alarming rate. This nostalgia is nothing new to our history, our storytelling. Historically, the Trojan War marked the end of the Mediterranean Bronze Age, thrusting the Ancient Greeks into a dark age where nothing was written down. Sitting amongst the ruins of these great cities, oral storytellers would tell the stories of the great heroes who won great wars (such as that of the Trojan war and the Theban war) and returned with such riches, such glory, such kleos. Rome looked back at the Golden Age of Greece, the Medieval period looked back at the glory of Rome, the Gothics and Romantics looked back at the simplicity of the Medieval period as they faced Revolution. It hurts to look back at the time within our own short lives and easy to romanticize the times before us. As of recently, though, it seems like we are looking back closer and closer to the present; the ouroboros of time tightening its circle slowly.
Nostalgia doesn’t have to be bad, in some ways it can be cathartic to work through the pain in our recent lives, our recent history. The concept of katharsis also comes to us from the Ancient Greeks and written about by Aristotle in his On Poetics in regards to the Attic tragedies. The city Dionysia festival in Athens saw people (mostly men) from across the city states of Greece join together to watch days upon days of tragic theater. It’s in this that Aristotle theorizes catharsis through art helps to expunge us of our negative emotions in order to help us move on with our daily lives. In a famous example. Euripides brought a tyrant king to tears with his anti-war play, The Hecuba, which sees the great queen of Troy lose everything to the Greeks. And so we watched melodramas, tragedies, horror, and we painted and photographed our darkness with such love, such light.
In this issue, we invite you along to witness our paintings, our polaroids, our memories, our songs about the good times, the dark times. We reach into the past to understand our present to shape our futures. In this issue, we expunge our fears, our troubles, our terrors with the warm, faded grain of film. Let your nostalgia guide you, lead you to catharsis, and let you grow.
Richard Berwind
Poetry and Managing Editor
