SD redux

While on the flight from Chicago to San Diego I was thinking what a rush it would be when the plane landed at the Lindberg field airport. Having spent more than 7 years in SD, the city has sort of become a home, complete with the little bits of nostalgia which one associates with home in general. It seemed to me that I have left parts of myself in various corners of the city and these bits of memory must be waiting around quietly, only to spring up and take me by surprise by their poignancy. However I found myself being disappointed when such a rush did not happen as the plane landed. It didn't materialize while I was driving from the airport to UCSD and there was little to speak of when I met my old coworkers there. It seemed to me as if almost no time had elapsed between now and when I used to lumber along in the office at 10. Everything seemed as if in a smooth continuation from when I left. The broken touch of the chipped  left hand of my old chair seemed all too familiar to evoke any feeling of loss. UCSD, on the whole, seemed to have been frozen in a reality that I had left it in and the series of experiences which are the mile posts of intervening time appeared to me to have been wholly ineffectual in distancing it in my present consciousness.

It wasn't until I was sitting alone drinking coffee at my old favorite coffee haunt at UCSD, the art of espresso, that the whole structure of nostalgia began to take shape. Its a feeling whose substance is a general sense of loss of something dear and whose physical manifestation is a slowing down of reactions. It derives its strength from the vague associations which render a place real in our minds. The smells which characterize a certain place, its overall visual signature, the sounds which one hears while there, all of it serves to endear the place in our hearts in a more permanent way than is possible with its association with concrete memorable instances. This is perhaps why the most nostalgic moments of this visit for me were while walking through the neighborhoods which I used to walk alone. It was in those instances, undisturbed by conversations, I feel, that the essence of the place became inextricably intertwined with me because it served as a canvas upon which something permanent was drawn: the undulating topology of my own thoughts, the lazy stream of my own consciousness. In that barely remembered structure of my recollections, the buildings, the bridges, the restaurants, the drooping trees, the embers of fire, and the chipped paints of whitewashed fences served as the bones of the skeleton upon which rests the sum total of my understanding. While walking they appeared and disappeared and took me around the labyrinthine corridors of my thoughts, revealing snippets which were long forgotten, giving birth to new explanations and new ways of looking at things, but most importantly, often renewing a link to the past, to a time which I spent not talking and and not in anyone's company but strikingly alone.

Almost all of the places which I associate with these times belong to the last 2-3 years that I spent in SD. It includes a couple of coffee shops which survive within me through the immediacy and intensity of certain sensations, the grain and feel of their wooden chairs and tables, the diffused lights with which they were drenched, the music which played in the background, the flowers which bloomed and withered in the indoor pots, the arrangements and angles of their furniture, the special geometry and touch of their coffee cups, how they appeared when certain regions were taken up by patrons, in effect, by the observations which are easy to miss in good company. Then comes certain streets which I must have spent considerable amount of time exploring. While walking on those again I was exhilarated by how familiar their topology felt, how they rose and fell at places and how the branches of the trees from the adjoining houses leaned over them, how the cracks on the pavement were organized in a pattern that I had intimately known, and how these streets offered well remembered views of the shops, the businesses, and the canyons. I felt a muted sense of happiness when the SD sky appeared framed within its buildings in a familiar way, or when the Sun percolated through the trees like I remembered it did.

In those moments of walking around aimlessly I became aware of a sensation whose flight is often curtailed by ambient distractions, of the permanence of memorized sights and lifeless objects such as a certain color of the sky or a remembered formation of birds silhouetted by a patchwork of clouds or the play of light and shade on the sidewalk. These useless sights, it seemed to me, are not so useless after all but are brimming with incredible potential for genesis and genesis of a kind more permanent and perhaps more important than that achieved through society. They mold and accentuate and sharpen and terminate the various offshoots of our thoughts which are furiously working away trying to make something out of the raw material that is the social part of our lives. They are the tools of creation of hopefully something new and interesting and different and not... well, hopelessly mundane.

I met old friends there who have always been absolutely fabulous. I stand eternally amazed by the variety of their personalities and wish I could spend more time in the company of such awesome people as I know in SD.