It's the algorithm, I tell myself, opening Instagram's home page. By now it knows me, it's been studying me for years, stealing my data, the bastard — whichever way I turn it immediately recalibrates. And what does it serve me ad libitum? My childhood. Ice creams that no longer exist, toys they no longer make (thankfully — someone did die playing with '80s toys), songs that were actually songs, those ones. Snack cakes, little jam tarts. Remember how good they were, how they nearly choked you? Yes, of course I remember. Everybody stop. But is this me? I mean, is it me who wants this? Do I want the endless '90s carousels with Nirvana, Blur, Oasis? Do I want the Adidas acetate tracksuits and the bucket hats? Do I want to see all the photos of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette again? Yes. That's me. And does it work? Damn right it works. It's nostalgia — Proust's madeleine poetics — it's worked since Homer. Miss Argo? I'll show him to you in a reel from when he was a puppy, with the little music underneath. Come and cry.
Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (return) and algos (pain). The marketing geniuses know it well — it's the pain of a beautiful old wound reopening, far more powerful than plain memory. Don Draper explained it perfectly trying to sell his idea to Kodak. You feel it in your gut. The sweetest pain of returning to something you loved and know. These are emotional journeys, more penetrating than the emotional showers at spas, more lysergic than LSD. It's the sense of belonging, baby. You know that scene where the bastard food critic in Ratatouille tastes a couple of oven-roasted vegetables and gets sent straight back to the only good moment of his life? Right. What the algorithm does flooding my feed with old Friends clips wants to hurt me, and to do me good.
Facebook tries in its own way, they all do. Every day it gets personal with the little photos: want to see more memories? Including this bastard you were with and wanted to forget forever? Here you are together, both miserable, in the south of France. Want to see what you were writing on this exact day in 2009?
Facebook is very precise — it digs through your detailed timeline, the part standing in for the whole: synecdoche of memory. Instagram is vast, it takes the totality. A millennium, a generation. It goes hard with the brands. So come, Fiat 127, bring back my summers on the motorway down to Calabria with no air conditioning, the GiòStile thermos with mint water and the Tupperware full of rice salad, the Philips Walkman with the red foam on the headphone cushions, Giuni Russo, the Righeira. Come, discontinued Algida ice creams. Come and hurt me, kill me with your lovely remains. Make me see the cone-and-ball lolly again and bring back its sublime taste. The bastard from those Facebook photos can stay in the archive — what I want back is one summer, just one. One road trip. I want to be seven years old and the underage passenger of an amaranth Fiat 127 hurtling (well, doing what it can) down the Autostrada del Sole on the Homeric journey — forget Ulysses — Turin to Catanzaro. Leaving at night to beat the traffic and because it's cooler (yes, but once day breaks we'll be boiled alive). Don't talk to your father while he's driving. I'm not buying you anything at the motorway stop because I've brought everything myself. The leather seats are on fire. I'm being sodomised by Baglioni. Now and then my father pulls out a Battisti tape, or a summer mixtape. Alta Marea by Venditti — put it back on, I like this one. How do you rewind it? Dalla? A mirage, it doesn't last. You can't listen to your Fisher-Price music while the car radio is on. Roadside pit stops with everyone watching me, I know they're watching me as they drive past, and my mother goes «nobody's looooooking». «Nothing's coming out.» «We've stopped, so you're going now.» Recognizing cities by their number plates. Sleeping in sweaty, sticky half-sleep. I'm cleaning your grazed knees with mercurochrome and picking off the little scabs with the scissors RIGHT NOW — put your knee here, between the seats, before the handbrake, on the handbrake. Wave your little hand at the other 127s, the «sisters». That sick feeling looking out the back window. Thighs, then belly, then knees, all stuck to the seat. «Turn around and sit properly.» No seatbelts for the children, no seatbelts for the adults either, but if we have an accident they need to find us looking presentable. In the right position for a corpse, at least.
Are we there yet? No, we're in a queue on the Salerno–Reggio Calabria motorway. Are we there yet? Stop it. I need to wee again. Not now, when we get there.
Silvia, say hello to the sea. «Hello, sea.»
Want to share this memory? No, thanks, I'm fine feeling this bad.
She worked in theatre with Rezza Mastrella, wrote about culture and lifestyle for Marie Claire, loved Hole, and lived dangerously between Rome, Milan and Ivrea. These days she teaches, but her students have no idea how punk she is.
