Rosebud: Proustian Moments

Citizen Kane’s dying word stands for security, hope and the innocence of childhood, which a man can spend a lifetime trying to regain…like the green light at the end of Tom Buchanan’s pier in The Great Gatsby, or that yearning for a home that never was, which the Portugese have a beautiful term for – Saudade. I’ve a sled of my own…the Iftah ya Sim Sim theme from the intro to the 80s Arabic version of Sesame Street (iftah ya simsim abwaabak nahnul atfaal). And like Rosebud, it’s also gone through a kind of piling and burning ritual, given my strictures on music.

To anyone who experienced the roaring 80s like I did, though, it is bound to produce a sense of acute, haunting nostalgia, tinged with melancholy – a sense of tremendous distance mixed with a sense of such surreal proximity; so exquisitely, so oppressively sweet, yet so unbearably painful in its Proustian evocations. One thinks of our whole generation watching it in our cross-legged innocence, and of how so much innocence has been lost in the last 30 years, by the whole world. The crazy joys, the lazy dreams, the gemutlichkeit, are all consigned to oblivion, replaced by Yeats’ rough beast of pitiless gaze, slouching towards Bethlehem.

The kids running around in the clip are probably normal adults today leading ho-hum lives somewhere near the 50th percentile of some contentious salary scale, but in my mind they’re still acting. Back then they personified a snug world of pre-teen make-believe. Today, in my imagination they’ve grown-up to become cruel and abusive, troubled and aimless, wily and calculating, representing the dominant pathologies of the present human condition, just like they were the projections of our frolicsome childhood…when the world seemed a shade greener.