A List of Nostalgia: Curious Old Imaginations and Novels, and the Universe and Stars, Re-Emerging Throughout the Preparations of Close to Far
Sunghui Lee
In Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), One More Kiss, Dear by Vangelis plays like a background song on the street over the scene where Rick Deckard buys a drink at a stall after retiring a replicant for the first time. The emptiness after the hunting overlaps with the old-fashioned and sentimental song, whose lyrics tenderly recalls a past love as if grasping the moment regardless of the approaching departure. The song was released in 1982 along with the movie, yet it refers to a much older style typical to crooner ballades of the 1930–40s, with soft and romantic lyrics and melodies. Crooner ballades are a sentimental genre where prevalently male artists like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole sang into the microphone with a smooth, low, and intimate register. Popular songs mostly revolved around the yearning for a distant lover during the second World War period. Vangelis borrowed a style that had been in vogue already 40–50 years ago and symbolic to the bygone era for Blade Runner and created a dystopian atmosphere of 2019 Los Angeles in about 40 years ahead of the time. Multiple layers of time are accumulated in this single song.
In Herbert George Wells’ The Inivisible Man (1897), physicist Griffin makes himself transparent by synchronizing the refractive index of the body with that of air to let light filter through. However, transparency turned him vulnerable instead and pushed him to tragic situations, and he ended up in a miserable death. Griffin obtained a sort of omniscient perspective through seeing others yet himself turning invisible to them. He couldn’t achieve his intended purpose and was cornered by a town crowd instead. From the beginning, Griffin was born albino with remarkably pale skin and red eyes, which was classified as an anomaly and stigmatized in the 19th-century setup of the novel. He wished to escape the visibility turning into an invisible man, but in a society where individuals are identified and treated based on the visible body, an invisible body was marginalized to the outside of the system rather than becoming a liberated one. Ironically, the body turning invisible dragged more attention, and he finally was trapped by gazes.
The Horsehead Nebula, located below the left star among the three in Orion’s belt, was first identified in 1888 by Williamina Fleming, a computer at the Harvard College Observatory, while examining the photographic plate of the constellation Orion. However, in the Index Catalogue (1895) of celestial bodies by astronomer John Louis Emil Dreyer, the discovery was credited to “Pickering,” publishing it as an achievement of the observatory director Edward Pickering and his brother William Pickering, who took the photograph. Her name was erased from the records.1 Most of the astronomic photographs capture shining stars or nebulae, yet the essence of the Horsehead Nebula lies in the black silhouette that covers the light behind it; it indicates the absence of light through the shape, which shows a presence by means of the lack of light. The reason why people are fascinated by this nebula is due to the figure of pareidolia, which appears like the head of a horse from the angle seen from the Earth. 1300–1500 light years away from the Earth, this nebula cannot be seen with bare eyes, and its image exists only as photographs shot with a large telescope. Its images completely differ according to the wavelength, appearing like a black horse in a photograph taken under visible light, while it looks like a shiny ghost in an infrared one. In the latter, stars and distant galaxies are also visible, which had been hidden behind the nebula under the visible light. We’d say that the Horsehead Nebula is located within the constellation Orion, yet this is not an actual location in the universe but just a two-dimensional projection from the Earth. Even this light is from a thousand and some hundreds of years ago, and it is gradually interfered with the bright light of neighboring stars. Hence, according to the observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers assume that the Horsehead Nebula will dissipate in about five million years.2
Pleiades (M45) is an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus and is 440 light-years away from Earth. It contains young and blue stars born barely 100 million years ago, out of which five to six stars are visible to bare eyes; still it is also known as the Seven Sisters. The name of the Japanese automobile company Subaru originated from the Japanese word for this star cluster, and its logo also contains images of the stars. The astronomical photographs reveal the nebula reflecting blue surrounds those stars. On the other hand, in New Age belief, this star cluster is considered to be the home of extraterrestrial entities that will lead humankind to awakening. New Age was a huge vogue in the West of the 1970s and 80s and a loose cluster of concepts and practices centering the belief that humankind will soon transit to an era of consciousness. Based on the end 19th-century theosophy and esotericism of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the 1960s hippie movement, this alternative spiritual movement combined Eastern thoughts and Western mysticism out of the resistance against conventional religions and materialism.3 In the 1970s, Billy Meier from Switzerland argued to have encountered aliens from the Pleiades and published pictures of a flying saucer, which turned out to be a hoax.4 And in the 1980s, books on channeling claimed to convey their message were popular.5 The concept of ‘starseed’ also spread, believing that the human soul originated from Pleiades, Sirius, Andromeda, or Orion. It also turned into a trend recently on TikTok, populated by GenZ, and consumed as a language describing the missing sense of belonging or a yearning for somewhere remote.6
On the extrasolar planet of Tralfalmadore in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), time doesn’t flow, and every moment exists simultaneously. To Tralfalmadorians, past, present, and future moments unfold altogether, and they can pick the desired moment to observe. Even if someone dies, they will still be alive in another moment. Death is not an end but just a bad moment. Because every moment already exists, there is nothing people can change with free choice. Therefore, they intend to stay in good moments and face away from the bad ones. In a place where every moment coexists, there’s neither loss nor change. In this sense, the Tralfalmadorian world view is also interpreted as a fatalist view of time, deprived of the imagination of alternatives through shutting off the possibilities of change. Billy Pligrim, the protagonist, is not willingly on time travels but “unstruck in time” and thrown into moments of war, honeymoon, and death. In his wedding anniversary celebration while listening to a male quartet singing, he is suddenly triggered with the faces of German guards right after the bombing of Dresden during World War II. Even his ending is revealed early on. Billy Pilgrim will die, have died, and will always die on February thirteenth, 1976.7 “So it goes.”
When I recall, things that were once unintelligible and inexplicable linger longer as afterimages swirling in my memory. In those scenes, there are a hundred space pictures. Horsehead nebula, Pleiades star cluster, Andromeda Galaxy, Rosette Nebula, etc. I cannot recall where all those pictures went, yet still now they manifest in my mind as afterimages. No new image can ever replace those afterimages. However, they are remote and unreachable, no matter how desperate I would attempt to approach. Memory is an image; because I cannot recall my memory without any image. Some are born blind; hence their memory is tactile. I cannot imagine that sensation, because my tactility is already dominated by images. Only the darkness will provoke tangibility. The dark matter that makes the universe should turn discoverable through gravity alone. Even the essence of gravity is uncertain. The dark matter of the universe should be something invisible yet palpable, I conclude. Jorge Luis Borges suffered from chronic insomnia and wrote the story of Funes, the king of memories, as a metaphor for insomnia. Borges’ writing is about memory. Funes remembers everything. No matter how long the dark of the night perches, insomniac Funes’ amount of memory remained unaltered. This is because he remembers time, not images. In contrast, I, incapable of remembering the entirety of time, recognize it and imagine space through afterimages.
- Alan Hirshfeld, “Brief Life of Williamina Fleming, Spectrographic Pioneer and Astronomer, ” Harvard Magazine, December 7, 2016, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/12/williamina-fleming (accessed on October 23, 2026). ↩︎
- ESA/Webb, “Horsehead Nebula (MIRI image),” April 29, 2024, https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411b/ (accessed on October 23, 2026). ↩︎
- Gordon Melton, “New Age Movement,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last modified October 12, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Age-movement/Realizing-the-New-Age (accessed on October 23, 2026). ↩︎
- Steve Novella, “The Billy Meier Affair – Wedding Cake Edition,” NeuroLogica Blog, September 8, 2011, https://theness.com/neurologicablog/the-billy-meier-affair-wedding-cake-edition/ (accessed on October 24, 2026). ↩︎
- Melton, “New Age Movement.” ↩︎
- Michael Allen, “What is a Starseed? Starseed’s meaning and use on TikTok, explained,” We Got This Covered, December 9, 2022, https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/what-is-a-starseed-starseeds-meaning-and-use-on-tiktok-explained/ (accessed on October 23, 2026). ↩︎
- Vonnegut Jr., Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Vintage Books, 1991), 116. ↩︎
