Hagioptasia is a term coined by musician Daniel Laidler, which he says represents “a fundamental human perceptual tendency to experience an illusory sense of extraordinary ‘specialness’ in various aspects of life.” These aspects of life include music, religious and sacred objects, art, status and glamour, and nostalgia. I wrote about expressions of hagioptasia in emo music, with a focus on how emo music lyrics often centre around nostalgic feelings (e.g. about childhood, people, and places).
I was thinking about emo music and nostalgia again, as I noticed that some of the post-hardcore/emo bands I started listening to in my late 20s – who were big in the early/mid-2000s – gave me this nostalgic feeling. Two bands that made me feel this way are Thursday and Saosin. For some reason, these bands just weren’t on my radar back in my emo days, but their ‘sound’ is still very nostalgic to listen to (i.e. Thursday’s 2001 album Full Collapse and Saosin’s 2003 EP Translating the Name). I can easily imagine listening to them when I was younger and seeing them live in their prime. It may seem strange to feel nostalgia for something not experienced before, but I think this goes to show how hagioptasic people are.
Relatedly, the writer John Koenig coined the term anemoia to refer to the feeling of nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. (You can read my review of Koenig’s book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – which is full of his neologisms – here.) But anemoia can encompass more than just times or places; as I experienced, it can be triggered by music as well (although I suppose this is because the music is from a certain time and place). I would call nostalgia for music one didn’t grow up with – but which existed in a genre/subculture one enjoyed – a form of weak anemoia. I don’t have memories of listening to Thursday or Saosin to feel nostalgic about, but their sound was very much of the time. It fits in with the genre of post-hardcore/emo music around that time, which includes bands I did spend my teenage years listening to.
Strong anemoia would be aligned with the original meaning Koenig gives it: feeling nostalgic for a time one never lived through. (I think anemoia is a spectrum, however; while I might feel it with respect to the 60s, which I never lived through, I also feel it when thinking about being in my 20s in the 90s, but I was, in reality, just a child then.)
Anemoia is an example or outcome of hagioptasia. We could only feel nostalgia for things not experienced if hagioptasia was a strong tendency; if it were a weaker tendency, then anemoia may not exist. Laidler writes:
Hagioptasia emerges as a distinct and fundamental perceptual tendency in human psychology, separate from but underlying many emotional and behavioural responses. This perceptual capacity, while innate, interacts dynamically with social and cultural learning to shape how humans construct meaning and significance across various domains of experience. Distinct from awe’s overwhelm, nostalgia’s retrospect, or sanctification’s reverence, hagioptasia stands as a perceptual root beneath such responses.
If true, then hagioptasia is responsible for some of the most meaningful emotional experiences that we have in the course of our lives. Andy Warhol also captures what a strange and interesting tendency hagioptasia is: “When you see somebody on the street, they can really have an aura. But then when they open their mouth, there goes the aura. ‘Aura’ must be until you open your mouth.” (Laidler features this quote on his blog.) This sense of an ‘aura’ is what gives emotional weight to anemoia. The nostalgia for something not experienced is not just an abstract or intellectualised thought about how one might have enjoyed a certain event, band, time, or place in the past; it is the feeling of appreciating that thing as something special. We project an aura – a sense of specialness – onto it, enabling that bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.
Yet anemoia may involve more pain than warmth, given that it refers to something not experienced, which is too late to experience (unless time travel becomes feasible in the future). In the case of anemoia, our hagitoptasic tendency and ability to engage in mental time travel mix, allowing us to live out emotionally weighty daydreams. We see this kind of imaginative hagioptasia in actual dreams too, with the people, places, and scenarios in dreams being imbued with an aura of specialness. And because of this quality (assuming one remembers the dream), we might feel nostalgic for the experiences we dreamed about. This would be another type of anemoia: nostalgia for a time or place that never existed and will never exist. We could refer to this experience as oneiric anemoia.
Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows includes neologisms for many other kinds of unique and complex emotions that I think exemplify hagioptasia (you’ll probably notice some examples of this in my review of the book). I’d like to delve into the connections between hagioptasia and this new taxonomy of emotions in a future post.
