I've reread my first post and realised that I really need to practise writing. I can identify where my syntax is clumsy and where my phrasing doesnt fit at all, I suppose good writing comes with practise. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I hardly write. I'm jealous of the 30,000 words of your novel you've got on your hard drive; I'm super envious of the music blog you've kept up on-and-off since you were fifteen. Cos I seemed to have peaked when I was younger, and now I just can't bring myself to write. I have no self-discipline. There's just TOO MUCH STUFF already out there.
Back in the early times of European literature, there were poets who performed memorised epic verse for the courts as a way to earn their living, because not many people knew how to read or write. They would recite works like Beowulf, and all the alliteration and strict metrical rhythm meant that the minstrels could remember it pretty accurately. Then the Romans, then Christianity, came, and all of a sudden more people could read and write. Sure, it was only the monks, but nonetheless things started to get written down and we began a more concrete written record of literature.
This is how it went on, and by the fifteenth century the really wealthy learned to read and write, namely the people who were involved in the Church. That's where your Bunyan and your Chaucer comes in. And patrons would commission scribes to write out all their works of literature by hand, and all that existed was the manuscript. But then the iPad of the early renaissance came and lost a load of people their jobs, as well as creating a whole new industry - the printing press.
Suddenly the written word was a commodity. Political pamphlets, Bibles, newspapers, even fucking dictionaries... and the novel. People bought picaresque volumes, and they gained popularity. The industry grew and grew over time, leading to writers like Dickens getting paid by the fucking WORD in his serialised dramas, to the dismay of so many hapless twentieth century schoolchildren. Reforms in the late 1800s led to mass literacy, and people who were never able to have a voice before could now be heard. More than ever, the written word shaped the discourses of society of the time.
As we all know, this grew and grew over the twentieth century. There are so many writers and fringe movements and genres now that it feels like any kind of writing we want to access is out there. The language poets, the collage poets, the Harlem Renaissance, poststructuralist anarchist writing, situationist writing, surrealist writing, Fat Black Woman's poems, the so-called Northern working class novel... All these movements and splinter groups in such a short space of time, where hundreds of years ago there was more... unification? in trends in literature.
And then what happened? Then came along the fucking INTERNET. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet. But now how are we as readers supposed to sift through the endless narratives and discourses of this intangible cyber database in order to select all possible options for ourselves so we can define our own place within it? What we read shapes what we writes. TS Eliot was onto something when he talked about that. And how are we, as writers and contributers to this cultural milieu supposed to not get so fucking disillusioned and confused when the faced with the endless possibilities of authorship and readership and freedom that we just get fitility and pack it all in? I guess that's why I don't write.
But, hey. I'm doing it now. Maybe I've turned over a new leaf. Or maybe I'll give it up in a few weeks... I guess I just thought it was a good idea to start a blog (the most modern and innovative of the serialised forms) as a platform for all this, with the backdrop of the 2012 PHENOMENON as a nice little bit of literary symbolism and actual fucking LIFE symbolism to tie it all in.
The end of history has passed us; that's what everybody was talking about years ago.
This generation's narrative is that of youngest child syndrome...
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
The Widening Gyre
Yeats, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Okay. So I'm finally starting the blog I planned a year ago. It was meant to start a year before the 21st of December, 2012, which is the proposed date of the 'end of the world' or the 'Mayan Apocalypse' or whatever you want to call it. If you don't know much about the "2012 phenomenon", as the great modern authority on All Things (Wikipedia) calls it, go look it up. The date apparently marks the end of the cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, which belonged to the ancient civilisation of the Mayans, being pretty good at astronomy as far as I can tell (though I'm not sure how good they were at other bits of science. Medicine, for example). However, I got caught up doing Christmas and having fun and studying for my exams, so I ended up starting this little project typically late.
So, what do people think this prophecy means? Some New Age types reckon humanity will enter into the dawning of a new spiritual age, where all the chicks and dudes of the world will love each other and there will be no war and we'll all walk around barefoot at one with all the animals. Other people simply think God's wrath is upon us and the end is nigh and the lake of fire shall open up and swallow the people that one particular denomination (of which there are thousands) see as sinners. Ok, so, so far I'm not exaxctly convinced. But there is something in the air, as it were. Maybe it's just the curse of youth, but every day I see turbulent changes in the cultural discourses I am exposed to, and a growing dissatisfaction with the accepted societal critiques of the last half a decade. My uncle, who lives in France and is the 'Successful' member of the family (he designed guns for the MoD, if I told you his name I'd have to kill you), he told me with the fire of wine in his eyes, in his empty draughty villa, "It is an interesting time to be alive". His words stuck.
Anyway, some other people think that we'll just be struck by a shitload of natural disasters, like the piece of Hollywood disaster that came out a couple of years ago. I live in a very hilly place, far from the coast, with lots of natural resources and high above sea level, so I won't start losing sleep over that possibility. Or maybe it will mark the moving of a disasterous asteroid or secret planet into our orbit, fucking everything up big time. Or maybe it's something about particle physics, uniting the quantum with the subatomic, the end of entropy or the destructive discovery of the Higgs boson.
In case you can't tell, I don't exactly believe in all this stuff. but I do believe that a hell of a lot of people believe in it, and have invested a lot of hope or fear, or even money, on the fact that the 21st of December 2012 marks a giant change in the journey of humanity. I guess this blog acts mostly as a kind of social commentary. It says a lot about Western society at the moment that there has been a rise in 'End of the World' prophecies and cults, and there's a hell of a lot of literature and 'documentaries' about it out there, espousing all sorts of dogmas and theories, claiming repent now or prepare now or open your eyes now. People sense change, people are tired with the cultural and political milieu and although there is a general malais among everyday people, discourses such as globalisation, consumerism, capitalism, socialism, and ecology have become cliches. People want change, they just don't want to have to instigate it themselves, so they defer responsibility and passion, resign themselves to the idea that change is on its way no matter what. I'm guilty of this to an extent; I'm a proper armchair activist. I'll enter heated pub debates about political corruption but I've only been to one protest. I'll write my own blog, but I won't read yours. I'm too arrogant or self-conscious to join a movement of any kind; I care too much about my own success in life to sacrifice more than a few hours or a few quid for others. I'll be benevolent, as long as it doesn't get in my way. I guess It's got me too. Oh well, eveything will be ok, I just need to finish my degree (I graduate this summer) then I can give away a load of stuff then get to a high place and party like there's literally no tomorrow... see how easy it is?
Turning and turning in the Widening Gyre... the increasing chaos of the world, a centrepoint of order which we are whizzing further and further away from, ready to reach the end and collapse in on ourselves and begin the cycle once more. The Big Crunch. Rapture. Revolution. Primitivism. Chaos. Extinction. Death. All the end of a cycle with a counterpart as a beginning. We like cyclical patterns; we find comfort in them. We fear linear endings because we can't comprehend them. Time as cyclical. A new cycle in the Mesoamerican calendar; a new cycle in our existence.
Political unrest in the West, disunity, fragmentation, art that's so META it's collapsed in on itself and is endlessly turning cycles of self-gratification, fucking nanoscience, the obsession with self-image, alcohol, morbid obesity, uncertainty, change, cancer, shifts in the political and social spectrum, a consensus of capitalist corruption, yet it's somehow embarassing or cliche or ultimately futile to act out against it, global fucking (you got it) warming...
Oh, for fuck's sake. can we just get this apocalypse over with, please?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Okay. So I'm finally starting the blog I planned a year ago. It was meant to start a year before the 21st of December, 2012, which is the proposed date of the 'end of the world' or the 'Mayan Apocalypse' or whatever you want to call it. If you don't know much about the "2012 phenomenon", as the great modern authority on All Things (Wikipedia) calls it, go look it up. The date apparently marks the end of the cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, which belonged to the ancient civilisation of the Mayans, being pretty good at astronomy as far as I can tell (though I'm not sure how good they were at other bits of science. Medicine, for example). However, I got caught up doing Christmas and having fun and studying for my exams, so I ended up starting this little project typically late.
So, what do people think this prophecy means? Some New Age types reckon humanity will enter into the dawning of a new spiritual age, where all the chicks and dudes of the world will love each other and there will be no war and we'll all walk around barefoot at one with all the animals. Other people simply think God's wrath is upon us and the end is nigh and the lake of fire shall open up and swallow the people that one particular denomination (of which there are thousands) see as sinners. Ok, so, so far I'm not exaxctly convinced. But there is something in the air, as it were. Maybe it's just the curse of youth, but every day I see turbulent changes in the cultural discourses I am exposed to, and a growing dissatisfaction with the accepted societal critiques of the last half a decade. My uncle, who lives in France and is the 'Successful' member of the family (he designed guns for the MoD, if I told you his name I'd have to kill you), he told me with the fire of wine in his eyes, in his empty draughty villa, "It is an interesting time to be alive". His words stuck.
Anyway, some other people think that we'll just be struck by a shitload of natural disasters, like the piece of Hollywood disaster that came out a couple of years ago. I live in a very hilly place, far from the coast, with lots of natural resources and high above sea level, so I won't start losing sleep over that possibility. Or maybe it will mark the moving of a disasterous asteroid or secret planet into our orbit, fucking everything up big time. Or maybe it's something about particle physics, uniting the quantum with the subatomic, the end of entropy or the destructive discovery of the Higgs boson.
In case you can't tell, I don't exactly believe in all this stuff. but I do believe that a hell of a lot of people believe in it, and have invested a lot of hope or fear, or even money, on the fact that the 21st of December 2012 marks a giant change in the journey of humanity. I guess this blog acts mostly as a kind of social commentary. It says a lot about Western society at the moment that there has been a rise in 'End of the World' prophecies and cults, and there's a hell of a lot of literature and 'documentaries' about it out there, espousing all sorts of dogmas and theories, claiming repent now or prepare now or open your eyes now. People sense change, people are tired with the cultural and political milieu and although there is a general malais among everyday people, discourses such as globalisation, consumerism, capitalism, socialism, and ecology have become cliches. People want change, they just don't want to have to instigate it themselves, so they defer responsibility and passion, resign themselves to the idea that change is on its way no matter what. I'm guilty of this to an extent; I'm a proper armchair activist. I'll enter heated pub debates about political corruption but I've only been to one protest. I'll write my own blog, but I won't read yours. I'm too arrogant or self-conscious to join a movement of any kind; I care too much about my own success in life to sacrifice more than a few hours or a few quid for others. I'll be benevolent, as long as it doesn't get in my way. I guess It's got me too. Oh well, eveything will be ok, I just need to finish my degree (I graduate this summer) then I can give away a load of stuff then get to a high place and party like there's literally no tomorrow... see how easy it is?
Turning and turning in the Widening Gyre... the increasing chaos of the world, a centrepoint of order which we are whizzing further and further away from, ready to reach the end and collapse in on ourselves and begin the cycle once more. The Big Crunch. Rapture. Revolution. Primitivism. Chaos. Extinction. Death. All the end of a cycle with a counterpart as a beginning. We like cyclical patterns; we find comfort in them. We fear linear endings because we can't comprehend them. Time as cyclical. A new cycle in the Mesoamerican calendar; a new cycle in our existence.
Political unrest in the West, disunity, fragmentation, art that's so META it's collapsed in on itself and is endlessly turning cycles of self-gratification, fucking nanoscience, the obsession with self-image, alcohol, morbid obesity, uncertainty, change, cancer, shifts in the political and social spectrum, a consensus of capitalist corruption, yet it's somehow embarassing or cliche or ultimately futile to act out against it, global fucking (you got it) warming...
Oh, for fuck's sake. can we just get this apocalypse over with, please?
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