ride that hobbyhorse, utopyr would probably say; I may revise this for the dreamwidth version

My favorite passage in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era has become a self-illustrative example of the phenomenon it describes. Describing the loss of the parts of the literature of classical antiquity that survive only in offhand quotations, he writes that cultures forget those parts of the past that they cannot relate to their immediate experience, or find uses for that make past experiences seem intelligible in present terms. (Hence Pound, who has now become irrelevant to present experience, sought to find ways of discarding Victorian fustian and ossification in order to make classical inheritances from Greece to China into something that could interest an early-twentieth-century contemporary. That he shared some of his era’s prejudices, misunderstood many things in the way of the self-educated, and wrote unintelligibly is part of why Kenner’s book about Pound remains interesting in a way that Pound himself is not.)

My purpose in the more sequential parts of my online journals (the less sequential parts are strictly jeux d’esprit or worse) has been akin to Pound’s in perhaps equally wrongheaded ways: to interweave my own interpretation of present experience with neglected, discarded, or misunderstood fragments of past experience in such a way as to present an alternative perspective on the twenty-first century and on the human condition.

The human condition: I am not remotely qualified to present alternative perspectives on the overall condition of the planetary environment or its cosmological context, and by and large I steer away from doing so, but they did teach us in graduate school how to update personal intellectual perspectives on the academic disciplines in which we gained some fluency. They also gave us clues as to how those disciplines might be related to one another most productively. They also suggested that those clues might cease to be relevant under changed social and intellectual conditions, and new clues would have to be teased out of the surrounding mental murk.

The difficulty is that the parts of the human condition I consider most generally misunderstood are misunderstood because they are the ones least relevant to most readers’ immediate concerns. Just as we can get through the day without being unduly concerned with the meaning of a quantum physicist’s recent pronouncement that spacetime does not exist or that the Standard Model is not so standard after all, we, or my readers, anyway, certainly do not feel the need to ponder why cultures hive off great bulks of historical inheritances (the readers, like the societies in which they live, just toss ‘em out and think no more about it). Even less do they feel any need to understand how early childhood experience might shape not just psychology but biochemistry, or that biochemistry cannot completely explain a human condition that is shaped by the bodies we inhabit, the societies we inhabit, and our interactions with individuals and institutions in those societies. We just pick up what we read, see, or hear (not necessarily in that order) and toss off a social-media post to share it, in much the way that a previous generation might have fired off an e-mail or mailed a quick postcard or picked up the phone and called somebody with the news (or the New).

Every once in a while, the most contemplative among us do sit down with a five-thousand-word summation of somebody else’s already oversimplified book-length summation of the current situation. That is every once in a while, and the frequency with which those summations turn out to be supplanted by summations contradicting the previous ones lead most folks to declare at a certain point, “Oh, to hell with it.”

This means that not just small but large corners of the contemporary situation remain generally neglected, and not because they are systematically excluded from public discourse for reasons that benefit the existing economic order. (That is a different, more pervasive problem.) The aforementioned neglected aspects just don’t interest very many people.

The problem any advocate of such neglected aspects faces is to make the questions sufficiently entertaining that readers or listeners will stop long enough to consider the issues at hand instead of cramming them into the mental frameworks that said readers or listeners already have.

In past centuries, this was done by telling jokes, or writing novels, or more recently by making movies.

How this is to be done in the age of social media is a question I am no more qualified to consider than the inadequacies of the Standard Model in physics.

The problem is that very few people who are interested in the neglected aspects of planetary culture have grown up in the age of social media, either. And we have lived through a revolution in daily awareness and consciousness that threatens to send larger parts of the human situation than ever over the event horizon (I use this antique metaphor with a precision I can’t stop to explicate at the moment). At best, those of us with an interest in recontextualizing such lost knowledge can mention it in the middle of discussions of more immediately interesting search terms, and hope that a piquant sentence shows up when somebody is looking for something else and finds their worldview shaken up by a randomly discovered phrase as resonant as the words of Sappho that survive because they illustrated some ancient grammarian’s point about the peculiarities of how Greek was written.

Anyone who has followed this essay to the end will realize how seldom I succeed in doing that.