RETROFUTUROLOGY
“How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future”

A group show of visual art at Observatory, Brooklyn,
curated by the Hollow Earth Society,
Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels

The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.  —Kant

To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past.

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and complicated-looking wires: It’s a modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age—our new computer chips and LED lights and cars with doors that open upright like a space pod—can puncture the time barrier, with the right old-fashioned mad scientist at the steering wheel! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s, wherein a white kid can invent rock and roll? A steampunk 1800s? A future wherein the promises of kaleidoscopic, holographic advertising from the late 1980s come to fruition—a world with yet another layer of retrofuturist dreaming added onto the small-town diner…?

Our visions of the future are nested.

Our conception of time is hyperreal. In explaining the visual gimmicks of a single cultural artifact such as the Buggles’s “Video Killed The Radio Star,” we must refer to the heyday of radio; the future promised by television executives in synthesizer advertisements; science fiction pulp covers from the 1950s; the neon-on-black-and-white aesthetic of MTV in its early years, not to mention the gallery scene that birthed that aesthetic; 1950s diner-decor futurism; the late-1970s body-posturing and dystopic styling of Devo; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, looking forward to 2026; the garb of mad scientists in movies from the 1940s;—and the sigh that comes with opening a magazine and seeing all of this, compressed down into an ad for sunglasses for hipsters.

Or not even for hipsters: The retrocamp fashion exemplified by an irritating blend of past and future has been recompressed and sold in shopping malls internationally. This isn’t marginal pulp—

This is the process on which the present runs.

You are invited to join us for a group show

The Hollow Earth Society seeks artists working in drawing, printmaking, and painting, and possibly sculpture and video/multimedia art (space is limited) for RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show focused on past- and present-futures, to be up from January 29 to March 5, 2011, at Observatory. Submissions are due January 8, 2011.

How to submit:
Include all information listed below. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered unless they are mind-staggeringly fantastic and presented with great humility.

1. Send us up to five images. Digital submissions will be accepted via email. Files must be in JPEG or PDF format. Please number your image files to correspond to your image list.
2. Send an image list. Double check that the numbers on your list correspond to the numbers in the names of your actual files.
3. In your list, include for each image: an image number, the work’s title, the date of work, the medium, and its size and price.
4. Along with the list, please include a brief description of each image.
5. Send a three-line bio, your contact information and an email address. You may also submit a résumé.
6. If you like, send an optional artist’s statement, no longer than 300 words.

THERE IS NO FEE TO ENTER.

Deadline: All email submissions must be received no later than January 8, 2011. (All accepted work should be physically received at Observatory no later than January 24, 2011.)

Return of submitted materials: Include a SASE and make sure there is sufficient postage, or pay for shipping and we will ship your work back to you. If work is two-dimensional, the Hollow Earth Society is more than happy to have it on file for future shows and keep it exhibited for sale on our website. The same 30% commission for art sold will apply.

Drop-Off: If you have been accepted into the show and are in the NYC area, you may wish to drop off your art at the gallery. Email us (gallery@hollowearthsociety.com) to schedule a date and time.

Pick-Up: Return of mailed artwork with return postage will begin on March 12, 2011.

Email submissions to:
gallery@hollowearthsociety.com

By post:
Observatory
543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215

To find out more, click here.

I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:

That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…

Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—

Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—

“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:

Or you could simply be amazed by the—

“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)

We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…

Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.

I may not agree with all of his reviews, but film critic A. O. Scott has some serious chops for metaphor, as illustrated in his take on Get Him to the Greek:

Mr. [Jonah] Hill, wide-eyed and anxious as ever, makes a fine visual and temperamental foil for Mr. [Russell] Brand. The two of them are like the Trylon and Perisphere of comedy. Mr. Brand, though hardly calm, is volatile in a cool, pseudo-self-aware, pointlessly articulate way, whereas Mr. Hill resembles one of those round cartoon bombs with a lighted fuse on top. He pleads, babbles, trembles, fulminates and—more than once—vomits, all with an expressiveness that is both alarming and strangely cute.

The Trylon and Perisphere are two of my favorite structures. Together, they served as the “Theme Center” of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Sayeth Wikipedia re: the Theme Center:

Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called “Democracity” which, in keeping with the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow,” depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere.

Does that beat all, or does that not beat all? Good thing the world came together in 1939 and ushered in a long-lasting era of peace and democracy and wacky technological future-cities, instead of, oh I dunno, some of the worst crimes in history, a nuclear arms race, disco, &c.

But to return to Mr. Scott’s fabulous simile, yes, perhaps the rotund Mr. Hill is like the Perisphere, and the lanky-manic Mr. Brand much like the Trylon. My question is, who in Get Him to the Greek is Democracity? (Puffy?) And who the Helicline?

My further question is, why don’t we have no goddamn Trylon or Perisphere today? If Bloomberg wants a fourth term, he better get on the (peri)ball.

Naturally, I demand that—as we live not in boooring old Modernity but in POWERTHIRST-powered Fight Club- and Murakami Takashi-themed low-art/hi-art lofi wifi genetic-rhizomatic-iEverything Postmodernity—our new PostTrylon and PostPerisphere be more than meets the eye…

“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.

To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.

James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.

[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]

Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.

Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…

I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.

Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.

Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).

Check out the Partial Map. Srsly, it’s a perfect gift from Nerd Santa Claus.

What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.

But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.

As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.

What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…

Really, consider space. Consider this:

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

—Roger Cohen, “Toilets and Cellphones,” New York Times.

The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.

The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.

In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.

We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.

Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.

Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.

I love bizarre groups of old things. So does, I take it, Joanna Ebenstein, who’s just launched a site for The Secret Museum, her “exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched, and curious collections from around the world.”

Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy, Astropop Productions) has an eye for the macabre-elegant and the hideous-awesome. Her blog and the events she puts together have several times blown my mind, and the Secret Museum is no exception. I especially give her props for aiming to capture the mystery and wonder of “liminal spaces.” (What is science, what art? What spectacle, what education? What grotesque, what natural, &c.)

The Secret Museum is on view free of charge, IRL, at Observatory Room in south Brooklyn through Sunday, June 6.

History never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret. This is a secret history of kept secrets.

—Derrida.

According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.

Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.

Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)

Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.

The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.

Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”

To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.

Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.

Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”

Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.

From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:

“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”

Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:

Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.

Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.

But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:

During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.

And are the Japanese Jewish?—asks this great Pink Tentacle post, from a series on Japanese urban legends. Even with the urban-legend disclaimer, the wording of the post repeatedly assumes that there really is (or was) an Ark of the Covenant.

I wonder why we feel the need even to speculate about “lost artifacts” and apocryphal heroes. Do we find it cathartic to imagine that there was a Seal of Sulayman, a Rod of Aaron, a Sword of Roland—at some point—and we’ve merely degenerated, been scattered in an ur-diaspora (courtesy Babel, the Deluge), losing our physical links back to the Divine?

That any one of us could find tomorrow our own Lost Tablet or Holy Horseshoe and so become the future Sulayman, Frodo, or Per-Ce-Val—”Through the Veil,” the vale of the shadow of mortality, through all the way to the gnostic-mysterious Origin of our very Being?

The Japanese talkshow clip is pure entertainment, of course, as is the first Indiana Jones. The whole Pink Tentacle post is entertainment. But the comments reveal how seriously and variously we take questions of national identity and religious ipseity.

For me, the convergence of entertainment and serious give-a-shit-ness is where fiction comes in. These “fabled lost somethingerother of Ancientplace!” para-connections between remote peoples and times make for great fiction, unless Dan Brown hears about them. (My favorite consequence of the search for the [Japanese] Ark: The government named the supposed Ark-locus “Tsurugi-san Quasi-National Park.”)

And, yes, if some lost Middle Eastern influence did end up all the way on the remote slopes of Tsurugi-san in Shikoku—if the Ark did indeed cometh out of Israel or Babylon, then somehow into Japan—I would want to know more, as a historian—a conscientious fabulist, playing around with a limited set of signs-of-things-that-supposedly-happened, drawn from certain sets of texts.

But I wonder just how many other schizoid theories there are out there—of the secret still-attainable flat earth/lost tribe/Dead Sea Powerscroll/ancient biblical ninja powersword/lost Powerthirst flavor (Ark Lite), and so on—floating around, begging to be entertained, like Tourette’s-afflicted children, in Japan and here in New York—and especially on the internet. The number must be staggering.

Eventually, we must all be the “lost tribe” of some other tribe, one not lost to itself.

Or aqueducts. Whatever. Check it out! Wonders from history. Booyakah.

It’s bizarro-spring, here in New York. Cold crud weather, and almost May. I wonder. What is it about the darkness of a cloudy sky that terrifies us?

What is it about the ecotones between darkness and light—the syzygy of light bursting into darkness, of darkness sliming down over light—that can be both beautiful (awe-full) and absolutely dread?

We can see a frightful ecotone in every cloud (fluffy and light, but shadowing out the sun), and writers have for a long time captured different moments of cloud-dread.

Art critic and endearing madman John Ruskin was the most famous cumulophobic. He thought a mysterious “plague wind” was a sure sign that humanity is doomed:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.

—John Ruskin, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.”

More on Ruskin’s plaguesome clouds from Joel Segal.

From Cabinet.

Other great writers are more or less blunt about the doom, melancholy, and generally emo nature of clouds—all generally in contrast to the storybook associations of clouds with purity, innocence, and lightness.

Lampedusa mentions clouds after a long, bizarre scene of political discourse. The clouds block the sun. Obscuring God, future. Progress, metaphorically, is on hold—a mere trickle forward:

Day had just dawned: the little light that managed to pass through quilted clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows.

—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1958.

Woolf uses clouds as a gate into dream—positive, progressive dream. But this passage comes during World War I, during the death of the protagonist, the agony of the family. The dream is a temporary respite, an illusion. The reality is the obverse of the cloud-shadow, the disturbance (frog, pebble) ever-ready to splash into the pool, shatter the mirror (the mind):

In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote form the known domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

And, extending cloud to air, we have the earlier notion of limitless freedom (a fluffy, unending march of clouds, a cloudless sunny day of unforgivably honest blue) as a trap, a plane on which to always be in-view, to always be caged, forever under the moon’s eye, without ground, falling:

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…

—Virginia Woolf, “An Unfinished Novel.”

Gass is more blunt:

…the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty…

—William Gass, On Being Blue, from that famous thundering-magnificent opening litany of blues—azures, royals, sadnesses, seedies, stockings, Prussians, Russians, bruises, forgettings, and, as here, absentness, emptiness, the Modern.

I’ve quoted Gass at greater length before; this passage is such an unreal mixture of precision (clouds do have shaded slopes) and surprising, breath-robbing melancholy. The increasing absentness. Of God. The empty silver throne. (”Emptiness has such a warm subtle sting… Heaven ain’t something someone else can give.” —Eyedea & Abilities, “Paradise.”)

So clouds block us from the Creator, remove us from the natural play of planets and suns. They are a kind of white-gray chaos, a litter of un-form across a plane we feel should be whole and formal, complete.:

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.

Of course, writing chaos is not a chaotic process. Expression of un-form requires immaculate form. There is no one better than Aira, whom I’ve also quoted before, before the clouds. The “clouds” sound out a one-two dance-step hoof-hoof cadencing. They track chaos through chaos, and a pattern emerges. Form from un-form. A midnight pattern, obscuring a high noon. Or a streak of off-white on a sliver-moon night. Syzygy and ecotone, imperfect and thus more fascinating to have the clouds there but not completely of one type. Even better to take the patterns of clouds and remove them from the sky:

Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun. And shafts of rain thrust into little yellow clouds, agates enveloped in moss, pink hawthorn.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter.

Finally we arrive at the simple-lush prose of rancher-writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. He gets a dang Honourable Badge Of Merit because he writes boldly and artfully and simply and naturally. His cows come alive. (They were never not alive. I just didn’t feel much about cows until I read Verlyn Klinkenborg—and then Lydia Davis, in Electric.) Cloudy Klinkenwords, translating the pattern of the clouds into/onto birds:

What I see from the train should really be called a heronry, a village of well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense clouds or puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.

—Verilyn Klinkenborg, “Heronry,” The New York Times, 5 January, 2009.

And finally-finally—eliding the clouds themselves, because in his Wyoming the plains have stolen the clouds’ job, have skinned the clouds and wear their patterned drabness, setting out from the horizon; turning the birds back into darkness; the cows into symbolic darkness (here the light that stands out against mere “gloom,” ecotone); giving color heaviness and momentum; capturing this tectonic intermediate-ness of dawn, the beauty of that lack of grounding, lack of depth-of-field—the spark of my investigation, Klinkenborg’s “Out of Darkness,” from a recent Times:

When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyo. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects — the old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattle guards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them easily in the gloom.

But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, not so much gliding as fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. To say the light is rising is to overspeak. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky…

The gray ahead broadens and seems to grow heavier, as if there could be no getting out from under it. And slowly color begins to emerge, what color there is… Out here on the plains, pressed beneath the sky, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immensity of the drabness that surrounds them. It is a mood, I know, the wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.

From TED: “Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can—and should—be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.”

I wrote this jam for my current literature class and offer it up in the spirit of sharing*. (*The spirit animal of sharing, FYI, is the eastern screech owl.) I’ll follow up with a few thoughts on Postmodernism. But for now—let’s munch on some Mod:

For most historians, modernity begins in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Enlightenment. Modernism (notice the “-ism”) comes at the end of the nineteenth century, with Pound in poetry, Joyce and Woolf (and the earlier Kleist) in prose, and Manet, Matisse, and Picasso in painting.

But Modernism is not some hi-falutin “school of art.”  It’s a shift in thought.  The “crisis of the Modern” hits home after transdiscursive (discourse-inventing, meaning way-of-making-knowledge-inventing) thinkers such as Freud, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Eliot, and Bergson, collectively question our basis for making knowledge (from the past) and of representing Being (which cannot be represented). They are skeptics. They cause a collective shift in thought—a shift from which we have never recovered.

By the outbreak of the Great War, Modernist thought suddenly finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities” (Plato, the bible, science as understood by Bacon and Newton, biology a la Curvier), but in human experience—the succession of moments—the imprint of moments lived, sensations felt, memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

But this focus on the individual and her thoughts shares little in common with the willful Romanticism of the nineteenth century: In just decades, the idea of the unconscious comes to play a huge role in art, as does the Marxist idea that the course of your life is largely determined by class. Darwin’s observations concerning biology’s fatalism (natural selection) completes the trifecta. The Romantic notion of the totally free human is gone, replaced by a mixture of the individual (which is fragmentary, reaching to define self, to ground self in knowledge that she must construct) and the massively social (because the Utopias conceived in the nineteenth century are finally being acted out).

Siggy Vicious

Further, lived moments do not exist purely as affects in the heroic human brain (as per the intense emotions of the Romantics), but as medialized, technologically-distributed information. Signs. With Modernism and a shift away from the Enlightenment’s insistence on a rational, discoverable world (with Bohrs and Einstein, and with Joyce, and with Picasso and the Dadaists), we see the prefiguration of the current age, Postmodernism, and the current condition of thought: a vast chain of signs—shared, created, effaced, mutated, and judged via media (social networking, calls on phones, TV, emails, texts, books, ads)—stored and changed via the still-mysterious alchemy of the (biologic) brain.

The center of knowledge is no longer (only) the past, no longer authority, but the immediate, centerless, distributed, individually-experienced present. We agree upon certain canons because they are expedient (allow for the manufacture of iPods and cars…), but we constantly threaten them in order that they should not lead us into the pre-Modern error of supposing there is a Truth or Perfection to be empirically “detected” by humans somehow, even, especially in art. It simply isn’t possible. Michelangelo isn’t perfect. Science is incomplete and will continue to be. Science, with the uncertainty principle and the discovery that the best contemporary models for the universe (string theories, leading to brane theories) can’t be tested empirically, ever. (To see the universe at its absolute level, we require a particle collider the size of the universe…)

Knowledge is part of the experience of being human, and humans are not computers. We are highly sensitive animals who write poetry and scamper and go crazy. Knowledge is not separate from poetry and scampering. Though we know quite a lot within a certain framework (science—the Enlightenment), there is much, mainly our own consciousnesses, that we cannot “know” or that we have yet, at least as a global culture, to find a framework for.

Knowledge itself, with the smashing of the atom (going back to relativity’s rise in the late 1800s) and the smashing of the rational mind (Freud and Mach, in the late 1800s), is merely a convention. (I know I’m biting Foucault here; knowledge is what is made by power. Psychoanalysis opens a knowledge to control sexuality; post-seventeenth-century prison systems open a new knowledge of “reform” and “discipline” to control the population.)

And there’s more. The fact that I can formulate the above sentence means we are living in postmodernity. “Post-” here implies less “after” than “aware of.” I could say we live in paramodernity (”beside modernity”), since we can examine it at our leisure, using its tools (technology, psychology, modern biology, economics and history after Marx).

But that’s another essay. The point of this one izzz: Modernist thought finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities,” but in human experience—the succession of moments lived—sensations felt, of memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

And I’m out!

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite things, period, and I’m proud to edit it, when I can. Congratulations to everyone who’s written, edited, viewed, or even heard of AO. You’ve all earned the award (a “Southie,” perhaps?).

FYI, apparently, South By Southwest is the new Burning Man. (Both have godawful oogly websites.)

[Of course, both of these media circuses pale in comparison to a good ole fashioned Wicker Man.]

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.