periodicity
"Ozymandias"
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Percy Shelley
***
"Ozymandias" has to be one of my favorite poems of all time. Not only is it a meditation on the ephemerality of all human endeavors, which is a favorite subject of poetry in general as an artistic medium obsessed and intricately related with the "instant" and the unfolding of time, but it also speaks of the core duality of human existence: that between our material, bodily presence, our actual "thingness" in the world as something taking up space and made of constantly decaying matter, and the infinitely more subtler "passions" that seem to run over and beneath this materiality, and, albeit fleeting, can persist beyond our material presence in the world through lasting art.
One of the things I'm most interested in is the way that history makes itself known to people, the way that, through subtle changes in our collective world-view throughout time, we come to "develop" (for lack of a better word) intellectually, which in turn affects every other aspect of our lives. How does history happen exactly? For most of our history it was believed that God pre-ordained events and we simply followed the script, but this "common sense" philosophy of history started to give way in the Renaissance, with a renewed focus on the individual (shown perhaps most extremely and intriguingly through the development of "perspective" in paintings, which showed the world as if seen with the depth-perception and visual angle of the human being, rather than some god-like presence flattening everything out). Soon the "great men" theory of history became more in vogue, and the theory was that certain key "larger-than-life" individuals in the world, like Newton or da Vinci or Napoleon, shaped history for the rest of the people who merely followed their lead. So one could say, for example, that Napoleon was in a sense an apogee and emblem of Romanticism for his passionate nationalism, his loner against the world complex, his reliance on inspiration and sensibility over law and dictum, and his emphasis on the aesthetics of battle, (his crafting himself as an artist of the European continent and all) and this in turn reverberated throughout the Western hemisphere as a new model for what man could be, someone utterly free, defined by his own laws of existence and living always against a society that was attempting to oppress your sublime greatness and individuality. However, Tolstoy's "War and Peace" at the end of the 19th century put a huge wrench into this view of history, suggesting that the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars (and history in general) was controlled largely by small chance events, that, indeed, history was constructed out of tiny minute "butterfly effect" occurrences that in turn caused larger and larger outcomes, and really it was all out of our hands, not even a Napoleon could be a leading force of historical change.
Both of these theories seem to add something to the mix...but I still wonder exactly how, for example, the Enlightenment "turned into" the Romantic age, how this sea-change of sensibility, meaning-production, and outlook on the world came about in the first place. Obviously the art being produced at the turn of the 18th century, before romanticism "hit it big" had hints of the emerging importance of irrationality, the supernatural, and the force of the individual as a counter-reaction against the Enlightenment's (over)dependence on Reason and universalized laws:
Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1797)
etc. etc. obviously there are many combined factors that go into "evolving" Modernism from the Decadent era, or "postmodernism" from Modernism, and these terms too, just like musical genres like "post-punk" or "shoegaze" or whatever, always serve as approximations of a certain large amount of cultural activity as a way to easily discuss them, but they are still all pigeonholes. History is more than the terms we come up with to describe it. Obviously I'm being kind of abstract with this all and you may not know exactly what I'm talking about...but it's interesting to track the development of references to "ennui" (intense, gripping boredom) or "social alienation" or the use of drugs in culture at large through history, and try to feel out how these various modes of being come alive at certain periods in history and "progress"...when did people first start feeling a sense of boredom and lawlessness and meaninglessness and "existential angst"? certainly not in a tribal society setting, where the very existence of something "meaningless" didn't make sense, or in medieval society, where the "great chain of being" provided an easy way to understand the primal order and reason for the universe at large,
maybe sometime in the Renaissance with the increased use of science "disenchanting" the world at large and the idea of God falling by the wayside did these kinds of sensibility and ways of encountering the world start to spring up. This is just one example, of course. But obviously throughout history there are huge motifs and themes that come to define a certain period, yet how do these themes intertwine and influence one another? what is our overall quality of life like compared to people 1000 years before us? it might be better materially but is it "better" mentally? what does this all mean? I don't know.
What it really comes down to though: even in the tiny little millions of conversations that people worldwide are having right now, history is happening, ideas are being transferred and exchanged and created, and our "mean worldview" is changing, very very slightly, every second...(post)postpostmodernism is being birthed yall!
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Percy Shelley
***
"Ozymandias" has to be one of my favorite poems of all time. Not only is it a meditation on the ephemerality of all human endeavors, which is a favorite subject of poetry in general as an artistic medium obsessed and intricately related with the "instant" and the unfolding of time, but it also speaks of the core duality of human existence: that between our material, bodily presence, our actual "thingness" in the world as something taking up space and made of constantly decaying matter, and the infinitely more subtler "passions" that seem to run over and beneath this materiality, and, albeit fleeting, can persist beyond our material presence in the world through lasting art.
One of the things I'm most interested in is the way that history makes itself known to people, the way that, through subtle changes in our collective world-view throughout time, we come to "develop" (for lack of a better word) intellectually, which in turn affects every other aspect of our lives. How does history happen exactly? For most of our history it was believed that God pre-ordained events and we simply followed the script, but this "common sense" philosophy of history started to give way in the Renaissance, with a renewed focus on the individual (shown perhaps most extremely and intriguingly through the development of "perspective" in paintings, which showed the world as if seen with the depth-perception and visual angle of the human being, rather than some god-like presence flattening everything out). Soon the "great men" theory of history became more in vogue, and the theory was that certain key "larger-than-life" individuals in the world, like Newton or da Vinci or Napoleon, shaped history for the rest of the people who merely followed their lead. So one could say, for example, that Napoleon was in a sense an apogee and emblem of Romanticism for his passionate nationalism, his loner against the world complex, his reliance on inspiration and sensibility over law and dictum, and his emphasis on the aesthetics of battle, (his crafting himself as an artist of the European continent and all) and this in turn reverberated throughout the Western hemisphere as a new model for what man could be, someone utterly free, defined by his own laws of existence and living always against a society that was attempting to oppress your sublime greatness and individuality. However, Tolstoy's "War and Peace" at the end of the 19th century put a huge wrench into this view of history, suggesting that the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars (and history in general) was controlled largely by small chance events, that, indeed, history was constructed out of tiny minute "butterfly effect" occurrences that in turn caused larger and larger outcomes, and really it was all out of our hands, not even a Napoleon could be a leading force of historical change.
Both of these theories seem to add something to the mix...but I still wonder exactly how, for example, the Enlightenment "turned into" the Romantic age, how this sea-change of sensibility, meaning-production, and outlook on the world came about in the first place. Obviously the art being produced at the turn of the 18th century, before romanticism "hit it big" had hints of the emerging importance of irrationality, the supernatural, and the force of the individual as a counter-reaction against the Enlightenment's (over)dependence on Reason and universalized laws:
Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1797)
etc. etc. obviously there are many combined factors that go into "evolving" Modernism from the Decadent era, or "postmodernism" from Modernism, and these terms too, just like musical genres like "post-punk" or "shoegaze" or whatever, always serve as approximations of a certain large amount of cultural activity as a way to easily discuss them, but they are still all pigeonholes. History is more than the terms we come up with to describe it. Obviously I'm being kind of abstract with this all and you may not know exactly what I'm talking about...but it's interesting to track the development of references to "ennui" (intense, gripping boredom) or "social alienation" or the use of drugs in culture at large through history, and try to feel out how these various modes of being come alive at certain periods in history and "progress"...when did people first start feeling a sense of boredom and lawlessness and meaninglessness and "existential angst"? certainly not in a tribal society setting, where the very existence of something "meaningless" didn't make sense, or in medieval society, where the "great chain of being" provided an easy way to understand the primal order and reason for the universe at large,
maybe sometime in the Renaissance with the increased use of science "disenchanting" the world at large and the idea of God falling by the wayside did these kinds of sensibility and ways of encountering the world start to spring up. This is just one example, of course. But obviously throughout history there are huge motifs and themes that come to define a certain period, yet how do these themes intertwine and influence one another? what is our overall quality of life like compared to people 1000 years before us? it might be better materially but is it "better" mentally? what does this all mean? I don't know.
What it really comes down to though: even in the tiny little millions of conversations that people worldwide are having right now, history is happening, ideas are being transferred and exchanged and created, and our "mean worldview" is changing, very very slightly, every second...(post)postpostmodernism is being birthed yall!