ON DECLINE

Ah, nostalgia. One of my favorite topics. It just keeps poking it's hydra's heads out of the many gopher holes of memory. Man, I want to mallet the shit out of them. So here goes.

Nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idea of cultural decline. This connection is almost so obvious as to not merit its writing here. But anyway.

The gold old days are gone for good. The young, drunk on freedom they can't appreciate, don't pause to remember those warriors who fought and died to give it to them (this formulation can be as applied by any veteran, whether of a foreign war or the war on the home front of, say, the civil rights movement).

But the good news about the good old days is that their glorification is perennial. A generation past its prime (and obsessed with growing irrelevance) attributes its own obsolescence to general cultural decay. There may be hope for humanity in the mere fact that, despite our dizzying careen down the slippery slope of history, we're still here; still looking for solutions, still producing art worth looking at, still lamenting bygone eras.

The most recent example I've found comes from Beatriz Sarlo. She's arguing that the regurgitation of counter-cultural styles that occurs in retro revivals softens their edge, and in doing so, encourages a new generation to forget their real revolutionary symbolism. In short, a bold challenge to the existing regime becomes an attention-getting "fuck you dad!" A political act becomes "mere" style.

"A 'retro' relationship with the past diminishes its meaning: the miniskirt no longer speaks of the sexual liberation of the 1960; the decorative little rings that punks used to pierce into their ears and noses with gestures of insulting defiance no longer evoke the reactions that they did in the past; the bland ecology movement has forgotten the old libertarian vindication of nature and the body; the New Age does not remember the days when the business of expanding the senses went through physical, psychological, and moral experimentation that touched on all the limits. These forgotten things blot out some of the pages from our history that are really moving, heroic, or fanatic... It is impossible to hang a sign from each miniskirt that says, 'Invented by Mary Quant at the same time as the Beatles were inventing 'Let it be.'' But perhaps it is worth the trouble to reconstruct some histories so that all the ideas don't disappear, 'gnawed away by our habit of forgetting.'"

Beatriz Sarlo, "Postmodern Forgetfulness," The Argentina Reader.

Social movements disintegrate and return in the spiral of fashion, its arc the same but curvature a bit narrower. I think it's worth pointing out that the desire to re-edify the meaning of a past era has to, at some level, spring from the author's own nostalgia for the time when a miniskirt really meant something. So we've got good nostalgia ("history") and bad nostalgia ("retro fashion").

But that's really neither here nor there. Let's go back a few hundred years.

"He was evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect, which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed him.
'Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,' he thought."

That's Dostoyevsky doing Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov (sorry, couldn't find the umlaut) in a debate between a dissembling atheist (agnostic? hard to say) and a group of devout monks over the comparative roles of Church and State. Written in 1880. What I love about this one is that Dostoyevsky reveals his character's sententious disgust as vain attachment to his own accomplishments. Sound familiar?

I'll leave it to you to ask the question "just how ironic is it?" of the following lines from Pope, written (according to Wikipedia) in 1709.

Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.

Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, "An Essay on Criticism, Part II", lines 474-484. Apparently memory wasn't very durable in the early eighteenth century either.

Finally, I have to resurrect one more dead white man from the same anthology. Pope, at least, can still be found in collegiate English courses of 200 level and above - the following poet, I'm sure, is lurking only at the post-graduate seminar level. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the river Lethe.

The Silver Swan

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
"Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."

That's Orlando Gibbons, lamenting the cultural decline of 1612. Can we see a pattern emerging? They certainly did have a way of putting things succinctly back in the good old days. But then, I've fallen into my own trap.

Maybe that fear that we will forget the past is well founded. Maybe we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors if we don't spend our youths combing musty tomes of Virgil and Chaucer, we will forget who we are and where we come from. Maybe when you arm your legs in a miniskirt you should take a moment to reflect on its once-militant connotations; maybe the next time you pop acid at a Phish reunion you might try to really push the envelope of your being instead of wandering around mumbling, ecstatic at obtuse metaphors, "Dude, the crow IS the sky!" But maybe the cycle of forgetting and remembering goes on, despite the frenetic acceleration of post-modernity.

Maybe we haven't escaped history just yet.

The next time you find yourself on the brink of opining that "contemporary hip-hop is too commercial, we need to get back to the foundation" or "there hasn't been any good pop music since 1994," remember that there's no reason to join the long gray line of wistful old farts quite yet. Who knows, a revolution, or a really great pop hit, might be just around the corner.