Estimated reading time: 4 mins : 27 secs
Clive’s final paragraph includes this thought:
Evocation needs more than notation: it needs impetus.
It’s the impetus I’m interested in here.
PS Ben Hammersley was a late addition. And this shows. Bite me.
After WWII, Betjeman was often disparaged as a social throwback, and today, although his prominence is no longer seriously questioned, there is still a remarkable list of important anthologies which do not include any of his work. But at the time his fellow craftsmen knew that he was at least as up-to-date as they were. Geoffrey Grigson might have turned down Betjeman’s poems for New Verse, but Eliot wanted them for The Criterion. There would have been no doubt of Betjeman’s originality if he had taken Faber’s offer when it came. With Eliot in command of the editorial board, Faber already had the power of an establishment institution specifically equipped for deciding which new poets were modern enough to last. But . . . Betjeman stuck with the more fustian house of John Murray because, as a cultural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honored architectural doodads, like illustrations from Ruskin. He did, however, from within the neat boxes of his four-square stanzas, sound more modern than anybody.
And it’s true, I guess. Betjeman is closer, in my head, to Constable than Eliot. And they made him a knight of the realm? Overrated.
It’s odd to think that, between them, Faber and John Murray got to decide who’s modern, and who’s not. (As it is, in all probability, just as conveniently explanatory and easy to overstate.) Nevertheless, anybody old enough to know who they are will appreciate the truth of it.
Old white men used to be able to decide an awful lot. They’re not all men any more (although most of them are still white), but, as Ben Hammersely puts it, “the world is currently run by a generation whose upbringing has left them intellectually unable to be deal with modernity.”
The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.
While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.
A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.
Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.
I’m seeing a classic gestalt-shift thing here.
(You know gestalt shifts? They’re those pictures where you can see two things, but not at the same time. There’s gestalt shift images scattered throughout the post.)
In the past, we had an infrastructure capable of deciding who and what was modern, and what was not. And pretty much all of us benefited from it. The occasional Betjeman got shunted to one side, I guess. But, in exchange, we had all that stuff sifted into convenient piles for us to digest, comfortably.
And now we have an infrastructure where we’re all capable of deciding who and what is modern, and what is not. And pretty much all of us benefit from it.
And, of course, the opposite is true. All of us suffered under the old system too. As we will suffer under the new.
In the past, though, you knew who you were rebelling against, I guess. If you were a poet on the rampage, you could go and burn down Faber or throw brickbats at Eliot.
Like Ben Hammersely, I’m fairly confident who to blame at the moment for the wrongness. Our current generation of leaders are totally and utterly incompetent, when it comes to understanding the current condition of confusion.
This is probably much more comforting than I’d care to imagine. What will I do when they’re dead?
I’m as big a bring-on-the-fucking-future-already cheerleader as anybody, and I’m reasonably adept at using the notation afforded by all this modern stuff, (Modernism is sooo-ooo old-fashioned, and even post-modernism was a mere transition) but, “Evocation needs more than notation [and aesthetic]: it needs impetus.”
It frightens the bejeebus out of me to imagine where the New Impetus™ will come from.
We’ll miss the people who put adjectives into hexagons when they’re gone.
Images: Colonel Sanders looks like a stick figure with a tiny head from Nerd Nirvana, Swimming Bunny from SuperPunch, Einstein-Monroe Condensate by Aude Oliva for New Scientist, Devil’s Advocate from Matt Watts, Indy from Olly Moss, Pittsburgh Zoo from Optical Illusion, Spartan Golf Club from Roger von Oech.
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