tchotchke #39: We, amnesiacs all
Weights and balances of culture
If you haven’t heard, college students have never read a book before. Discourse about pedagogy and standardized testing and a general concerning decline in literacy Because Phones aside, there are some critical knock-on effects for the current generation of students enduring this trend. It’s related, quite deeply I think, to the “crisis of inspiration” being addressed in general terms on social media, regarding film and literature in particular.
Researching the origins of Star Trek for my book about the history of fandom, I was struck by a passage in Inside Star Trek, the behind-the-scenes tome by associate producer Robert Justman and studio executive Herb Solow, in which Justman and Roddenberry are brainstorming the pitch bible for what would become the iconic 1960s original series.
Trying to figure out how to expand upon Roddenberry’s initial “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch, the two men hit upon the idea of taking inspiration from Gulliver’s Travels, which Justman notes they both had read in school. The Enterprise would encounter strange planets and alien cultures, landing in frequent peril, in the same way that Gulliver came across the Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians. (For a little while the Enterprise’s captain was even going to be named Gulliver until they thought better of it.)
Shortly after that, while reading about the Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter in the excellent book No Simple Highway by Peter Richardson, I came across a mention of Hunter’s lyrics for Terrapin Station being inspired by the border ballads of 19th-century Scottish writer Walter Scott, who was one of the most popular writers of his century but is not read very widely today except by academics and people who live in Edinburgh.
These two notations of inspiration struck me, not necessarily with their incongruence but with the thought—what creators of my generation, or the next one, could offer similar citations? (I’m genuinely interested to know, so please send some to me!1)
The pop culture of the 60s and 70s remains foundational to us today because it sipped from the source, so to speak. As the Atlantic article discusses, fewer and fewer students today (at least in the US) are being given the proper toolkit to do that. And I’m not trying to be like one of those retvrn homeschooling weirdos with regards to the ~Western canon~ but surely there has to be a middle ground?
Engaging with historical literature and visual art can be difficult, and is difficult to learn how to do de novo without early instruction and guidance from a teacher or tutor—for the majority of people, I’m saying, not some of you geeky autodidacts. The privilege of inspiration, of being able to understand the origin of the things that move you, and find new starting points for your own imagination, should by all rights be something everyone is taught to access, in the same way that everyone should be taught to create music and art and literature.
Crate-digging and cinephile cultures are vital and enthusiastic ecosystems for artistic production and community, but they can also be silos. It’s easy and fun and not wholly unprofitable to consume and recycle pre-processed, osmosed, and adapted cultural artifacts, especially in film and popular music, but our shared heritage as a species goes so much further back than the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction!
As my friend Emma wrote on her blog last week, the reason to study the past is not because it was better or more important, but because in every way it actively informs the present. If we don’t familiarize ourselves with what inspired our cultural heroes, are we really familiar with them at all? The further we move along into this amnesiac cul-de-sac the more disoriented and bewildered we will get. I’m thinking of lossy compression in an MP3, a multiply reduplicated Xerox growing darker and unreadable.
Geoffrey Sonnabend, the famous 20th century theorist2 of memory, postulated that
“[we,] amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events.”
If we fail to maintain this construction, reminding ourselves at all times of the weight of the past, and using that weight as counterbalance in the complex pulley system that is “culture,” we give in to this “intolerable knowledge” and will probably send ourselves insane—that may be what is already happening, as creation becomes a purely aesthetic exercise.
Banger of the week
My favorite literary citation by a modern music act would have to be the Everything Everything album inspired by Julian Jaynes’ theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.