Author: Mark Hannam

In a series of lectures given sixty years ago, Frank Kermode spoke of the connection between the stories we tell to understand our world and our conception of the nature of time, and how the structure of our fictions tends to mirror the structures we believe to be fact.  Some cultures view time as a series of repeating patterns, whereas others, notably the Western tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought, view time as having a definite beginning, middle, and end.  The Bible starts in a garden and ends in a city: the creation myth and the prophesy of the apocalypse are the twin narrative devices that have given our culture its strong underlying sense of progress, from time’s start to its finish. 

The theory that history is heading towards a terminal crisis, does not fit comfortably with the modern scientific perspective.  While the universe might have started with an intense bang and might be moving towards a uniformly entropic collapse, these moments are unimaginably remote from us in time and cannot provide a suitable frame of reference by which to understand our history: they might constitute a beginning and an end, but they are not our beginning or our end.  Having discovered a few hundred years ago that our planet is not the centre of its own solar system, we are slowly coming to terms with the knowledge that our history is not central to the story of the universe: is meaningful for us, but marginal in the wider context. 

Continue reading “A modest acceleration in the rate of gradual change”

I was never a great fan of David Bowie.  In the 1970s, I liked some of the songs – Rebel, Rebel for example – but not the glam rock clothes, the make-up, or the hair.  And I never understood what that eye-patch he wore was all about.  In the 1980s, he began wearing stylish suits which were more to my taste, but then his music was sounding too close to disco.  In retrospect, I appreciate his status as a significant influence on modern musical culture rather more than I appreciate the music itself: I do not dislike it, but still, I am not a fan.  My other favourite of his early songs is Life on Mars, and I recently discovered a wonderful cover version by Gail Ann Dorsey, who played bass guitar in Bowie’s band for many years.  He wrote this song in 1971, two years after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had become the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. 

The year before the Apollo 11 mission, Stanley Kubrick released the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a futuristic space mission to Jupiter is disrupted by HAL, the on-board computer, leading to multiple deaths among the crew, both human and machine.  One of the movie’s great themes is that technological advancement does not of itself suppress human violence, but merely allows it to manifest itself in more compelling ways.  In the opening scene, among a group of early hominids, a large bone from a dead animal is transformed into a tool for killing, and this instrumentally violent act is replicated, millions of years later, by HAL’s calculated, digital murder.  Weapons evolve, but if our moral code does not then the outcomes will remain the same.  Kubrick seems to be reminding us that wherever we go in the universe we take our failings with us.

Continue reading “Life on Mars”

A few years ago, the various authors associated with this website ran an online book club, which lasted for a couple of years.  Back in August 2021, we read Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher, an English author whose work ranges in style from academic aesthetic theory to popular commentary on the contemporary film and music scene, and who acquired a significant admiring readership among a subset of those who follow cultural criticism.  Fisher committed suicide in 2017 after suffering from depression for some years.  The bleak view of the world he presented in his work suggests that his decision to kill himself might in part have been to do with his discomfort at the many negative features of modern life he described, and not just the specific circumstances in which his own life was lived. 

The opening chapter of Capitalist Realism is titled, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.  It is a memorable statement, and it has achieved something of an iconic status within contemporary left-wing aesthetics of which Fisher was once an active participant.  However, it is not an idea that we encounter in the writings of the leading theoreticians of Marxist influenced aesthetics – Georg Lukács or Bertold Brecht, for example – who still believed in the possibility of a much better world, even if they became sceptical about its imminent arrival.  As the influence of Marxism on contemporary social theory has diminished, so too pessimism about alternatives to capitalism has flourished.  Post-modernism has mostly replaced hope with cynicism.

Continue reading “Lack of imagination”

Around six hundred years ago, the Florentine sculptor Donatello made a marble statue, almost two meters tall, of the Jewish prophet Habakkuk.  The statue was commissioned for a niche on the Campanile which stands adjacent to the Duomo in the centre of Florence.   Habakkuk’s large, distinctive bald head looked down on the people below with a stern gaze and disconcerting intensity.  As the authors of my history of Florentine art note, not even the enormous drapery folds, falling with such energy and grandness of scale, distract attention from the head of this prophetic orator, who appears to serve as conduit between the unfathomable and the human.  He looks a true prophet and there appears nothing ‘minor’ about his strength of his thoughts or character.

A century later, in the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari told a story that while Donatello was making this statue he became so affected by its likeness to life that he used to curse it, saying, Speak, damn you, speak!  Today, I suspect this behaviour is more likely to be read as a sign of Donatello’s eccentricity than his artistic genius, for we would think it implausible that he might seriously have believed that the stone figure he was carving could ever talk back to him, however impressive his achievement.  However, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl made an interesting observation about this story, drawing attention to the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which includes God’s rebuke to those who worship idols: Woe to him who says to wood, “Come to life!”, Or to lifeless stone, “Wake up!” (Habakkuk 2: 19).  Has Vasari conflated the sculptor’s behaviour towards the statue with the warning against sin given by the prophet on whom the statue is based?  Alternatively, as Schjeldahl suggests, is there a more intriguing explanation, namely that Donatello, an artist of unfathomable intelligence, was inspired, or somehow driven, to play out in stone a spiritual danger intrinsic to art.

Continue reading “Talking statues”

There are times when, rather than discovering new and interesting things, is it good to be reminded of important things that you already know.  For me, a recent trip to the movies with my daughter was just such an occasion, as we watched A Complete Unknown, the newly released Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold.  It was good, better than I had expected, and I plan to go again: there was a movie I seen onetime / I think I sat through it twice. 

The film’s title is partly a joke about the very familiarity of its subject, for the story of the nineteen-year old Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and the miraculous series of songs he wrote there in his early twenties is already well known.  Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary film No Direction Home covers the same period in Dylan’s life, and both filmmakers borrow their titles from the chorus of his most famous and important song, written at that time: How does it feel / How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Just like a rolling stone.

Continue reading “The unwashed phenomenon”