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DAY ONE - AQUARIAL. In a special essay for this Tenth Anniversary Edition, veteran G21 writer, KEVIN CAREY, mourns the loss of the aquarial aesthetic.
Sussex, UK - In spite of a penetratingly elegant demolition by Kurt Gödel, elegant theories generally stand the test of time; whether we think of Platonic ideas of mind and matter, the Christian doctrine of Hypostasis, Newton's laws, the proposition that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or even the long held belief that the Red Sox are incapable of winning the World Series, elegance is the best defence against corrosion and is only vulnerable to the paradigm shift which generates another more comprehensive elegance.
Kevin Carey If we were to hold a competition for the shortest lived elegant paradigm it would have to be James Lovelock's Gaya hypothesis that planet Earth is a self regulating organism. It has lasted for less than two decades, for less time than a variety of astronomical elegances since the invention of radio telescopes. What killed it was not a new paradigm but an old piece of physics, the concept of the irreversible tipping point. In spite of the ever less definite denials of the White House, most people now accept that there are too many human beings on the planet, too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and too much pollution in the lakes, rivers and seas.
If I were a betting man I would put my money on the first problem being resolved relatively simply by war, epidemic, famine and the toxicity of the other two factors. I wou ld also wager that there will be enough flexibility in the world economy for the rich to survive catastrophe (as they always do) but the power of the rich to dig ever deeper wells in their own private estates will not be enough to - forgive the pun - stem the rising tides of water crises.
Other contributors will cover this ground much more analytically than I ever could; but what concerns me is another tipping point and that is the loss of the aquarial aesthetic. There is a point at which cultural material - the Egyptian cultic practice, the Latin language, the Dutch adoption of oriental glazing, the etiquette of knighthood or the iconic status of the sonata - cease to be vital forces in the way we live and become the preserve of the scholar; we do not know these things as part of our way of life but have to learn about them through a process of comparison, deliberatively learning about ourselves through learning about otherness as opposed to serendipitously learning about ourselves through simply being. We are now in serious danger of losing any natural aesthetic sense of water. We are rapidly passing from a situation where the Hoover dam was a curiosity in a world of untroubled lakes and rivers to a situation where every lake and river will be an industrial site; tourism is eating up our coast lines; and all sense of the uninterrupted, random nature of water's way of enlivening will disappear.
Although, of course, all great art has a sense of otherness, a sense of the sharp communication of the painter's own experience, it does not succeed as a life enhancing medium if it cannot inform our own experience. Thus, we look at Turner and wish we were there, or at Manet and remember that once we were there, or at Monet and know that we could be there but soon all we will be able to do is to mourn that we will never be there; reality will have metamorphosed into history and felt sensation will have become nostalgia.
If you want to study a similar loss in our own lifetime, all you need to do is to outline the 20th Century history of silence.
There is no place on earth, not even the polar wastes, that are innocent of aircraft noise; there is hardly a space in the OECD which is innocent of ground transportation noise. We have destroyed the barrier between the public and the private, pouring our sound system output into the once sleepy streets, out of our windows, out of our cars, out of the gap between our ears and their phones. WE shout down our cell phones, retailing the kind of information in the hearing of complete strangers, which the people of the Victorian and Lincoln era would not have exchanged in the privacy of the marital bed; and we are barked at incessantly through public address systems about every aspect of our own conduct and the dangers of the conduct of others. Silence is no longer cheap.
But rather than being drowned out - another pun - by commerce as silence has been, water will become the subject of commerce. It will soon be the world's most important industrial product. It will be fenced, protected, bought and sold on the futures market, fought over and died for; and although there is something poignantly grandiose and melancholic in industrial architecture, the appeal of utilitarian ugliness is surely limited. And as the fences get higher and the commodity more scarce we will collectively begin to forget what is beautiful or, rather, we will need to forget that it was beautiful.
As the rhinoceros horn becomes an aphrodisiac which justifies the beast's slaughter, as the great redwood becomes a truckload of planks, as the sonnet sells greetings cards, so the lake will pass from ends to means and we will collectively suppress a sigh as we open an expensive bottle of water. We will fall into a kind of denial that passes its own kind of tipping point.
Of course the prophets (in the Biblical sense) as well as the nostalgists will always be with us and there is a chance that they will reverse our wantonness that, out of a sense of pure self interest, we will both increase our care for and decrease our wasteful consumption of water; we will ultimately, at a great cost, similar to that we have precariously secured with nuclear energy, achieve a balance between necessity and risk. We may even do better, as we have in food production, giving ourselves the room to produce more than we consume.
But, once it is lost, we will never reclaim the aquarial aesthetic.
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