Off to Towne

We are off to the Big City now. After our Country residence, we are off for our London Season. Big city living will be pretty interesting after our leisurly life here at the manor where other people make our food, and there are plenty of quiet, private spaces to sit. We are staying in the utter central area of the city across from St. Paul's Cathedral.
Luckily, we are in walking distance of the Blackfriar's Pub, the Globe, and the Tate Modern. These are Good Things. But where will I do my yoga in the morning? I may have to forgo the two mile walk and 1/2 hour of yoga each morning in this urban setting. And this also means no internet access. It is a little odd that going totally urban for us means a big jump down in technology. I have my mobile phone, but who am I gonna call (except for the proverbial ghostbusters)?

While we are here, we will see the Tate Britain and look at the lanscape watercolors of Turner and Constable. Yay! We will also visit 221 Baker St. and check out the invented life of Sherlock Holmes. After our discussions of romanticism and the gothic, I think it is fitting that suddenly we are dispossed of our 19th century country lifestyle here at the manor and, will we or nill we, thrust into the hectic pace of modern life. I hope my companions can feel this as a fun intellectual exercise rather than a brutal shock. I suppose it all depends on how grotty the hostel is...

So, our minimalist urban adventure begins. It will be a few days (okay, six) before I am able to post the summary of our fun, and the end of the journey. Cheers!

The Great Mushing Together of Modernism

Today we had our last formal class. Now comes the scary part: real learning. No more fake learning. We are going out into London to see if all this theory makes sense on the ground: the medieval sense of justice of Robin Hood, the Romantic connection to the divine, the Modernist debunking of mystery. Mush it all together and we get the 21st century. No wonder nobody can figure out what comes after post-modernism: everything does. And they have the same problem figuring out what comes after generation X. Generation Y? What happens when we hit Z? See, post-modernism with its self-referentiality, irony, and juxtaposition of conflicting genres is just one big identity crisis. Even Sherlock Holmes is a conflation of medieval justice, romantic horror, and modern scientific observation. It makes one's literary head spin. I think people's heads were spinning back in the 18th century, though, when Wordsworth was complaining about how "getting and spending we lay waste our powers/ nothing we see in nature that is ours." So in our 21st century world, we still love truth and beauty, but we also like a bit of Bahktin's carnivalesque where we "decrown" truth and beauty so we can have a bit of fun with it. Maybe the hallmark of our present day delerium is our ability to enjoy playing with ideas more than people did in the past. Irony is fun now, not just painful. We can enjoy all genres in their purity and in their mixing.

For example, I was walking in the Peak Districk, in Derbyshire, where Austen had put Mr. Darcy. Down in the valley, the little trains zipped back and forth from Sheffield to Manchester, little red, blue, and yellow two car trains, zipping up and down the dale like little toy trains. From the top of the high peak, one could see the Great Houses with their grounds down in the valley, but up on the high peak, there was *nothing*. The stark contrast of the staid world that Austen wrote about and the wild cliffs was a lovely juxtaposition of conflicting genres. I also think about how Austen never talks about Aqua Sulis in any of her referecnes to Bath. How interior was *her* life. I wonder what she thought of the water god sitting there under the Pump House where one would drink the special water. But in the 21st century we have room in our minds to fit it all in: Jane Austen and Aqua Sulis. Mr. Darcy and the mud of the peat bogs on the high peaks. So that is the good part about the mushing together of modernity. I think in our 21st century version, we are even brining back some mystery into technology as our fiction turns to robots and artificial intelligence. It is at once frightening and exciting. So if we can take the humanity and inspiration of romanticism, believe in the value of caring for the community in the medieval Commons sense, and trust in the value of scientific reasoning, we might end up with a sustainable aesthetic. In this case, maybe purism is stunting, and we get a better product by mushing it all together. We know that mutts are stronger than pure-breds, so maybe the same is true for art.