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.