Ink Tea Stone Leaf

The other day – maybe it was yesterday – I was driving Ariele to work, and we were talking about one of my cranky old man traits. By these I mean the features of my personality that make me resemble a stern, inflexible codger, which are also features I’ve possessed since I was at least twelve years old, to cite an arbitrary point in the timeline of my youth. My mother described me around this time as an “old soul,” which seemed profound to me when I was twelve. Now, the idea mostly makes my joints ache.

The specific cranky old man trait we discussed sprang from the concern I voiced that, more than ever before, the artistic culture we live in is synthetic. All culture is synthetic, to the extent that it is synthesized by people and wouldn’t exist without them, but what I meant by this is that the art we treasure is largely what is created for us, in rote mechanical fashion, by corporate interests that seek to market something they call “nostalgia” to us once we are both old and impulsive enough to purchase it for ourselves. They don’t have the means to sell us perfectly individualized experiences, but they do have the means to carve us up into ever more precise “generations” and indoctrinate us into the identifying with one another based on the songs and movies and television shows that were current before we emerged from puberty, which cannot be the same ones that were popular for the adolescents before us. We all fall for it, to varying degrees.

All of this is well-trodden ground: the modern age depersonalizes the very personal relationship people have with creativity, teaches us that material culture is what is mechanically reproduced and wrapped in plastic, and that nostalgia is a theme song from a Saturday morning in the 1990s, or however long ago it was for you. We’ve heard all this before; we know the internet is killing us; we continue to hurtle inevitable toward tomorrow’s fresh modernity. My cranky old man trait is that it bothers me, and I’m not even forty.

But why should it bother me? Am I not a collector of popular material culture? Am I not perpetually running out of shelf space for what is collectively referred to as “media?” Do I not make the occasional impulse purchase of some officially license knickknack, which I’ve decided I love because I remember its source material? Some of my other cranky old man traits are the conviction that others are not agonizing over all this materialism nearly as thoughtfully as I am, and rank hypocrisy.

What needles me in this case is the use of words like “classic” to mean “it made an impression on me and my cohort when I was younger.” Young people are of course notoriously impressionable; they exist to be impressed upon. Their most cherished hobbies include enforcing the distinction between the products which are cool to consume and the products which are not, and cultivating the illusion that they are entirely consistent in these matters by aligning with their peers and conforming to their preferences. They call this “having taste.”

Is that what a classic is – the thing we all agreed was great when the impersonal forces of the market placed it in our inexperienced hands? What about the thing that we thought was great but didn’t necessarily want our friends to know that we thought so? One may wonder if something remains a classic when the cycle of market nostalgia has run its course and nobody with an age-based interest in it remains alive to reinvest in its various reboots and revivals.

Here are some words on nostalgia, a word that was invented to translate the German equivalent of “homesickness” into 17th century academic Latin. Perhaps we should reflect for a moment on what the wistful recollection of ephemera has to do with a word as substantial as “home.” Again, this is all cranky old man bullshit; of course the stories, images, and sounds we recall are our home, as much as the scent of grandma’s cookies on Christmas, or the annoyingly endearing way that the screen door to the back porch kept coming off its track and getting stuck. Nostalgia is watered down from the medical intensity it used to connote, but the principle is the same; our culture is ephemeral, so naturally it hurts us when it fades away.

We have implicit faith from an early age in the “instant classic,” but the truth is we can almost never know what future generations will find speaking to them, in place of whatever the entertainment industry (the designated manufacturers of our tastes, whether they be legacy corporations, upstart digital entrepreneurs, or the platforms that monetize them) decides will be speaking for us. My honest assessment is that, in an era when artistic culture is designed to be inherently temporary and disposable, it is a miracle that as much of it merits the status of a true “classic” as actually does, and a blessing that dedicated individuals have worked so hard to archive the things that matter beyond their place in the contemporary landscape. They preserve a lot of trifles too, but that matters less: everybody has their own idea about what deserves to be remembered, handed down, and rediscovered, and it’s only in the aggregate that anything is ultimately decided. There is no consensus without a critical mass of idiosyncratic obsession.

So is it all actually fine, and I only need to relax and remember I’m still decades from achieving true senescence, when my kvetching may carry some justification? How can I even begin to answer that, when I’m only along for the ride with everybody else, living in the only world we’ve got and trying to discern which parts of it carry any meaning worth internalizing? The best alternative to complaining is praise, and so I praise the minds that are open; open to what speaks compelling truth with a human voice, regardless of time and familiarity. Thank goodness for our capacity as audiences to actively rediscover and reinvent, not just passively receive.

Thank goodness that, in a setting where capital is dedicated to producing content for media, people are still interested in moving one another with stories.