Antics

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

As objects age and break, we throw them out.  In most cases, the decision is unequivocal: nobody thinks twice about discarding a blown light bulb, or smashed plates.  But some classes of objects can survive everyday knocks to win through to a new lease of life.  Furniture, for example.  A broken chair may be repaired, a scratched table re-polished.  Eventually they cease to be old and broken, and become instead, in some mysterious way and at some ill-defined point, loved and lived-in antiques.

The antique is a relatively new concept, and is still in a state of flux.  For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, antiques meant the same as antics: something odd and ridiculous.  In England's Augustan age, old objects were prized if they were Classical - that is, thousands of years old.  The later, Gothic craze made medieval fashionable, and with the Victorians came a delight in collecting anything older than a century or two.  As the decades of the modern era have rolled by, so has the temporal margin required to elevate an object to the status of antique shrunk.  Today we teeter on the brink of finding last month acceptably ancient.

This increasingly frenzied rush to canonise the past seems to be a result of the accelerating pace of life, of the sense that nothing is fixed and stable anymore - and hence that history, even of the most recent vintage, is a rock worth clinging to.  What is also remarkable is that almost anything is potentially a venerable antique, even the most ephemeral of bygone objects - everything, that is, except people.

People never become antiques; instead they just become old.  As a result, we never accord them the spurious honours that even the tawdriest and tackiest light-fitting of twenty years ago receives.  At best, we offer the previous generation indifference, and at worst outright contempt.

There may once have been some justification for this rejection of an unwanted burden.  If every day was a continual struggle for survival, exposing on mountaintops those too old to work had a certain callous logic: it was them or the tribe.  For a society characterised by gross overproduction and shameless overconsumption, there is no such excuse.

Why are we not appalled by the shuffling old men swaddled in their multiple layers of jumble sale cardigans, by the hump-backed and skeletal old women picking among the leftover vegetables?  How can we allow their last experiences of life to be so bitter?  How can we forget that in a very few years, though cardinal now, we too shall be an abandoned people?

We forget because we have to; because to remember would be to acknowledge that our short era of power and plenty will inevitably end, that we also will age, and will one day perish.  We ignore the old because they are our mirror of tomorrow.  The irony is that we all come to realise the shabbiness of their treatment - but only when we ourselves become cast-off and impotent.  By then it is too late to stop the antics of the succeeding generation to whom we set such a pathetic example, who have mislearnt too well - and now proceeds to pay us in the same coin, and to store up for their own sad and unthought-of future.

(1989)

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Ludwig van who?

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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