The Mongol, Storytellers, and Zombies

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again
----Larkin, MCMXIV

A generation that had still gone to school in a public carriage found itself under the open sky in a landscape where nothing but the clouds remained unchanged...the men returned from the front struck dumb , not richer but poorer in communicable experience.
----W.Benjamin

They expected a grander experience, and they witnessed the disintegration of experience. Today experience can only refer to a past. Otherwise it is synonymous with horror.
---Roberto Calasso.

I read somewhere of someone meeting a person on a blind date and not asking, even after three hours, what that person did. At first I thought this was odd but then I realised that this is an entirely modern phenomenon: the art of conversation is dead, firstly because people are closed in on themselves ('Me, Myself , and I': the intoxication of our selves) and, secondly, because the span of shared experiences is much narrower...whether we even have something that could justifiably be called an 'experience' is questionable. The eyes become opaque and our lips move mechanically. Are we , the great language animal, running out of 'being', out of things to say?

The Mongol has hit on to something: the communte to central London is only bearable if we occupy our minds-anything (sudoku or some trashy magazine are best) to escape ourselves. The only people who talk on the tube are Albanians who laugh voraciously amongst themselves or American tourists blabbering on about 'Friends' and The Da Vinci Code. The underworld is the land of the zombies...but is it so different above?

Yesterday in Foyles, a teenage kid asks the assistant:
"Have you got any satanic Bibles?"
Try downstairs in the cult section, this is religion and philosophy.
"The big one, not the small one"
Yes, maybe in the basement, under 'cult'.
"Where is that, second floor?"

From Agamben's 'Infancy and History':
With war there is the destruction of common experience ..but the destruction does not just accompany the tectonic shifts in history, the disasters and the catastrophes but resides in the very heart of a humdrum life. What, in an average day, can be translated, recounted, as an experience? Is it the fact that we all lead very similar lives that precludes communication or is it that we go through the routines of the day mechanically, unreflectively? If the former, then the problem is one of identity and homogeneity. A common world, on the other hand, unites and separates us, offering up the possibility of different perspectives.

Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, or unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them have become an experience. ..the everyday oppressiveness, the banality of the ordinary, the deep ennui that covers us like a thick blanket, the numbness of our gaze...

Experience has its correlation not in knowledge but in authority-that is to say, the power of words and narration. But who can accept authority that is based on experience? To do so would be to give credence to the past when what we desire, precisely, is its elimination. It would also to place a value on the wisdom of old age and to maintain that not all those people in generations gone by were complete and utter naive fools. The cult of youth makes this next to nigh impossible. And nothing disturbs the modern conscience more than this possibility: we latecomers must be deemed to have extricated ourselves from years of delusion, only we have the right to call ourselves 'enlightened'. All other experience is considered-has to be considered-invalid, suspect.

Hence the disappearance of the maxim and the proverb, the disdain for cliches and the mania for originality and creativity. But in reality, all this has been replaced by the slogan, the jingle and the sound byte. Our subservience to experts and mandarins, Boston Brahmins and swamis or gurus of all persuasion, lifestyle managers and spin doctors, makes a mockery of the Enlightenment's claims of autonomy. The problem now is perceived as not how to start the story but, rather, how to bring it to a close. How to tell a story that ends all stories.

We moderns are voyeurs, observing the experience of others, unable to plunge into the unknown. We want security more than anything. At best we can theorize about experience. A reflective, self-conscious age (Kierkegaard), one that only seeks mirrors, that dares not go beyond the limits of reason. Hedonism is as predictable and boring as a mechanical life and both, ultimately, spring from the same root.

Take any example. Museums or art galleries. Almost always we do not allow the work to speak to us, to move us. Instead, the onus is on appearing intelligent, in 'deconstructing' the work, in unravelling its mystery before the mind's eye. In this regard, American simplicity can be like a breath of fresh air:

Outside the Leaning Tower of Pisa:
"Is that a Chuch , coz if it iz I'm tellin' ya I ain't gonna go in. Damn it, I'm sick to death of all these Chuches, ain't there nothin' else to see in this God-damned country?"

The modern tourist's ideology can be summarised in a few words: 'Been there, done that'. Everest, K2. Tick. It was there, it had to be done. That is all. Even the travel brochures market their holidays as an 'escape'-and is this anything but an escape from a mind-numbing and mundane day-to-day reality? If one thinks of the armies of tourists with their cameras and camcorders then this initial impression is confirmed. For what is important here is not the experience itself but that it is captured, kept safe so that one can view it again and again in the comfort of one's home. The most extreme example of such a mindset are the photographs of Abu Ghraib...

Must we sacrifice experience to 'pure knowledge'? As in Tiech's story, Das Lebeusuberfluis, must we throw away the ladder that connects us to the world? Knowledge, and knowledge now! We repeat the sins of the Fall. There's an element of fanaticism in this rejection of the world's slow wisdom. The virtual world is upon us...

What are we to make of the high rates of drug addiction and excessive drinking? A desire to escape experience, perhaps? We want to forget and to forget completely. 'Wasted' , as they say. When humankind is deprived of effective experience and becomes subject to the imposition of a form of experience as controlled and manipulated as a laboratory maze for rats then rejection of experience is a legitimate defence.

The Gambler: