Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
Octavio Paz.
I.
On the 15th of November in 1992, at half past ten at night, a large, white van pulled up at One Canada Square filled with 1000lbs of home-made explosives. Security guards discovered the van before its load could be detonated and a controlled explosion was undertaken to safely get rid of the vans contents. No one was hurt. The editor of the paper was allowed back into the building to set the front page by hand.
In 1867 the first terrorist attack in London was carried out by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group who sought Irish Independence; they set off a bomb outside Clerkenwell Prison killing three people.
So began 130 years of bombings in vague degrees of co-ordination across London; firstly to free Ireland from British rule, then to free Northern Ireland from British Rule, a period described by that most incredible of Euphemisms, ‘The Troubles’.
II.
History is full of events like this, vague suppositions which we read as a sequence of events; name and then file away. The idea of cause and effect allows us to shape large chunks of unintelligible and only hazily related material into the neat narrative of the school textbook. To move forward in our study of history it is essential we move onto the comparison of the unrelated events that took place in disparate places and at different times; a new arbitrary historical discourse.
III.
When the Russian tanks rolled westward into Poland in the year of nineteen-thirty-nine there was little the army could do to halt the innumerable gently sloping divisions. The defence was a not a success, stranded, a blood-clot in the heart of Europe. If they were lucky those who remained were taken off to Siberia to collect the sap from trees for the next six years. In parallel the German tanks rolled eastward and Poland really collapsed, buckling under the weight of two tectonic plates of ideological imperialism. It has been well documented what happened to ninety percent of the Jewish population who couldn’t escape, collecting sap from trees isn’t so bad is it? People conveniently forget that Britain and France merely declared war on Nazi Germany and did nothing to try and save the lives of the six million Jews living there.
IV.
These are two examples of the enacting of ideology, but it is in comparison between the poetics of the periods that we can construct some kind of correlation. Both periods produced winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Seamus Heaney and Czesław Miłosz, from Ireland and Poland respectively.
Heaney’s collection North, from 1971, explored the difficulty of forming a Northern Irish/Catholc identity at the time through the historical conceit of comparing an ancient Ireland in relation to the modern one, suffering from its ‘troubles’. Heaney, as poet-witness to these acts of political violence shy’s away from overt statement of support or protest, instead he bows down, whatever you say, say nothing, is his only ironic advice. Through his misguided idea that using poetry one can change something, that maybe by exploring old barbarism he can shed some light on new barbarism he accepts the idea of cause and effect, that human history is a rational discourse; as if poetry could hope to change anything, as if it could change a giant and anonymous cultural system of violence.
In post-war Poland Czesław Miłosz was writing poems, saying anything, saying it by samizdat and multiplying it by photocopier. In one place the only system of censorship was the self-enforced censorship of poetic voice, in the other you had a real fear, there wasn’t even the opportunity for anything as luxuriously decadent as just having a system of poetic self-censorship, still the poets found a way to comment upon their political situation, the whole impetus is not on what is being said but on the act of just saying something. Whatever you say, say something, was Miłosz’s reminder to us.
V.
Can we now proclaim that the age of ideology is over? Can we file it away in the museums under ‘Atrocity Exhibit F: fig. 1b’, a little reminder of the stupidity and megalomania of humanity?
We proclaim we are in the age of nothingness; we have seen everything that history had to show us and were unimpressed, naturally, only unfeeling, throwing glasses in brick houses.
We are a generation that connects to life via ultrareal violent computer games, iconophilia and late night television insomnias. If our parents generation thought they could change the world, and their grandparents reinvented it, we are too tired to believe in change or revolution; we just want to squeeze out the last drops of fun and then discard it.
They tried to discredit our generation because we could only connect to life via ultrareal violent computer games. But we are impossible to stop because our unfeelingness is an avalanche and everything else is a tiny Swish chateau in comparison. The snow is rolling down the mountainside, a beautiful wave of white powder that sweeps up unique and delicate snowflakes and whips them into the crescendo of an landslide.
The history of modern humanity is based upon repeated and beaten attempts to create something interesting. If a single feat of daring can change the whole conception of what is possible then equally a single defeat of daring will reinforce the whole conception of what will always remain impossible; but it is important (and this is a handy epithet for the Off Modern movement), whatever you do, do something.
