The truth is in the strings …

The poets aren’t the embattled ones in this eternal debate: they’ve always had a good press. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”, said P.B. Shelley, in the early 19th century. We’ve been madly applauding that line ever after even if we don’t quite believe it.

Nobody likes the reality principle. It’s far nicer and prettier to think of a world where the magic agents of change – poetry, music, academic philosophy – could transform us into the angels we think we could be but can’t seem to get around to becoming.

“Change is eternal”. True. We don’t need to go further and mar a profound paradox by cobbling on to it the palpably untrue platitudes that “change is always good” and “the present condition is always bad”. Yes, this debate is often framed in political terms. In that debate liberals are the “realistic” ones: they like change, anywhere anytime. Conservatives are the Don Quixotes of the modern world, standing athwart history and shouting “stop”. That can be funny, but it can also be noble, as Cervantes showed. In any case we don’t need to convert a relentless, amoral and unappeasible force into something approaching a new Gospel.

Aristotle saw poets as the truth-tellers and beauty-makers of our world, helping us endure and understand it by showing it in its awfulness, purging us with pity and fear. Such experiences can’t be created by an escapist art but only by one which holds a mirror up to our human life as it is lived. Aristotle’s description may be old, but it’s hard to improve upon.

No, Percy, you wrote a few good lines, but you didn’t prove to be the propagandist of a world waiting to be born. As for you, Saint Theodor (Adorno): you gave us mostly sour apothegms, a death wish lurking behind every one of them, appropriate for the dyspeptic time in which you wrote but not eternal truths anywhere except English Departments.

and keep in mind the massive fascist mechanism of the “music industry” is DESIGNED to do just that: keep musiciaans from being True, force them to produce “commercially viable” pap guaranteed to keep the listening public somnambulent, all for the sake of sustaining a business model (and indeed an entire way of life) that is already obsolete. (any “industry” that has to SUE ITS OWN CUSTOMERS in order to stay solvent…. don’t even get me started!)