The Test of Time
Everything is temporary, and it’s easy to forget that. There’s something in us that drives us to seek stability, try to find something permanent and reliable, that can be there for us forever, and during this pursuit it becomes to forget for a while that there’s no such thing. This desire for permanence obscures – a blindfold may not be pragmatic headwear but at least you know what you’re going to be faced with when you open your eyes.
A few problems emerge from this craving for unshakable stability. From the artistic perspective, we often find ourselves worshiping the idea of timeless stories, of classics – we want to create something immortal, that people from any time and place can love and cherish, and this isn’t necessarily an ideal that makes a lot of sense. If we understand art as communication, then we ought to understand as well that all communication is contextual, and any art we create or appreciate will shift in meaning tremendously over centuries and decades – or even weeks and days. None of this is meant to be a sick burn on Shakespeare or anything, only to suggest that what we hear from his stories is probably quite distant from what he was originally intending to convey – mostly dick jokes, from what I can tell – and that, far from standing the test of time, the modern appreciation of his work emerges largely because we exert great effort to establish a historical artistic context within which it can be enjoyed.
But every preserved piece of art history like that, every frozen piece of context, is something to be learned, an additional cognitive burden, and we can only accept so many of these. Sometimes it’s worth it! It probably is for Shakespeare, even if noise gets introduced over time, like a game of telephone played across centuries. However, the art we’re willing to do this for is suspiciously bound to particular places, cultures, ethnicities, and continues to be so even as more and more modern works get accepted to that canon of literature, leading to an increasingly narrow space for other works to flourish.
All because we want to believe in the concept of immortal art.
We also want to believe in permanent solutions to problems. A permanent form of government. A permanent hierarchy of power and permanent structure for addressing grievances. How are we meant to build a static system for people, when people themselves change so quickly? So, then, we go for a sort of second-order permanence, a system that can incorporate changes into itself in a regulated way – but the bigger this system gets the more we want to believe in it, and the more we want to believe in it the less attention we pay to its workings. It changes over time, and if there’s no one watching to oversee those changes then many of them will be for the worse. That isn’t to say any existing government system was necessarily particularly just or equitable at its inception – only to say that faith in it being thus has always undermined attempts to make it more so.
While we may eventually become accustomed to our own mortality and fragility, many of us never become really accustomed to the mortality and fragility of the world we live in and will someday leave behind.
Problem Machine 