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About Jens
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Is There Nothing Left To Say?We live in the dying ashes of Western culture. The Bachs, the Shakespeares, the Rembrandts--where are the great men of our day? There are none. The giants of a former age have gone, and left us here to tend the dying flame. Our theaters are buried alive in manuscripts, our publishers, drowning in stories. But what is there to contribute? And why is none of it any good? We reach out, clutching at mediocre work, only to crown it, unmerited, with our praise and grim delight. The well we sip from tastes of dust. Is it, perhaps--could it be--that there is simply nothing more to say? Every culture grows, then blooms, then dies. And in that blooming strives the furious concentration of the young man searching out his place in the world. But that culture, fully bloomed, crystallizes a central core, alien and inscrutable, an untranslateable human experience of the world, of which art and science are its clearest and profoundest expression. The men who first described our Western world, our earliest artists and scientists, were the pioneering explorers of our narrow symbol universe. Shakespeare and Newton, Bach and Galileo--what lucky men they must have been, born, nay, destined, to discover the West in their own souls, and record what they found. Just as our possibilities now seem increasingly well-worn and trite, so to them the world still contained the illusion of endless potential, stretching out as far as the inner eye could see. They laid the cornerstone, discovered the metaphors, the symbols that describe our lives, and by and for whose meaning we live. In this way, we are truly "pygmies on the shoulders of giants". And so, as fewer and fewer paths remain to be explored, and the jigsaw puzzle of Western culture nears completion, the raw, messy energy of the creator ebbs, withering under the calcifying gaze of that undertaker of every age: the academic. Awe, wonder, and mystery have been replaced by "critical analysis" of the "text". Words, alive and meant to thrill, are parsed and dissected under the merciless gaze of the uninspired professor. But "texts," like frogs, don't last too long in the dissection pan, and our aesthetic naievete is severed by a scalpel, replaced in our souls, as in our culture, by the entemologist's taxonomy, marvelling at the beauty of butterflies by sticking them with pins to cardboard. So it has always been, in latter days like those in which we live, as dynamic culture solidifies into enduring, ever-practical civilization. Imperial Rome, our Classical cognate, produced ever-mushrooming legions of writers and scholars, mimicking, consciously or no, the styles that went before, filling many scrolls of papyri, and saying very little indeed. What are we, then, the writers and artists of our day to do? If all roads have been mapped and all journeys undergone, what is there for us, the denizens of this late and downwardly-trending age, to do? Spengler, in his Decline of the West, advises us to seek work as bankers, manufacturers, industrialists. Our times require practical, acquisitive men. But he also notes, almost sadly, that there are those of us who are still driven, regardless of our own self-consciousness of its futility, to write, to act, to paint--to create. This is our tragedy, and the tragedy of history. We are doomed to howl at the moon, without voice, songless, our futile rage bursting from the seams of a life unsuited to these times, in a waning age of the already- done, bit players in a long-foretold tragedy. |