Rootedness in an Age of Impermanence

I was born in a mediæval city. Having been spared the ravages of carpet-bombing during the Second World War, most of the radical changes it suffered after the conflagration were a plague of altered street names and the gradually encroaching communist inspired architecture beyond the old urban centre. These historical vicissitudes, unremarkable for a Central European metropolis of the time, it thankfully survived.

   A restaurant fronts the old town square, first opened after the war in honour of the 1364 banquet which was hosted on the same premises by Casimir the Great for the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, and Louis I of Hungary and Croatia. It remains in continuous operation until today. On the opposing side of the square, which is one of the largest in Europe of the early Renaissance, stands the Basilica to Saint Mary with its characteristically mismatched towers. It looks on over congregants who have milled about at its feet for centuries. At the centre of the square, the Cloth Hall, an important node in the complex trade routs between Europe and the Far East. All this, is not a ten minute walk away from the “Wawel”, the city castle, whose oldest archæological excavations revealed a settled presence in the region older than the founding of Rome herself.

   This reminiscence occurs to me as I reflect on the absence of that specific feeling in cities, as some might put it, “unburdened by what has been”: that qualia experienced when walking over cobble-stones, past ancient masonry, the feeling that one is as much observed by the embedded history of the place as one admires its weathered æsthetics. I am furthermore reminded of the old Japanese belief that an inanimate object can become auspicious with age, and develop a kami, a soul of its own. A romantic traditionalist will not find it difficult to subscribe to such a view. When one is connected to the place on a deeper, spiritual level, that feeling transcends the ephemeral, into the tangible realm. This is why such experiences are deemed real and not mere ‘constructs’, and why their abolition is a profound assault on the heart and soul of a people.

   What is described here are monuments to collective memory, however there are other monuments, less profound but no less true, which are experienced on a personal, individual level. They do not need to be constructed from the Rock of Ages. They are imbued with meaning through the cathaxis of a single lifetime. So exclaims a character from Jack Kerouac’s The Town and The City (1950): “And someday we will all be remembering Galloway and the nostalgia of our youth here. We'll even remember this night in this cafeteria, on the eve of a New Year, 1941, and lost moments once unwanted.”

   Memory is always localised, but in the era of constant flux, where change itself is a celebrated value, locality alone can no longer confirm the truth of what is remembered. That Galloway cafeteria likely no longer exists, just as the childhood suburb or university campus here in Sydney has developed with such aggressive rapidity and impetuous scale that it is no longer recognisable: a foreign land in which the local is a perennial stranger.

   One common theme of the contemporary condition seems to be the impermanence and temporary nature of virtually every aspect of life, as well as its commodification, both in the private and public realm. Home, wherever it might be, will always evoke familiarity and affection. But the qualia described earlier is impossible in a city that prioritises the drive towards The Future over the preservation of its own heritage, its past, its history: a city that does nothing to honour its kami. The masonry does not look on, it has no soul. This is why the contemporary condition is a profoundly desacralised one. In recent years we witnessed the frenzy of mindless iconoclasm, mostly in the United States, but a softer yet more virulent form of this erasure is the planned, seemingly rational elimination of the physical space to which memory is connected – this is happening throughout the ‘developed’ West.

   Those raised in the intellectual tradition that defined fusionist Anglo-American conservatism, but who have always intuitively understood the above, must admit that this is attributable to the creative destruction, ceaseless ‘innovation’, and the near-fanatical pursuit of ‘novelty’ and ‘newness’ which characterised the West’s post-war hedonistic orientation. Economic considerations quickly subordinated the political sphere to its own demands of growth for the sake of itself. The resulting materialist quickening has infected every area of the inner life, and left the individual uprooted, unmoored, amnesiac and entirely unaware of his own identity beyond the fleeting demands of fad and fashion: the most immediate expression of the managerialist and technocratic order at the ‘end of history’. These tendencies (inherent in the cult of economic rationalism and frequently ascribed to the political ‘right’)  have contributed to the demise of the communitarian spirit and torn the bonds between people, reducing them to mere individuals of fungible worth. However, I often wonder whether there are thinkers on the orthodox left who likewise reflect on the consequence of their own revolutionary ideas. Communitarian sentiments are not served by the promotion of fluid identity or a global outlook based on oikophobia and xenophilia. If everything is self-defining and self-actualised, then nothing exists beyond the self and its will. The will too, is unanchored to anything beyond its own impulse, and acts according to a law of its own creation. The subject is thus trapped in an uninterrupted self-referential solipsism and his temporal orientation cannot shift from the here and now. Because the notion of particularities is rejected as a matter of doctrine, everything becomes conceptually ‘borderless’, a prison of infinite meaningless space. There is no concrete reference point, nothing to anchor one’s being to that which exists beyond the nominal, the merely voluntary and subscriptive. In a word, nothing seems real any longer.

   Our task now is therefore to regain a sense of rootedness in this age of impermanence, resacralise those “lost moments” and honour our memory once again.