HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Tracing the past to unturn stones of the future
Imagining an alternative future can sometimes best be served by immersing oneself in vestiges of the distant past, writes Chris Thurman
Humankind," says the enigmatic bird in one of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, "cannot bear very much reality." The line has become a global poetic meme of sorts — not because Eliot was the first to express the idea, but precisely the opposite: it strikes us, intuitively, as true, like an archetypal manifestation, something that emanates from what Jungians would call the collective unconscious. If the earliest readers of the Four Quartets encountered the poems in the context of the Second World War — during a period that must have seemed to them the acme of mass communication about the grimmest imaginable reality, linked to unprecedented levels of production and destruction — then Eliot’s epigrammatic statement has acquired a new resonance in the 21st century. Reality, for us, is increasingly virtual and ineluctably mediated. The combination of social media and a 24-hour news cycle presents a conundrum: we are surrounded by an unreal-reality constituted by the endless rotation of the US pr...
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