The Future
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the great wide expanse of THE FUTURE. When all is said and done, I think everybody does a lot of thinking about the future. Wondering if they’ll be penniless forever, or whether they’ll really get to live the dream. I mean, the future is coming! It’s coming all the time! And people besides me think about it. For example, economists. Or palm-readers.
I also know that people besides me think about time and the future because I have been stuck for a few days sleeping very little because of a book called The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1919. I like reading it at night before bed, because it’s cool to read about total abstractions when it’s dark out, and because I keep dreaming about extreme interplanetary space missions and/or being in charge of a team of cool kids who are all wearing matching suits.
So there’s a whole CHAPTER of this book on the early 20th century’s ideas about the future. I went for it. There’s a lot of ground to cover when addressing the future, incidentally. The war. Philosophy, art, science, science fiction, technology, psychiatry, the Titanic. I lost myself in there for a while. In the end, though, I came out pretty encouraged by Futurism. Here is part of their manifesto, written in 1909:
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness…Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
Man, I wish I could have seen some guy just standing on top of a car letting the public have that speech. They were unafraid! They started trying new things! Just to see what would happen!!—and for the simple fact that it was new and not like the past! Some really cool art came out of it, too, like chromophony (the color of sounds!) and painting people that look like robots walking up the stairs and exposing film in weird ways.
As a movement, Futurism emphasized the celebration of change and originality. It spoke to the process of creation, of making as a remedy for temporality. This is what I like about it. It tried to get people to notice it, to be angered by it if necessary—but to notice! and to form their own opinions as a result. And yeah, also, its founders were completely misogynist, as many men in the early 20th century proudly, irrevocably were, counting feminism as an “opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice” they wished to demolish. (Whoa.) They also enjoyed exalting war and fascism. After WWI, Futurism became a vehicle for Fascist propaganda, and it morphed into a different animal from that of the original manifesto—one still addicted to destruction and conflict, but with little to no attention to collective creativity and the strength of youthful innovation and argument.
And no, I’m really not so keen on the war or the misogyny or the Futurists’ insistence on the categorical removal/destruction of the past and all its decorative trimmings (I mean, let’s be real, I love the decorative trimmings part. That could pretty much be my tagline. DECORATIVE TRIMMINGS. Plus, three-quarters of my wardrobe is not from anywhere near this decade and probably has a hole in it), but I am inspired by the reminder that the future is a clean slate, a big stretch of what-ifs! and wouldn’t-it-be-rad-ifs! and lets-try-its! for us become better versions of ourselves in. I am excited by the inference that the process of thinking this way is just as revolutionary—if not more so!—than the final product.
There was this architect called Antonio Sant’Elia who was all for the idea that new construction should respond to the needs of the modern age, using steel and glass and cardboard (submarines…?) and concrete, making every building a dynamic, operational machine. In 1914, he said THIS:
From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city.
Every generation must build its own city?! Geeze. Yes! I mean, it isn’t about the fact that this architect just told the world that he fundamentally believed that his buildings not only would, but should, fall apart. It isn’t about the buildings, or the art. It’s about the manifesto. The fact that someone (or groups of someones!) went on the record saying that each generation should build its own ideas. That rebuilding ourselves is the manifesto. That isn’t destructive! It’s the most creative! This guy saying that every generation build its own city shows that someone thinks it can.
So that’s what we’re doing now. Pretty encouraging, right?
I had a real bounce in my step as I did a (figurative) victory lap around my apartment. I felt so great, like I could make the funniest joke if anyone had been around to hear it. It was alright with me that no one was, because it was the potential that felt so good. To think how our ideas matter in that way! That our collective manifesto—all the mantras we write over and over in our notebooks and on our walls and at the tops of our blogs, that we might use as sign-offs if we had regular spots on live network television—those are makin’ us a city and we can live in it.
Man. So in my city (of the right here, right now) there is a lot of sewing and loud music for dancing in and really great pancakes, and everybody writes, and stretches their muscles in every skill they’ve got, and makes lists of things they want to learn, and learns them, one by one, and the world is at their fingertips just like the great wide expanse of the future.
Published by Annie Murphy