Cast in Sand: Figure of the Writer as Spiritual Form of Modernity
“No more great art, no more great figures of art. No more, even, great interest in art. But, above all, no more great writers especially of ‘greater than life’ variety”. This is the lamentation that begs the question, why. In this podcast we’ll attempt to indicate why in our day some of the most valued and comprehensible spiritual forms vanished, seemingly, overnight, focusing on the figure of great writer as an exemplar. We propose that dialectical character of modernity, consisting of permanent flux and an attempt to retain stable forms of the flux, eventually dissolves everything formed by modernity into nothing.
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Branko Malić
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The present epoch as a shitty day at the beach . . . sandwich? Drinks are in the cooler.
Wait, you’re working on a beach and complaining? Had enough of the perpetually drunk British tourist, shouting at you to fetch him another beer in broken Spanish? Chatting up tattoo clad bikini beauties at the bar in the evenings been grating on your nerves lately? Sick and tired of getting outdanced at a keg party following a session of beach volleyball?
Across my workplace is a spanning cemetery (which is also where I tend to take my daily walks) and for a few square miles in its vicinity, a fine sampling of brutalist architecture. The only piece of nature I’m exposed to on a daily basis is a patch of lawn facing out my window. There used to be a lonely maple in front of the foyer beneath which I would have smoked during breaks, but they sawed it down last fall. Safety issues.
I hate to sound trite, but the obvious thing to note here, and I speak of this as someone who has the effluence of his fingertips as the sole employable skill, is that written words do not generally translate well into marketable commodities. The entry point to such a career is laughably low and a million Indians with post-graduate diplomas are lining your way to it. Even so I consider myself to be tremendously lucky for the pittance of a remission I receive for my labors, as opposed to the usual lines of employment left to the down-on-their-luck in my hometown, which is panhandling and dealing drugs. But they’ve now even legalized that, the bastards.
I never had a passion for literature, neither in the way of creating or appreciating it. I do not brag about this, I simply find that it’s not an era for it. The only things I tend to read for fun these days (apart from non literary works) are cheap sci fi horror pulp novels from Black Library. But maybe that’s because it’s the predominant cultural setting right now.