Sanguine
By Paul Cameron Brown
"The clock indicates the hour but what does enternity indicate?"
Whitman
Imagine, being told cubism isn't painting. That
Beardsley didn't die at 26, unheralded as a boy genius
or Corot didn't come to Paris after all.
Imagine, The Louvre without a rooftop, the
intelligentsia sitting down to a ragged table
surrounded by sawdust intellects, Proust not being
able to write his name.
Now that's splendour-that's in-depth "feeling".
That's emotion to pull your socks or catch the bus on
a brittle day.
It's easy. Try to "feel" the event. It's 1896. People are
perturbed (or so we are told) because the century's
getting old. Time's rushing by. There's an alarm clock
set to buzz at eternity's gate, Midnight 1900.
In probing the malaise that hit Europe circa 1881,
psychologists would have us believe the world grew
despondent. Despondent because a whole hundred
year cycle was about to elapse; despondent because
life itself was running out. Those poor Edwardians!
Poor lovers of the elegant, the late Victorians, belle
epoquers. A penny for their thoughts when
confronting a Picasso without the vantage of
hindsight.
If Europe and its child bride, America, grew uneasy in
the declining years of the past century. How then our
era? (These same psychologists pinpoint people's
spirits rise in the opening years of a new century.)
Now we're poised for the "really big one": the
cataclysm. What a boon for the absurdists. Peaches
and cream-not just one century dangling but the
culmination of ten.
There's even a word for it. Millenium, I'll say it again.
Better yet, a mere two millenia since Christ's
departure, we are poised again on the threshold. Half
& half. Like a party twelve pack-six of one, half
dozen of the other.
Remember. when contemplating your ennui or
malaise (whichever word is currently most
fashionable), you can hardly figure for less. Eternity's
given to you, my peers, a singular opportunity. And
from what we know of the 20th century. it should be a
grand slam homer. Already the clean-up batter is
staged for action. The bat looms over the plate.
There's so much bad news it's enough to make an
optimist greedy. After all, with this much horror there
is caused only for danse macabre celebrations.
1985. Only 15 years left before the digital watch rolls
over. before the cannon with the flower pops out.
Those forward looking voyeurs of hundred years
back must have felt cheated when mentally reversing
their lot with the denizens of the 20th century.
Page 13
In 1885, you could only gripe about the aging process
of a single tenth of one component. In 1985, you've got
that and the Millenia. Trendy things like atmospheric
pressure, negetive ions, adverse body rhythms and a
welter of other pseudo impressive formula abound to
help out in your witchhunt.
Surprise. 1066 saw comets, omens. signs coded in
stars speeding ecross the sky-a host of ditlurbing.
natural phenomena to boot. The vigilant saw meteors
at Caesar's, death.
The National Enquirer predicts Australia will break
into the sea. Californians will be upstaged. The
futurists will all need waterwings. The Club of Rome
hints the next years auger more chilling holocausts.
Everywhere, survival scenarios proliferate. Pro-lifers
will rearrange proverbial deck chairs on the
Titanic. Soothsayers will become all the rage as we
plot myriad escapes. A year's supply of canned goods,
anyone?
1885 has a lot to teach us. Umbrellas, a gentle ennui
like fine mist compounded by traffic in & out of the
Moulin Rouge. Perhaps a surfeit of absinthe helps just
as its equivalent does today. "Cheer up, there will
always be an England" doesn't sound so bad after all.
And there's always that one recruiting poster, "What
did you do in the Great War, daddy"?