Exploratory Nostalgia (Utopianism?)

Written in the distorted if not perspicacious style of old:

     What can we, whose calendar days are erased by the rustling of leaves and whose cauldrons boil with impotent indignation against the siege of daylight hours – what can we glean from the sand and stars? Our hours ironed out, we fade into abstraction. “Meaning” deigns from its skyward throne – built on clouds. Rain appears as tears to the weeping, and rivulets disregard lachrymose eyes.

     Timepieces mask the honeyed leaves, and torture us from the grip of autumn. What cosmic shout supplants the appointments you’ve made? For your engrossment, could you discern it from a car horn? Do you not hear the stifled siren in the claxon call? Its dumb scream as it rolls down a road darkly… it is pseudo-interaction, reduced to the fundamental social experience of modernity: anxiety and malaise. It is nature dissipating in acidic vapors. Blinding pollution: what can we glean?

     The miasmic artifice must be eliminated. Impotent art wraps itself in similar shrouds of self-importance, universality, and higher realms. Do not transcend; there is no such thing as ungroundedness, only abstraction, the illusion of ungroundedness. They are possible, or at least conceivable, “those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars.” (Lukács) Driving towards a telos, or feeling nostalgia (whichever suits your preference) implies a critique of the present, and evinces a pragmatic aspect to what would colloquially be called “idealism” in its implication that the present is amenable to directed change.

    Maybe the rosiness of Romanticism (or the romantic style) is not totally blind sentiment. That sentiment seems to have historically accompanied (prefigured) nineteenth-century utopianism with the early Romantic aesthetic movements. Is it that Romantic art, supposing itself autonomous, donned blinders to contemporary society, and the unsavory public manifestations of early industrial-capitalism? After all, it goes without saying that the many popular artists of that period were privileged enough to avoid the conditions of factory labor (although we sometimes see remarkable exceptions to this ignorance that prove the rule of the bourgeoisie artist). Was nineteenth century utopianism just a synthesis of two oppositional tendencies, the sublime divergence from the present and the corpus of social critique that had been steadily growing since the Industrial Revolution in seventeenth-century England?

     Perhaps it is possible to unearth and innovate a style that (nonetheless) countervails the present.