an essay about ideas

So here's something I wrote this week about ideas. It's strange and trippy and started out as a letter to my friend Pete Davis, who is an idea man par excellence - check out his amazing idea/company here: http://www.commonplaceusa.com/ It's a little ironic to be blogging an essay that ultimately points out the failure of the Internet as a vehicle for ideas. But you work with the medium you can, right?

Anyway, I call this - well - a hybrid of an essay and a poem, dubiously historically rooted. Or: a natural history of ideas.

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I’ve been imagining a kind of historiography of ideas: lucky for me, the big privilege of the poet is to walk through imaginary countries, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for. One thing that’s struck me about this fixation on ideas I have is that it all seems to start in the nineteenth century—the big era of progressives and their fervid projects, in the big stewpot of egalitarian America. I’m also kind of stuck on the nineteenth century--and I’ve had trouble moving on.


It’s 1750...the printing press has been around for a few hundred years, but has had little success among the little-educated masses of Europe. The serfs of Russia are still bound to their fields, toiling with little hope of recompense. The dream of freedom will wait for them for another century. In the Indies, in the new colonies of America, the slave-ships are still docking by the hundreds. And on the backs of these workers—in the drawing-rooms of the nobles, in the new coffee shops springing up all over Britain, in the freshly decked-out quarters of the new petit bourgeoisie, even in the dim study-houses of the Jews—the first birth pangs of the real idea are beginning. Ideas beforehand have a little bit of fragile history: the records and philosophies passed, hand-written, from elite hand to elite hand, the small illuminations of the monks through humanity’s enfeebled ages. But it’s long enough after Gutenberg now—a little light is peeping in. The small, ghostly mouth of the idea is beginning to speak. How strange an idea is: an entity with no counterpart on earth, born out of thought and borne on by thought, the unique province of mankind... pluripotent, but alone utterly powerless.

In the printing presses and the coffeehouses and the study rooms and the drawing rooms, aloof from the ignoble striations of the society that gave birth to them, ideas are beginning to hatch and pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand... Romanticism, Impressionism, socialism (1840s), Lamarckian (1809) and Darwinian evolution (1859), the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Mill and Schopenhauer and Bakunin... the birth of innumerable imagined republics is beginning. And spreading, for the first time, out of the little drawing-rooms of the richest—into the public blood.

It’s a heady time—the birth of the idea. Writing about Nietzsche, Lechower, one of the first visionary Zionists, said—“What I can say of him—he found a bowl deep in his spirit and upturned the bowls of everyone else. And replaced it with his own, a bowl overbrimming with a new and beautiful essence.”

Whatever you say of Nietzsche—the nineteenth century is the time the bowl of human nature first began to be fully upset. The first imaginings of human potential—the notion that that potential could be limitless—were taking root in human hearts. Men began to look to their fellows and imagine themselves bound together as nations, began to thirst for lands in which to root that public body, free of the shackles of empire. Others looked at the seemingly impassable chasm between classes and began to imagine it pregnable. One man made a machine that could capture the human voice, speaking; another made a machine that could capture the clear image of a man, harnessing light into stillness, stamping curved glass with a truth hitherto unknowable. Out of the consciousness of individual men, that clamorous darkness we all possess, ink began streaming from pens and then from presses, all with the same new, imagined, unimaginable message: the world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.

Steam poured into valves and the valves formed themselves into automobiles. Man, who had yearned from the dawn of time to sprout wings, constructed them out of wood and metal and the brittle but immeasurable force of his own ingenuity. The serfs shed their broad breeches and their ties to the brown land and became the black mass of the cities, that nervy, malleable mass they call “the people.” And the ideas streamed towards them: inchoate...unreal...unstoppable. In the nineteenth century men stopped looking back to the charred gates of Eden, and looked to create a new, perfect garden: the garden of ideas—a paradise that had never been. A peaceful and ethical garden: everything in neat rows, so carefully planted and tended that nothing could ever be as it was before. And how could it be? No one had ever attempted this!

But by the twentieth century, the paradise of ideas had become a dark garden. Socialism became Communism, raised up its red flag, and felled whole regions; the air of Europe’s countries was clotted with smoke; nationalism had showed its claws, and raked the land with greed, making colonies out of all the earth. Out of the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines blared the unified assent of thousands of voices, no man distinguishable from the great roar. Little words in the mouths of scholars and students became bullets, filling bayonets; and the earth was filled with trenches, and the trenches were draped with the bodies of young men whose ideas were draining, with their life’s blood, into the razed earth. By the middle of the century the bodies could no longer be counted: lost to ash; only a few gold teeth; innumerable under unmarked earth. Or stacked: in neat little rows. With dust filling their mouths, the dead could no longer disturb the garden of ideas; their stiff fingers would never muss the shell-pocked furrows.

But by the end of the twentieth century Europe was fatigued by blood. The flag of Communism fell over Russia, and the masses pulled Stalin down by his cold stone nose. They were weary of being the masses. They were weary of waiting for bread. They were weary of mourning their brethren. The smoke of the eternal memory flame, lit in every city and village for the fallen, stung their eyes and cleared them. The masses wanted to be men again. Each from a womb. Each with a name.

The privilege of an idea: it’s born to a man. Men’s privilege: their fathers die, and they rise up in their place. As a result, the memory of mankind is short; its little sight is poor. Even if ideas had spent themselves utterly in blood, it’s possible that someday men would forget their bankruptcy. Very few ideas are immortal, although all can be; some are as short-lived as their makers, and are blind as frogs in their last days.

Another privilege of a man: when he falls to the ground, he may lift himself up to his feet. And when he puts his hand to the ground again, he scoops up a cup of earth, and he lifts it to his mouth.

A new kind of idea began to be born: instead of turning all the earth into a paradise, man began to look inward, towards himself. By the end of the twentieth century, men had begun to doubt the sweeping power of the old ideas. They fixed every idea they saw with the stamp of its maker, the date of its origin. They looked deeply at their hands: they saw a tracery of veins, each leading in to a sole, inviolable center. And they said: no two men can be connected at the heart and survive; how then can we say this of whole nations?

They did not seek, any more, to shake the earth down and rebuild it again. They wrote new ideas in the fog of their breath on their mirrors, and they kissed their own lips. From their lips emerged a new song: the song of gain. The song of gain issues from one mouth, alone; but when men sing it in their thousands, the whole earth trembles with its discordant music.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had given men the earth: had filled maps with names, had filled the names with teeming cities; had filled each man’s mind with his own importance. A pity in man: the bride of self-importance is avarice, that hungriest of sirens. The engines that had begun to work in the nineteenth century grew fatter still on the earth’s deep reserves, and the rivers grew sick and blenched and gushed filth. Slender steel trees sliced the sky of cities into ribbons. And most remarkable of all: from the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines men created thinking-machines. They could think but little. They could see nothing, unaided. Really, they were nothing but mirrors—mirrors that men might fill with pictures no one could have imagined before. With the aid of these thinking mirrors, men could stamp their names on the air, could sing the small songs of their own importance. Ideas that might have seemed immutable—earth-changing—in the nineteenth century now flashed quick as flames and were gone, sliced into ribbons by the unstoppable mirrors.

And the pictures continue to flash. And still men sign their names on the cold, cold glass.

I will tell you who I am: I am a woman in a mirror. Each day I see my own memory cut into thinner and thinner ribbons. I am weary of signing my own name on the air. Fragile collection of syllables that it is, it grows weary with use.

I will tell you what I want: I want to turn away from the mirror. I want to walk back now: I am weary of the path we’ve taken. Most of all, I am weary of looking only at myself.

I turn away from the mirror and I look out to the street: sleeping in houses are my brothers and sisters, lying awake under cold stars are my brothers and sisters, stooping in hot sun far away are my brothers and sisters. Each from a womb. Each with a name.

Brothers and sisters: I want to turn back to the birthplace of ideas. I don’t want to wind up the bloody spool of the twentieth century—even if I could. But I’m sick and tired of the song of gain: a poor song with one discordant note, with one weary refrain.

Before it’s gone, I want to lean down to the ground and pick up a handful of earth. I want to stand up on my own two feet and cup my hand to my mouth.

I look down at my two dusty hands: the pallid skin, the tracery of veins. I listen to my blood. In my blood is an old song. Many of us have forgotten it; the first singers are long dead. But it’s there, pulsing, hovering, just under the fingernails:

The world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.