After the salon: on nostalgia, impermanence, context
The theatres were dark, the nation riven into warring factions, and Christmas gatherings discouraged or suppressed.
This was England in the mid-seventeenth century, but it is not difficult to draw parallels to 2021. Our last salon, A play without a stage: art in the time of closed theatres, considered what artistic culture looks like without high-profile performance. Are we destined now for a dark age of dramatic art? Perhaps not. As our speaker Heidi Craig explained, the absence of live performance in the period of Puritan rule did not signal the end of English theatre, but in some ways its solidification. Without easy access to live performance, people repeatedly pored over texts of their old favourites, and this nostalgia-driven process reinforced their popularity. Shakespeare, in particular, rose above all to became central to the English dramatic canon.
I cannot do justice to the scope and nuance of Heidi’s research, which you can read more about here, but will offer a few thoughts of my own which came out of our discussion.
Seeking the familiar
These are uncomfortable times, in which we weigh potentially existential threats when deciding to walk out the door. (Will it be microbes or the rising seas that will get us?) And in uncomfortable times, in dark times, we seek comfort. Nostalgia is comforting. As Heidi argued, it was nostalgia for the good shows seen, the grand evenings in the theatre, the buzz of live performance, that spurred Shakespeare and some of his more illustrious contemporaries to enduring fame.
A recent NPR podcast offers a fascinating discussion about nostalgia, which “for all its ambiguity, … does reliably offer one thing - an escape away from the uncertainty of the future and towards the permanence of the past.” It is comforting to experience old favourites again, to know what the next punchline is, not to be surprised by an unpleasant plot twist. It is this comfort and familiarly that drives the popularity of formulaic literary genres like mystery and romance (as we discussed in our salon about romance novels). They follow a familiar pattern .
I find myself wondering who and what is being canonized on a societal level in these dark times. In popular culture, the 1990s seem to loom large in the imagination again, with the enduring popularity of Friends, a level of media coverage of Britney Spears almost on par with the last years of the millennium, and the return of the fashions so ubiquitous in that decade. Send help: we may be in the process of canonizing Monica Geller and the crop top.
What will future historians make of that?
The collective intake of breath
I could not help but draw parallels between Heidi’s discussion of the energy of live performance — the collective intake of breath, the shared emotion — and these very salons. I have sorely felt the absence of a collective of humans in my living room this last 18 months. Perhaps you have felt a similar absence, in a classroom, a restaurant, or a concert hall. Oh yes, we now have a broader reach, and I am grateful for those who have been able to join us from Atlanta, and Waterloo, and Hong Kong, but we all know something is lost when conversation is filtered through the Internet.
There is a difficult line between access and impermanence that we are treading here. Live theatre is a rarefied privilege, more than it ever has been. Being able to see a virtual experience is more democratic. To experience even half of the wonder of Broadway, or the symphony, or yes, a live stream of Shakespeare from the Globe itself, is a gift.
And yet, what is lost when the theatres are closed, when every lecture can be seen on a recording, when we rewatch the old favourites again and again, is the unknown. The time we spend together may be transcendent — or it may all go horribly off piste. But whatever happens, it will happen and then it will be gone. It is ephemeral.
The artist Andres Amador designs stunning geometric shapes on beaches at low tide, intentionally and with the knowledge that within hours his creations will disappear. It is akin to a Buddhist mandala, painstakingly created out of sand and then ritually destroyed, which represents how fleeting our material existence is. As Amador says on ephemerality, “…as a cultural norm, we view permanence as having more value. But through this art I came to recognize that in the long arc of time, nothing will last — eventually all things I have done and that all humans have ever done will be erased.”
In some ways, ephemerality is the opposite of comfortable. Perhaps this is its appeal. A live performance, a live salon, a new dish, a book one has not read before — these are risky. Anything might happen. We might not like it! In that way, it is analogous to life itself.
Woven, together
People often ask me why I do not record the salons. The answer I give is twofold: first, because I believe in the ephemeral. I like the idea that our times together are fleeting and therefore more precious. Second, I’ve discovered that people behave differently when they know the way they show up that day will live on after the event. They become more guarded. They weigh their words more carefully, hoping to avoid anything being taken out of context.
I love this word, context. When I was doing my Masters research in History (back in the middle ages), a number of my primary sources were accessed in a novel way: online. They’d been digitized by libraries across the Western US, giving me far greater access to them than I would have had otherwise. Yet with all this new content came the risk of it being taken out of context, of doing a simple search for key words and phrases, casually ignoring the paragraphs, books, or physical sites in which they sat. I spent a lot of time then thinking through the implications of my power to talk about history, and my responsibility to represent these sources as honestly as I was able, even when they were messy and nuanced and did not support my neat thesis argument.
I know of other salons that are winding down, endangered less by the pandemic than by a creeping fear people have of saying the wrong thing and being “cancelled.” What a tragedy this is, to take away our opportunity to build context and understand the many layers that surround how we see the world.
I reflect that the word context comes from the Latin for con [with, together] + text [weave, woven]. A number of our modern idioms in English relate to weaving, and in many ways the material culture of the past is our best way to understand it. Much of what we have preserved from Shakespeare’s time is not on paper, as Heidi has written about, but on very thin linen cloth woven from old, recycled rags.
In these salons, there is something of this idea of weaving. We need both the warp and the weft, in their opposing directions, to make a sturdy fabric. We need our differing ideas, our impermanence, and our willingness to risk going off piste to understand each other better.
Together, woven.