I wrote this post kind of as a mission statement for my writing. I've been reflecting a lot on what I want to say about the world, and I wanted to explore some of those themes here.
Progress
As some of you may know, I've spent a huge chunk of time this summer and into the fall working on my writing. It's an old creative interest of mine that I wanted to redevelop, and it's going great. It's no surprise that I've been reflecting a lot on what I want to say about the world as I do this. And the idea that I have most been drawn to, and that I feel most natural expressing, is progress.
Even in the development of this website, which is when I started writing again, you can see the forces at play in my mind. On the one hand, there are changes to our social landscape and relationship to the web. On the other, there is the impulse to shape those changes. You may get the impression from early posts like "Why I made this website" that this impulse is just a desire to go back to the way things were. Actually, the idea has baked more in my head and I no longer feel quite the same way. I don't think that we should throw away the drive for progress in order to retain the past, but that we should recognize the tension that exists between these elements.
I've written all sorts of poems over the last few months, including some that explored darker themes. I just didn't feel like that was my voice. Instead, in the poems I loved the most I have been obsessed with the ideas and symbolism of progress and shared humanity. In particular, I wrote two poems about Montreal, one on Expo 67 and one on the symbol of Mont-Royal. Expo 67 has enamored me so much that it deserves its own section.
Optimism
The theme of Expo 67 was "Man and His World" and it comes from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He makes this fascinating observation in his novel "Terre des Hommes", from his experience as a pilot, that the lights of villages look like twinkling stars when they are seen from above at night. What a magnificent thought, that our world mimics in some way the stars that we have been dreaming about for our entire shared history.
Expo 67 projected this optimism to the world, and at least in Montreal locally, the impact was tremendous. Recently, at an antique book fair where I was looking at Expo 67 stuff, I struck up a conversation with two older gentlemen who had been to the Expo when they were about ten years old. Even at such a young age, they told me, the Expo had a profound influence on how they viewed the world. I'm pretty sure when I was ten, I was nowhere close to forming a worldview.
It made me wonder, though, what happened to that feeling. Today, Expo 67 is seen as the last peak of a cultural golden age in Quebec before we moved into a more fractured and turbulent political era. I suppose the feeling of optimism ebbs and flows. Progress continues to improve our lives, though it presents new challenges at each turn. Culturally we just seem to be kind of lost, and I don't think we have a sense of forward direction -- only forward decline. How do we get it back?
Openness
There are many reactions to the changes we see in the world today. Mine is certainly an active one. Other perspectives are more passive, fixated on the acceptance of doom and, in fact, the lack of a future at all! These views have proliferated in my generation. I always seem to be the most optimistic person among my peers regarding the central issues of our time. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't critique progress. But in art, in writing, in culture -- is this all we have to say? Are we truly so lost that we cannot dream of a future for ourselves? And what are the consequences of this thinking?
The forward direction we seem to have lost is not the actual development that we see happening everywhere, but the "progress of the heart", let's call it. A popular sense of global unity, solidarity, shared humanity, belief in one another, and optimism for what the future will hold, if we would only be open to it.
The quality of openness is one of faith. It shares space with hardship and uncertainty and great fear. Now, I don't think that we have closed our hearts entirely, but that in a world that has grown incomprehensibly big, there is nothing greater that we look to anymore. Progress of the heart is concerned with the development of our human spirit, maybe the greatest thing of all. So I want to explore that spirit in my writing and try to bring back a feeling of optimism that I think is missing in art today.