Fires and forests

“Dreams,” wrote Gaston Bachelard, “don’t modernize themselves as quickly as our actions do.”1 However rapidly our built environment is transformed, and however unrecognizable our societies might come to seem, the realm of the imagination remains largely unchanged. From one generation to the next, we continue to dream of fires and forests, caves and deserts, flight and desire. The implication is that our minds are shaped less by the present moment—contrary to all those scaremongering op-eds about the destruction of our attention by new technologies, which date back at least to Socrates (for whom the very invention of writing had fostered “forgetfulness in the souls of learners who will no longer use their memories”)—than by images so deeply encoded that they cannot easily be overwritten.2

There is something reassuring about this fact, in the midst of the current maelstrom. That our imaginations have deeper roots than Hollywood and social media is easily evidenced by—and helps to explain—the way that works of art from distant times and places so often affect us more deeply than cleverly executed expressions of the fleeting historical moment. There is no contradiction in feeling a stronger attachment to the figures painted onto the walls of an Etruscan tomb than those represented by a multi-screen installation of archival news footage, however much more directly the latter resembles our waking experience. To speak of the present without attending to the narratives underpinning it is to settle for a superficial form of connection. That applies to politicians as much as artists.

We might take the point further, and perhaps considerably beyond the limits intended for it by Bachelard. It could be argued that our actions will never catch up with our dreams, simply because our imaginations and the source material on which they have been trained are infinitely more complex than any technological innovation could begin to approximate. No digitally generated representation of a fire could ever approach the vividness of its appearance in a nightmare (much less the real world, for all the talk of LLMs “hallucinating” and Mark Zuckerberg’s bewildering—and revealing—faith in the sensorially impoverished “metaverse” as a replacement for the inexhaustibly rich space inhabited by the senses).

All of which is to say that there is an argument, in our frightening present, for works of art that do not seek only to reproduce the conditions under which we are living, but might also connect us to more fundamental images, patterns, and narratives. Not least because these shared human inheritances run much deeper than the many more superficial—and more visible—identifiers of difference that are currently being used to divide populations so that a powerful minority might rule them. Our program this month returns at intervals to the past, focusing particularly on moments of historical rupture—from the proclamation of the People’s Republic in China to the first “sexual revolution” in the late nineteenth century—to reflect on how the connective possibilities of culture endure through even the most dramatic social and technological shifts. A lesson might be that artists need not always worry if their vision does not modernize as quickly as the world surrounding them. It might only mean that they are more desperately needed.