Memory Lane

One begins to realize that our national middle-class hunger to return to two decades of Depression, world war, Prohibition, Racism Unadmitted, Covert Fascination with Sex, Deadly Innocence, Isolationism, Provincialism, and Deprivation Remembered as Good Old Days has become a cultural sickness.

The past has always been a rich source for fun and profit. Nostalgia is a good thing. It keeps us from forgetting our roots. Readers of this column know I trip down Memory Lane myself frequently. But it is clearly evident that when an entire nation refuses to accept the responsibilities of its own future, when it seeks release in a morbid fascination with its past, and when it elevates the dusty dead days of the past to a pinnacle position of Olympian grandeur… we are in serious trouble.

Harlan Ellison’s July 3, 1970 Los Angeles Free Press column. Ostensibly a review of Happy Days. Sorry, Fonzie!

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Thought:

“A poem is a corporeal thing. When you create in any art form there’s always going to be some element of the organic. And anything organic hits the limits of animality. A poem is full of meat. It can’t ever escape that, and I think that’s beautiful, though it’s also terrifying to be trapped in a meat sack. In forms of media that are less language-based, like sculpture or painting, there’s a physical reality to them—the canvas, the wood the canvas is stretched on, the paint itself—but people tend to forget the materiality of language or to think that language is above all that. I don’t think it is. To respect poems is to respect them as living, and more living than us. They’re a relic of the organic, always.”

Dorothea Lasky

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