Metropolis, by Fritz Lang (I can find a snippet of the rhythm at 2.26 in http://bit.ly/yQVqqS, but I swear the segment was much longer). It's a sci-fi dystopia about Industry dividing the head from the heart, the managing classes from the workers.
But what amazed me was the synchrony of the rhythm with the stop-start nature of modern roads; how the rhythm almost matched the piston-like up and down of my legs; the speed and intensity of city-cycles; our strange immersion in energy patterns far more powerful than we ourselves can produce. All this is in Metropolis too.
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All of the metrical arts - poetry, music, cinema, theatre - draw our hearts in through rhythm. It may be, as my friends The Spring Offensive say, - "I'm a hot-blooded mammal / And my heart's just a muscle. // It pumps my blood around me / And I need every drop to help me." (http://bit.ly/ArD5cp) We are excited by the play of rhythm, - not least because it's felt in our blood and along our hearts (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Any great artist taps into our psyche this way.
For instance in my own favoured medium of poetry, Nabokov says of Pushkin's Onegin stanza - "This opening pattern and the terminal one can be compared to patterns on a painted ball or top that are visible at the beginning and end of the spin." That is, the relationship between the parts resolves itself from a fascinating contrariety of colours by the stanza's end (though this makes the Onegin stanza sound difficult, whereas it is wonderfully smooth and easy to read). Or a critic describing Yeats's lack of narrative skill in contrast to Chaucer who "would offer swift summary gestures and a better control of pace: - kinesthetic precision, fascination with tools and other action-helpers, sympathy for muscular strain."
One reason I think poetry will never be popular again is that it can't keep pace with most of modern life. The tools are too complex and the dominant media is too distracting and multi-sensory. Arguably, the last great English city poet was Auden; but his authoritative voice could still draw power from the most popular domestic medium - the radio. Now attempt to translate poetry to TV, and the visuals detract from the medium, since the words themselves are designed to take the whole narrative. And even beyond that, how do you render cinematic visuals in poetry itself? I think a few - Derek Walcott; Alice Oswald; Michael Donaghy; Robert Pinsky - have managed to convey visual dynamism that can compete. But it takes a rare power.
Someone who can marshall enargeia. It literally means "in work", yet it translates as the "vividness of lived experience" or "a visually powerful description that graphically creates someone or something in words."
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A few days ago, I had a discussion with Aleks K about energy. We were talking about cycling at the moment - suffering the cold winds, and no sympathy from drivers. The next couple paragraphs roughly summarise the beginning of our conversation.
As a cyclist, you become conscious you're the person on the road driven by your own energy. The car has a different rhythm. Mostly it's controlling the pedals and the gears, but as a driver, you gradually convince yourself you must drive at the speed limit if possible. The engine almost takes a grip on the brain.
Cognitive extension theory suggests that man as a tool-making animal had developed the ability to imagine himself into his tools. For instance, feeling with the end of a stick; learning tennis - the feedback loop from strings to hand; working our thoughts out on paper with a writing tool. And we use this to build an environment that matches the limits of our technological abilities - as beavers build dams, we build cities. To create a world that matches our inner energies and aspirations. And cars reinforce this weird intimacy between man and tool.
I then mentioned this email I got from Oxford Business Alumni (not that I am a business alumni, but I'm glad I'm on their mailing list anyway) -
"Energy is the story of the human race. Low-cost energy fuelled industrial revolutions and raised millions out of poverty. The movement of goods across large distances, worldwide dissemination of knowledge and shrinking of international borders has all been made possible through the provision of affordable energy.
However, these achievements come at a cost – land, water, and air pollution is increasing, and once cheap energy sources are becoming scarcer and more expensive to find. Furthermore, 2 billion people today do not yet have access to energy.
The world faces two primary energy challenges, namely, how developed countries can maintain their competitive advantage while transitioning to a more expensive renewable energy system; and as developing countries like China and India increasingly consume fossil fuels to drive their economic growth, how developed countries can build global consensus to lower carbon emissions."
However, these achievements come at a cost – land, water, and air pollution is increasing, and once cheap energy sources are becoming scarcer and more expensive to find. Furthermore, 2 billion people today do not yet have access to energy.
The world faces two primary energy challenges, namely, how developed countries can maintain their competitive advantage while transitioning to a more expensive renewable energy system; and as developing countries like China and India increasingly consume fossil fuels to drive their economic growth, how developed countries can build global consensus to lower carbon emissions."
Quite an interesting summary of global energy tensions I thought.
But before we could discuss that in depth, I moved on to a broader point about energy. Energy - not just "fuel-powered energy" (as Aleks put it) - is what makes stuff move. Without it, we'd live in a static universe.
Aleks then said that this tied in to his current read Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose. In it, Penrose discusses entropy, the fact that the amount of disorder (or chaos) increases with the passage of time. Penrose says that our planet, with its single-point energy source from above (ie the sun), is distinguished by its capacity for controlled entropy. That is, energy comes in small enough packets to enable a certain amount of order.
Which is really interesting. Controlling energy involves harnessing orderly disorder.
And this can be seen in terms of global energy tensions. The desire to control our energy production but also to keep people happy - directly mirrors the tension between worries about the environmental pollution of energy creation, and the desire for public order. More energy = more goods and more knowledge = consuming, energy-saturated populace - and political popularity.
Like the cycle at the traffic lights, control over energy underpins the degree of movement and choice we have.
Like the cycle at the traffic lights, control over energy underpins the degree of movement and choice we have.
(That's a nice point to end on. We also discussed Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Maxwell's demon - "ah, that's interesting because it's about the direction of information as well as the direction of energy flow"; but I can't see how to fit that in here.)
