With the Retromania bomb about to drop, Simon Reynolds gestures at Borges as a prophet of "excess all areas" culture.
My own high-cultural penny'orth, however, is Eliot:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
Famously, this is sorta bullshit. Try to parse these lines, and you quickly lose any thread of meaning you might think you pick up on. But that phrase: If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable - that resonates doesn't it?
Moving quickly into the realms of massive theologico-cultural conjecture, the whole retromanic thing seems to me to have something to with the occlusion of death in a modern technocratic society. Death has replaced sex as the great taboo. We just don't know what to do with death - the one thing a culture of pluralism and excess cannot find a space for: the absoluteness of an ending. Hence, things that are obsolete become weirdly fetishized. The sobering fact that the past is absolutely no more is replaced with a sort of adolescent inability to let go of childhood toys and move on.
I think if there's meaning in Eliot's Burnt Norton it's this - this basic religious sense that we only properly exist when we let go of the past and treat the extraordinary, tragic reality of dying as a means of defining what life is. That is what he means by "redemption".
I think.
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