The End of the Modern World is a poetic sequence of more than 3,000 lines which I believe makes it by some way the longest sequence to have been written by an Irish poet, not excluding Tom Moore’s Lalla Rookh which is a sort of Irish Arabian Nights – different stories told by the same narrator. It is an elegy for a period of capitalist development, the latter part of which many of us lived through and which most of us experienced as liberating and even exciting, despite its horrors. Here are some lines which describe wishes that it was not impossible to think might have been fulfilled by a city of that era.
Let the city be spectacle, circus, arena this evening,
Its justification sensation, its poetry wonder,
And let it cling fast to its colours, unholy and gaudy,
Forgetting the facts of its life, its grimness of purpose.
Let the news that is flashing through bulbs on facades be exciting
But innocent also. Let crowds in another city
Bring down a dictator, lone ocean fliers be sighted,
Sporting events bring riches to all the participants,
Records be broken in every sort of endeavour,
The roar of the crowd sustain the elation of sacrifice.
But over it all, like the neon red glow on the clouds,
The sense of a future the artists have comprehended,
Demanded in manifestoes, foreshadowed in dramas,
Simple, electric and complex, achieved like the morning.
This was “modernity” as Susan Sontag described it in an interview (published as an essay titled A Few Weeks After) – the only culture, as she pointed out, that makes possible the emancipation of women as well as capitalism: “The modern world, our world”. A world that, as she also pointed out, had been shown to be seriously vulnerable.
Like all elegies, The End Of The Modern World is as much a celebration of what is past or passing as it is a lament. But a comparison of the full version now published with the extracts which appeared in this newspaper in 1982 will show an increasing emphasis on the grimness of purpose of our culture at the expense of the playful aspects; the purpose being the profits of a few and the anxiety of everybody else to sell what little they have to offer.
As will be seen from the fact that a good portion of The End of the Modern World was first published more than 30 years ago, I have been engaged on it for a considerable length of time, though not exclusively, it goes without saying. During those years I published a number of other books and regular pieces of journalism. They included No Laughing Matter and The Last Modernist, which are biographies of the major Irish literary figures, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett; another long poem, The Minotaur; and two collections of shorter lyrics as well as a Collected Poems. I would go to it at odd hours, drawn I think as much by the desire to continue with that wonderful English parent rhythm, the iambic pentameter, as by the view of the world which I wanted to express.
Much of that time I have been conscious of the fact that a prophecy Karl Marx made more than 150 years ago was coming true. This was that under capitalism, sooner or later all values other than monetary values would be superseded and that everything would become a commodity to be judged only by its monetary value. To trace this process, I had to go back to the Middle Ages which is where the modern era and The End of the Modern World both have their beginnings. Remote in time though that is, much of what began then is only now coming to be archaic and its true nature revealed. The medieval ideals of chivalry and romantic love were still clearly reflected in the popular music of my youth, for example. To assist this process of uncovering and disentangling I have called many other voices to my aid. Here for example is the voice of Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz.
What people did not know was how I worried
How when at night I stood beside the transports
Or at the crematorium or fire-pits,
I thought at length about my family,
Fearing for them in the uncertain future….
And then there was my work. My sense of duty
Has always made life much more difficult
For me than for my colleagues. I worked hard,
Perhaps too hard, at everything I did,
And when they offered me another post
Which meant promotion and which I accepted,
I was at first unhappy. My involvement
With all I did at Auschwitz was so great.
Putting this into poetry was not so much a matter of versifying Hoss’s prose, which I have done, as placing it ironically. There seems to me to be an extraordinary overlap with our own values, perhaps not a sharing but certainly some kind of identity. Ours has been a time of great wars and revolutions, of new obscenities and old. In many cases I have tried to illustrate our dilemmas directly as in the above quotation.
Chief among these voices, though, are those of the great historical uncoverer, Karl Marx, and his counterpart in psychology, Sigmund Freud. If these seem unpromisingly poetic figures let me add immediately that it was the chief poet of the age itself, the Frenchman Charles Baudelaire, who provided one of its principal themes and this was the commodification of the self, better known by an older word, prostitution. This primary activity, which Baudelaire saw as underlying all else, has of course many disguises, and disguise in its multiplicity of forms is also one of the principal themes of The End of the Modern World.
I don’t want to give the impression, however, that this is in any way a propagandist work. It does not call for us to return to a prior state of being, nor mobilise to advance on a future one. I have let my own sensibility roam pretty freely over the history of our time and the possibilities for its future. I have discovered inter alia the truth which I have always believed, that everything is poetic if we are open to unlocking it.
My father used to say when confronted with childish hullabaloo about things supposedly gone missing – “Nothing is ever lost, but sometimes we don’t know where to find it”. In return I would say that nothing is un-poetic. But sometimes we do not know how to discover the poetry which is all around us.
The End Of The Modern World by Anthony Cronin is published by New Island, 96pp, €11.95
