On Being the Future's High Middle Ages: Urgent Innovations

A Map Upside-Down Investigation

We have to start imagining the future again.

These aren’t End Times. It can feel like that is exactly what they are, but it’s an illusion. I’m not denying anyone’s scenarios for why it could be the end, I just think enough people and culture will survive that history will go on. And climate change isn’t a good reason to not save for retirement. Nor will the system have collapsed.

If we want to save our times from misery, shouldn’t we stop being so blankly defeated about the future?

Writers today are in a difficult position because they often need to write into the future, and the culture has not imagined a future for them. Artists of our era seek the future of art, but might that not entail a sense of the future in general? And everyone who loves a paradox will likely also love to be crunched out of ordinary time for a moment. This little letter may jostle your sense of time and give you room to see your version of the future.

When do you think we are, in history? Maybe the far future will not think much of us, such that for them we are the Middle Ages. Many eras get to name themselves, many don’t. People living in the Jazz Age talked about the Jazz Age, people living in the Middle Ages, by contrast, did not speak of themselves as an intermezzo.

Nor were they all middle aged. I am middle aged. I do not think of myself as an intermezzo.

“Middle” isn’t a bad name if you are surrounded by “Beginning” and “End,” but if those two get a descriptive name, “middle” starts to mean hyphen, or space. It starts to mean time of nothing.

Of course, there was actually a lot going on. Consider that scholars study the Medieval Period (another name for Middle Ages) not in one lump, but divvy it up so that there is a High Middle Ages, representing the later, most creative section of the era, the 11th to the 13th centuries.

This is when some of the most sublime Cathedrals in history were built. The cathedrals are butterflies in stone and glass, soap bubbles in carved stone and colored glass, and flying buttresses like a spider’s legs, holding it all tautly together. A fantasy of colored light caught in windows and at certain times of day they splash on the grey stone floor to glow there. The High Middle Ages were an unfathomably inventive time, but still “the middle ages,” mere mortar between the important historical bricks.

Nobody knows when they are actually in the middle. It was the Renaissance that looked out of its carriage window and said, “What did we just drive through?” The Renaissance did name itself, seeing itself as a rebirth of the arts and sciences of the Greco-Roman World.

So how do you end up in a golden age, or how do you become a little golden age of your own, writing things you believe in, things you learn from? The core answer is always the same, you pay attention. Close observation can reveal now, and thinking about now can reveal the future. Some writers and makers are going to reveal the future. Maybe you?

Does it give us hope to think of ourselves as the Middle Ages? Or does it make us feel a little sorry for ourselves. Both, I think. On one hand it would be wonderful to be certain that the human story will go on, robustly, for several thousand years (at least) so that to someone, looking back, we are the middle. On the other hand, I hope that in their eyes we earn some exciting name. At least maybe we’ll be their High Middle Ages.

Time is key in writing and reading. We have to feel the past behind us, and feel the future ahead the way you know your eyelids and your ass are there, though you can’t see and can’t much feel them. We require some temporal proprioception. We can build it up by thinking about it, as we are doing here.

Maybe this is the end of hats, but maybe it’s only a weird break from wearing them. You don’t have to know, you just think about it. If hats come back with all their old force, this will be known as the time of bare heads. The era pre 1960 will be the Felt and Beaver Era and the post 2060 might be the Recycle era.

What might we be know for? We think of what surprised us —smart phones etc.—but we have to think of what might surprise them. As we know, there used to be cocaine in Coca Cola, and if you like drugs that might make you feel born too late. Yet perhaps caffeine will become a controlled substance and people will dream of the cokes we have now — as well as our emporiums of coffee on every street corner. How they will long for our bounty!

The term Jazz Age, btw, existed before F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922, but after the book, it caught fire. The term, associated with the 1920s and 1930s, was named at the era’s beginnings. Surely he couldn’t have imagined how apt and adopted his term would be, but he did observe his present so well that he predicted the future. Someone will coin a term for our age. Maybe you?

Maybe the culture will trade its obsession for alcohol for a marijuana culture and that’s why we’re the early High Middle Ages. Har har.

Once upon time, before the various futurisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one could safely assume the future will be pretty much the same as the present.

Once again upon time, things have changed so much in the last 20 years that we are convinced that the world will be unrecognizable in 20 years, but maybe not.

I know how we got here, there is so much genuine reason to feel gloom over the real pain that is coming due to climate change, but that is not all that is going to happen. For the health of the present, it’s time to also breathe life back into that old idea of a vibrant, thrilling future.

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May all your boardwalk dreams come true my friend. Stay with us and I shall return to encourage you again.

love,

Jennifer