From despair to glory

"In darkness hear us, undying, swift-horsed sun.”

Overhead, the sun dances again, renewed in brightness. The times we are living in the West are the image of the sun in glory, unconquered, embracing the whole world in its radiance.?

This is our now, and without diminishing loss, suffering and death, no other time has had the possibilities we have. We can, for the most part, live longer and better than at any other point in history. Whether we do or not is a separate matter, but the chances and opportunities we have outstrip the kings and queens of recorded time. We are all emperors, in a way that could not be imagined previously except in stories.

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And this age, more unique than the others, deserves, demands, a new style, a new way of words, a literature of gold. Words must be heavy with meaning again, aglint with truth, beguiling with beauty.? Is this artificial? It is artifice, the product of the skill of hand and eye. In ancient times, the French kings rode out with a royal banner embroidered with a blazing sun - red and gold, scarlet and yellow - the oriflamme. It was a made thing, but it spoke of majesty. The people followed it - because although it was only an image of the sun, and not the sun itself, it ignited imagination, it spoke eloquently of the Daystar. And so I propose a new mode of literature: Aurelian, a style of brilliance, appropriate for this royal age -whose characteristics are geometry, finesse, beauty.

The rule of three

Whatever we take from the sea of our imagination is formless and arbitrary. As soon as it dries out from the initial exposition, however, it develops form, purpose - an independent existence. Underwater all is blurred and indistinct, but on land it immediately has contour, shape and colour. Or again: in order to play we must have a game. And a game requires rules.

So here is the first rule, the rule of three. All our ideas are clustered and set out in threes. We make three points, we repeat the same description three times in variations, three is the foundation of our counting and this style. When the theme is longer or requires greater elaboration, we pick out the sixes, the nines and the twelves, which allows for adjustment and an appropriate elegance. But the base of everything is three, repeated in word and notes and image. It is an application of poetics, compressed and essentialist, a natural minimum.

The fractal

Words decay. The long passage of time strips them from columns, burns libraries, turns paper to dust. Literature lasts longer than us, but it is subject to time, even if the longevity of great works can be measured in centuries rather than decades. Horace, writing 2000 years ago, boasted that his works were more enduring than bronze. But we can do better. Knowing that literature is subject to disintegration, we can create a structure where the essence is preserved, regardless of whether the whole text survives. Destruction and redaction no longer have same power, if each part of the text contains the essence of the whole, repeated three times. It is a pattern of nature - the sea reflected in every drop of salt water, the taste of a meal in every morsel.

The rule is simple: repeat the central theme in each portion of the whole, without eliciting boredom, and whilst preserving elegance. By doing this, our words become words of gold, with a threadbare but tangible immortality.

I would add: there is also a seed of rebellion here. We are human, and know that all things end. It is therefore human to try to outstrip death, and human to realise that the physical world is falling apart, subject to entropy. It is therefore something no stuttering digital construct could conceive. It encompasses our uniqueness and becomes the pledge of a literature born of physical hearts and minds. It is unique: no one has ever thought of this before, an idea entirely new.

In passing, I would also say that the loss of wisdom as conveyed by writing, continues to sting me. We have lost Aristotle's Poetics, most early English works when the monasteries were dissolved, Margot Frank’s diary, George Orwell’s Socialism and War, pretty much everything by Pindar.? We nearly lost Beowulf in 1731 in a fire (spoiler: Beowulf actually gets killed by a fire-breathing dragon, so some nice foreshadowing). We can forestall this destruction to a degree, and this should be attempted consciously.

A return to beauty

For too long now, we have been chained with minimalist forms of expression. Plain language, unadorned words. They have their place - orderly exposition and being understood are important. But we should be conversational again, we should revolt against terse barbarity and language? stripped of playfulness.? Luxury, digression, and wonder have their place - ornamentation, when restrained, enhances.? I tire of the poetry of despair, of ordure and the abyss. Let it carry on, by all means. We will match it with arms of gold.

And, in order not to leave you bereft, here is one of the first works, which should playfully embody these fractal, threefold thoughts. Others have given you a wasteland, I will leave you with a garden.

Author's note: This article was originally published in anticipation of the ARC Forum on 22 August 2023 and has been revised to reflect the results of that conference.