Also, for World Poetry Day, let me present a poem I’m fond of:
The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall?
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.
And people like us at the bottle bank
next to the cycle path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in
electric cars. Or after the late show –
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects – a true, legible script.
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.
Oh, that hurts to read. This is “A Vision” by Simon Armitage, it’s in a collection called Paper Aeroplanes which Rachel Oates (again) introduced me to, and it touches on something that resonates with me… cos when I were a lad, I read books like this:
This is the sort of thing I grew up on (there is a distinct possibility I still own these, too, though I’m not sure exactly where), this series came from Usborne in the late seventies and I presume it was the early 80s when I discovered it. Though this book’s otherwordly city of the future may be not exactly what Armitage’s poem describes, this is why I said it hurts. Cos I kind of expected this sort of thing would happen. It wasn’t just science fiction, it was something that, one day, could be real, I might even live to see it happen… And I don’t think that was just cos I was a child who didn’t know any better, I think there was still a broader sense that the future would indeed be expansive. There was indeed a vision for the future, and it was indeed a beautiful place (assuming we didn’t nuke ourselves out of existence before we made it back to the Moon).
The future… didn’t turn out like that, did it? I mean, sure, the Internet is cool, I suppose, and it’s weird how so few of our fictional futures seem to have expected it, but… I feel like there were so many other things that should have happened. We were cheated out of the futures we could’ve had, “all unlived in and now fully extinct”. (Cf. what Mark Fisher had to say about hauntology and lost futures; can’t share his enthusiasm for Burial, though). The lost future didn’t even need to be the sort of thing on the book cover above, it could just be the sort of thing Armitage describes, a small town or suburb made better and more interesting, then consigned to landfill. It didn’t need to be a grand vision… it just could’ve been more than what we got.
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