The Age of Miracles, redux

(Wiki Commons)

I just finished an awful/good book. No, I don't mean awfully good. I mean it was awful, but it was good. It was The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. When I bought it in Waitrose one day last week--when I was hungering for a real book and not something downloaded to my Kindle--I thought it looked like it might be Chick Lit, but a bit better.

It wasn't Chick Lit, and it was better, but it was terrifying. It concerns The Slowing, a time when the earth ceases rotating on its axis every 24 hours, with the rotation getting slower and slower and slower.

You can't imagine what that does to life on earth, human and otherwise.

But Walker imagined it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized this novel could, some time or other, be true. After all, we really don't know what the effects would be on earth of some disaster in the universe beyond the light years we have so far been able to detect. It could show up some day, without warning, and turn everything on its head, so to speak.

And then, earlier today, I saw Sandy Wager's post on Facebook's Plymouth & Southwest Artists page about the problems inherent in getting the UK government to cease supporting the unspeakably rich by gutting the programs that serve the rest of us--approximately 99%--and especially crafts workers. Considering that crafts workers encompasses a large number of professions, from people making inexpensive papier mache utilitarian objects to silversmiths working in precious metals and stones, anything that happens to them will have a domino effect on everyone else

So then, I thought, "Someone needs to write a novel about life on earth after the unspeakable few destroy all the arts for the many." This would include crafts, of course, but also music, theatre, and the written word--poetry, novels, ephemera of all sorts. What sort of world would it be? What sort of illnesses would people develop? Walker posits a few illnesses caused by The Slowing in her book. An anti-Stendahl syndrome would be a natural: a person passes out and goes into shock from his or her first encounter with completely unembellished ugliness. In Walker's book, people sicken and die from the disturbed circadian rhythms. Can people die from unrelieved ugliness, out of control utilitarianism in all they encounter? I suspect they could. I suspect I could.

Sandy's post noted, "Most craft occupations are subsumed within occupational and industrial codes which are mainly non-creative." That is, government statisticians, in their infinite absence of wisdom, may well have classified a company that makes leather seats for Mercedes automobiles in the same code as the leather worker who crafts Druid items and sells them at craft fairs. And then the statistics wonks could conclude, after surveying the financial health of that "code", that there is no need for intervention of a helpful kind by the government. That will be fine for the maker of Mercedes seats, but not for Sally Leathercrafter in Pentreskeard, Cornwall.

Here are my two suggestions:

1. Write a book like The Age of Miracles based on the destruction of arts and crafts in developed nations. (I have a feeling, though, it would read a lot like anything by Ayn Rand, and might suggest a screenplay much like Other People's Money...or just an average day's reporting on The City or Wall Street.)

2. Look at the proposed changes to the classification of crafts and offer any cogent support that you can. Click here to see where the statistical issues are at present.The major thrust of all of this is simply to determine the monetary value of creative efforts; this, of course, will influence where government money is spent. It would seem to be paramount to ensure that crafts were included in all considerations governing the arts. Not to do so would be like considering dental services to be divorced from health. And that would be ludicrous, and result in negatives for almost all concerned.

The Age of Miracles, now that I put in perspective, would be one in which the arts were valued once again, as they were in Druid times--when bards and ovates were supported by the clan in toto and held in high esteem as well. Now THAT would be a miracle this crass age.

*"Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
"The illness is named after the famous 19th-century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio." Wikipedia