Love & Theft

Good morning dear parish. This is something I wrote a little while back. It may seem like a polemic for a return to Romanticism, but it’s not quite that. It’s really me rummaging around some of its associations, and seeing how they may appear these days. As I say towards the end, it’s Romanticism(s) really, plural. I get how varied our response to the word can be. But it’s smack-bang in the centre of my ancestral wheelhouse, so it felt useful to gather a few thoughts at least. I anticipate the problems it evokes, but I agree with what Gary Snyder says here:

“Seventeenth and eighteenth-century British and French poets wrote poems that drew on symbols and stories of Greek mythology. This is not trivial: Greek myth helped keep the wild side of European culture alive; had it died it would have left Western Europe a lonelier place, with less love, less wilderness, less joyous art.”

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So I’ve stolen a word. Made a moonlit dash with something so multifarious in meaning, so overwritten and overthought that it may be a relief for everyone if I just make off with it. I’m going to place the word in unusual situations and just see what happens.

Romanticism.

Soft lies.

Myth means a fabrication, Romanticism is flaccid. Put them together, soft lies.

The things I’ve fallen hardest for need the most defending. They say myth is for simple people that need stories or they can’t stay engaged, that Romanticism is for weepy souls that tasted reality just the once and ran screaming from the room. Children that need soothing. Both lack clarity, sharpness, rigour. Myth is a fib, Romanticism an opiate. Not good for you.

I appreciate the chloroform that has sometimes been administered by both. The perils. Romanticism is a word that arose in Western culture, even though it threw its fists up against many of the insidious character traits of the colonial.

And I’m English-Irish with the mud of history on my boots. I intend to explore the hand I’m dealt. Work from the inside out. I come from someplace.