Toward Ecosophy

Now and again, writers have the odd experience of seeing the world imitate their fictional creations in some unexpected way. I've worried from time to time that my novels Twilight's Last Gleaming and Retrotopia, with their portrayals (one on the scene, one retrospective) of the collapse of the United States, might fall into that category.  The thought that any of my tentacle novels would do so, on the other hand, was never something I considered. 

Guess what. 

In the fictive world of my tentacle novels, the latest thing in the arts is a Neoclassical revival -- a movement back toward traditional forms and traditional standards of craftsmanship, and away from the deliberage ugliness and pointlessness of the last century or so of modern art and music.  That surfaced in a minor way in The Weird of Hali: Kingsport -- I needed to make it plausible that Jenny Parrish would know her way around the Chaudronnier family art collection, and so had the Neoclassical movement reach Miskatonic University a few years previously, and spark new interest in the old masters. It moved to center stage in The Shoggoth Concerto and The Nyogtha Variations, where I took the hackneyed old trope of a young creative talent embracing the avant-garde and rebelling against the pressure to conform to the dead weight of fossilized tradition, and made my protagonist Brecken Kendall a young creative talent embracing tradition and rebelling against the pressure to conform to the dead weight of a fossilized avant-garde. 

And so what should a reader forward me but a good lively article about Jacob Collins, a New York painter who has rejected the standards of avant-garde art. He's painting beautiful, technically capable portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, and teaching scores of students how to do the same thing, using the methods of instruction that were standard a century and a half ago. Of course the art establishment has stonewalled him; as Morley Safer of Sixty Minutes fame, one of Collins' fans, pointed out cogently, "The current art establishment, the so-called gatekeepers, hate the kind of skill and craft and vision that an artist like Collins has." 

Another echo of the tentacular, even closer to my fictive creation, is the career of English musical prodigy Alma Deutscher, currently fifteen years old, a violinist, pianist, and composer who is already setting the musical world on edge by composing beautiful classical music using the traditional toolkit of harmony and tonality. Inevitably, she has been attacked for this by the gatekeepers of the musical establishment, and her response is much the same as Collins': "I think that these people just got a little bit confused. If the world is so ugly, then what's the point of making it even uglier with ugly music?" Yes, she's composed operas -- a short opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, based on a Neil Gaiman short story, and a full-length opera, Cinderella, which opened in Vienna to rave reviews and a standing ovation from the audience. While she hasn't yet composed any operas based on Lovecraftian themes, here's hoping.  ;-)

One way or another, though, if Great Cthulhu rises from the sea sometime soon, you know, I'll be a little less surprised...