It is not so much that celebrities and artists die, it is that we are not replacing them. Culturally, we are afflicted with Heroic Non-Replacement Syndrome.

Sure, some of it must be chalked up to the millennial insistence in perpetual backward facingness and borg-like nostalgia for eras they did not live through –as the outpourings of twitter grief (twief?) demonstrate whenever somebody –anybody who predates this Hell- dies.

But it is so much more than that. What certainly doesn’t feel like almost 4 years ago, I wrote a post about seeking the higher ground. The days of drawing sustenance and inspiration from so-called popular culture had passed. The question was tabled: where, then, do creatives go to fill their lungs?

And I think that I might have an answer but you’re not going to like it.

First, where it isn’t. Because sadly this category has grown and it seems to be an immovable function of today’s reality, at least in part. Even noble attempts to squeeze weird juice out of previously robust fruits like superhero narratives –Legion comes to mind- feel levelled off somehow, like they have been forced through dynamic range compression. A mutant possessed by a more powerful demon mutant, covering Rainbow Connection on a banjo in a Kubrickesque room he created in his mind that he can physically transport people to should be all our jams. But it just can’t quite get it across the line, as if the entire culture is on antidepressants in a comedy club. That strikes me as a condition of reality rather than any particular failure on the part of the show runners.

Into the category of parts of the shoreline reclaimed by the sea, it is looking like we will have to put folklore. Every Thursday, that hashtag comes back around and takes bits of my soul with it. I wanted to call it appropriation – which, as you know, is a feature of monoculture rather than magic and hence could technically apply- but it is worse than that. It is safe-ification, milquetoast-ification. The teeth are ripped from cherished and terrifying stories from around the world and vomited all over Twitter to elicit the same reaction you get when you bring cupcakes into the office: “ooooh, lovely”.

Let me give you a personal example. A couple of months ago, somebody on Twitter suggested I might be able to answer a request from someone “looking” for articles “exploring the connection between UFOs and folklore” and @’d me while sharing the URL. This intrepid explorer said thanks and asked if I had any articles “about UFOs in folklore” that I might like to “share” with her.

Blink.

How about seven of the last nine years of posts to the blog somebody just this instant “shared” with you? Or that 112,000 word book I wrote? That’s not what she wanted though, was it? She wanted 500 words with a few highly visible subheadings that would turn whatever the underlying story was into an exact replica of every other story being shared on that hashtag. Because that’s exactly what the process does and it is nails on the chalkboard to someone who has spent the last five years saying the words “restoration of context”.

I’m not sure how much of this is “damn kids, get off my lawn”. Probably some of it, for sure. But definitely not all of it. Some of it – I would like to think a majority of it- is for the hashtag’s benefit. Because you just can’t engage with folklore in this way and expect it to retain its power. That’s not how the Force works. That’s not even how the Jung works.

Folklorists themselves are supposed to be a bit like Jane Goodall. The object of your study should make you smell a bit weird and you should always have in the back of your head the possibility that these things might kill you. And you should definitely return to civilisation more odd and uncomfortable to be around -the fart in the elevator that is your social group.

So there is a ruination going on here and it comes without even the slightest benefit to the ruiners. At least when you log an old growth forest you end up with the timber!

This is all to be expected -even predicted. Proper magic and mythology are the throbbing, organic energy cells that powered the last few things we lost to the sea: superheroes, decent music, etc. It was only a matter of time before the waves reached them too.

Let us return to that possible answer then, not just for the all-consuming hashtag but for Heroic Non-Replacement Syndrome. I mentioned briefly in the podcast episode with Dr Kripal, but I am positively haunted by Alan Moore’s observations on how he ended up in literature. You can hear him talking about it below:

He first became interested in comics at a time when there were perceived to have so little value that they were used as ballast in ships crossing the Atlantic to Britain. And however much his following statement is at least in part self-mythologising, it is also probably true:

The fact that nobody cared about comics when he first entered the business gave him a tremendous amount of creative freedom to explore and do what he wanted. And he said the same thing about his midlife interest in magic. Now both of these things have a tremendous amount of interest and even cultural respectability about them. (Hence the hashtag rant.)

So he moved on to literature. He is right that no one has cared about literature as a category of fiction since its prior heyday in the 1990s. (Martin Amis, etc.) I’ve been thinking about this and also thinking about how we might define literature as a fiction category in a self publishing world. Somewhat cynically, you could say the prior definition of literature was whatever was put on the shelf marked “literature” to be sold to book buyers who read “literature”.

Try this instead: literature is a story that is not only exclusively book shaped, but revels in and is hyper aware of this fact – like a painting that also admires its frame. It does what novels used to do such as take more than 100 pages to really get going or spend a whole chapter describing a teapot that nobody ever sees and it gives no fucks how you as the reader feel about that. (Jerusalem certainly gives no fucks. Maybe it does toward the end. I haven’t finished it.)

That’s it. That’s my definition. You’ll notice it is not genre specific, obviously. But in this way of thinking, “literature” does stand apart from other genre fiction by virtue of its hyper awareness –thus you can have science fiction and scfi “literature”. And Alan is correct. Not a single person gives a shit about any of this. It’s cultural currency has been declining since Austen’s day –give or take a few blips in mid twentieth century America and 90s Britain- and now approaches zero. It may just be a really good place to plant some replacements heroes.

There is another reason why creatives may want to think very seriously about unfurling their towel on this part of the beach. It is getting more and more difficult to say anything real publicly. The pH level of the discourse is hovering around 2. (Acid rain starts below 4.)

We’ve all felt this. We really only fire up social media for private conversations now. Venturing out into its public discussions is akin to looking down at the fork in your hand and realising you weren’t doing anything else with that other eye, anyway.

The great tragedy is that there are been few times where it has been more important to say something, to express something.

And I wonder if this isn’t the thin end of the wedge for the return of what used to be called high culture. So-called high culture was only ever temporarily class concern. Think of Shakespeare at the Globe or Mozart in the music halls. It elevated itself above the hoi polloi only when 19th-century industrialists took it upon themselves to become “patrons” of “the arts”. In the 21st century, the barriers to high arts are no longer financial. You can see some of the world’s best ballet for a tenner.

If anything, the barrier has reversed. With the rise of ‘dirty food’ and the elevation of anything prosaic as long as its obscure, new financial barriers are thrown up. It’s great to eat spaghetti out of a paper cone from a food truck and ‘not worry about carbs’ because you have a trainer. This ‘expensive low’ barrier is seen in corporate dress, collecting arcade games, etc.

It does have a barrier though. And that is rigour. Whilst we can’t all follow the Beardy one into literature, I think rigour in execution and a capacity to Say Important Things are what’s required and that they probably go hand in hand today. Perhaps the counter to a frictionless world is to constellate around things with inherent friction? Perhaps rigour is the heuristic that replaces barriers to entry?

Perhaps literature is what we should bring to the beach this summer. And if we move far enough up it, we may even find pen and paper.