Keats’s religion of consumerism

It’s commonly lamented that people today take a consumerist approach to religion, that people seem to feel freer than ever to pick and choose elements of, for instance, Protestant doctrine, Jewish ritual and Buddhist discipline, in order to create an eclectic mix to fit their personal circumstances and predilections.  Some see this reduction of religion to just another consumer choice as a grave indication of cultural and moral decline:  if the choice of god becomes akin to the choice of car brand or dog breed, then nothing’s really sacred any more.  Even taking the position that “well others may do that but i don’t” becomes dubious because even if you’re resisting consumerism you’re doing so as a matter of implicitly consumerist individual choice.

One way of looking at Keats is as responding to this defeat of the sacred by consumerism in two ways:  1) he accepts it as an inevitable fact of modernity – it’s not a matter of decline but is simply the only cultural logic we modern people know; it would be ridiculous to suggest we could approach the world otherwise than as consumers – but 2) he argues that for just this reason the equation should be inverted, and instead of thinking about how religion has been eroded by consumerism we should tease out the religious impulse, the sacredness, intrinsic to consumerism itself. Yes consumerism is a bummer; as ‘la belle dame sans merci’ and ‘nightingale’ show, buyer’s remorse can happen on a level that is completely devastating, soul-destroying.  But why shouldn’t the modern consumerist era have a god of its own, a god that, as Keats puts it in the urn ode, responds to “our” specific “woe”?  In other words:  if the modern destruction of sacredness is a form of suffering, then why shouldn’t consumers dream of the alleviation of this specific form of suffering?  This question is akin to the question with which Keats begins The Fall of Hyperion:

…Who alive can say
‘Thou art no poet; may’st not tell thy dreams?’
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue (11-15)

Keats’s method of reenchantment proceeds not by attempting to reverse modern disenchantment or (a la Wordsworth) mourning it, but by taking this disenchantment to its logical conclusion in order thereby to discover/invent a new, properly consumerist form of enchantment.

Buyer’s remorse

St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the Ode to a Nightingale are implicitly poems of consumerist disappointment.  They all tell a common story about the impossibility of realizing the consumerist dream of complete subjective fulfillment.  Whether in the form of the sexual union of Porphyro and Madeline, the knight and the fairy, or the poet and the nightingale, each poem shows that fulfillment of the dream (if not the dream as a dream) is something incompatible with reality as we know it.  No sooner does the dream seem to be realized than it turns into a “phantom”:  this is the term Keats uses to describe Porphyro and Madeline as they escape the castle.  The reality we’re left with at the end of this poem, as at the end of the other two poems too, is all the more miserably disenchanted for the fleeting appearance of the dream.

Yet the beadsman gives us an indication of Keats’s solution to this dilemma (the dilemma of the incompatibility of the consumerist dream and consumerist reality):  for the beadsman is at home in the cold ashes of the disenchanted reality but he also manages to worship something beyond this reality.  The beadsman accepting the ashes of consumerist disappointment is the precondition of his worship.

Similarly I think the ad below very provocatively suggests the deadness of its own imagery.  It reminds me of the beadsman’s ashes:  in this chaotically black and white hall of mirrors it’s hard to distinguish the women from their reflections although the distinction means less than it might since the women are so mannequin-like to begin with.  Our gaze is captured by a woman whose own gaze is captured by another woman (or is it a mannequin?  how would be know? does it matter?) whose image we also see reflected but whose unreflected body (which is actually the object most directly before us) is headless even as it seems suspended by the neck.  And once we notice this morbid detail we might proceed to notice that the central woman’s eyes are rolled back in her head like a corpse’s.  The ad doubtless projects images of beauty, but it also draws Keats’s ruthless line of impossibility between such images and actual life.  This isn’t a beauty to be lived; it’s only place is in a fantasy that is outside of life.

Like Keats this ad uncovers the deepest lie of consumerism which is its promise precisely to release us from consumerism.  The essential promise of every commodity is:  buy me and you’ll be liberated from your sense of inadequacy, your need to keep buying things.  So Keats subverts consumerism by forswearing the desire to escape it.  The trick to experiencing consumerism in an emancipating rather than oppressive way is to quit fighting it:  quit pretending that you can actually possess and live the fantasy that ads are selling and instead learn to love the fantasy in its very impossibility.  There’s an echo of Shelley’s Prometheus here:  just as Prometheus transcends his rivalry with Jove by forgiving him, the beadsman transcends consumerism by accepting that it turns actual life to ash.  We only grasp the full beauty of the phantom-dream of porphyro’s and madeline’s rapture once we accept that it isn’t accessible in reality but only in fantasy.

Keats’s religion of consumerism = communion of fanatic dreamers

The odes to psyche, the urn, melancholy and  autumn are all attempts to perform a certain kind of worship; and it would not be wrong to think of the worshiper/poet in each of these cases as a version of the beadsman from st. agnes.  In each case experiencing a disappointment and/or marginalization akin to the beadsman’s is the precondition of proper worship. But this resignation to personal disappointment is also shown to prepare the poet to participate in a kind of fantasy that transcends individuality and even time. This always involves imagining something impossible – hearing inaudible music (urn), building a church for a goddess without worshipers (psyche) – and turning pain into pleasure (melancholy) and making time stop (autumn). All of these exercises in impossibility can be seen as forms of spiritual discipline: helping us learn to resign ourselves to personal disappointment in order to appreciate the fantasy of an object (like the urn) beyond possession. This is what Keats would teach the lovers forever about to kiss on the urn: to enjoy the fantasy as a fantasy; not as a blueprint to be realized, a means to an end, but as an end in itself:  fantasy for its own sake.  But doing this requires the beadsman’s resignation to the ashes, forswearing attempts to actually sensually realize and personally possess the fantasy.  The point of this resignation is that it acknowledges in advance the futility of all such attempts. For us the fantasy is there to be worshiped in its very otherworldliness, not to be realized and owned.

Hence in the Fall of Hyperion Keats constructs a goddess precisely of failed poets—of those whose fate it is to be categorized as fanatic dreamers as opposed to legitimate poets.  This is Moneta; but Moneta doesn’t promise to redeem these lost souls in any normative way; rather she appears more like a symptom of the un-redeemed, disenchanted condition of modernity per se, its inherent disposition to impotent fanatasism.  Moneta’s name means money, her brain is hollow, and her eyes are gazeless and glassy.   Moneta exemplifies the commodity fetish.  If modernity conduces not to legitimate art but to consumerist fanaticism, then Keats reasons that for precisely this reason fantasism provides the basis for a new kind of art:  art as a kind of consumerist worship.  Keats correlates Moneta’s objectification with her non-exclusivity.  Like Warhol’s Marilyn she lives only in the imagination of her admirers, but this imaginary life depends upon her actual deadness:  her thing-like status, what makes her brain hollow and her eyes “blank,” is also what allows her to “beam splendid comfort” to the multitudes:

[her eyes] seem’d visionless entire of all external things; they saw me not
But in blank splendour beam’d like the mild moon
Who comforts those she sees not,
who knows not what eyes are upward cast.

Whatever “comfort” Moneta offers is predicated upon a painful tearing apart and reconstituting of the subject who feels it:  it’s a scary, somewhat dehumanizing insight to realize how much of our identity is invested in the commodities we consume.  But for Keats the way to re-humanizing, to re-gaining self-possession, is precisely to quit denying this investment, to take ownership of our consumer fantasies as such:  again Keats’s point is that we can transcend consumerism only by utterly surrendering to it.

Sample Fanatic Dream #1:  Transcending Individuality

This clip from the movie “Bottle Rocket” is recommended mostly by how funny it is but I think it also illustrates the social appeal of a fanatic dream contrasted with the oppressive, normative (i.e. the opposite of fanatic) coolness of the guy in the bronco.  Like the beadsman or the addressee of the ode to melancholy, the Luke Wilson character embraces disappointment; he says “goddamn it” because he knows this plan is going nowhere.  In exchange though, like the lovers on the urn, he can appreciate the dream for its own sake, just for the sake of its dreaminess.   He gives up the need to possess values like coolness in order to sustain a dream.  But like the ode on the urn the movie suggests there’s something way richer and more intimate about this dream than about actually being cool (which in contrast seems rather dull and mean):  richer because we get closer to the point of our ideals of coolness, love, beauty, etc. by just dreaming about them than by claiming to realize and possess them, and more intimate because a kind of mind-meld is possible in the dream (like the merging of the odors of the flowers in st. agnes); we become indistinguishable co-authors of the dreams we share whereas claims to realize and possess our dreams cut us off from one another.

Fanatic Dream Samples #2 & 3:  Transcending Time

This brilliant animated video is about a flightless kiwi bird’s dream of flying.  So the premise shares the Keatsian form of bridging unbridgeable gaps, imagining the impossible (e.g., hearing the inaudible, etc.).  It’s striking how the short video is able to register different orders of time:  it begins in the normal time of the lived present, but with the shot down the cliff we’re made conscious of how the present extends far back into history: the bird’s been nailing trees like this for years!  Knowing that this effort extends back for years becomes significant once the bird jumps and we realize what the purpose of all this work has been:  constructing the illusion of flying.  The video wonderfully draws us into this illusion by turning the camera so that the vertical fall appears as horizontal flight.  The effect of this maneuver is that it, like the ode on the urn, makes us see what we know is not there.  It crystallizes the fantasy of flight as a fantasy:  we’re inside the bird’s head, living his dream along with him/her.  The crucial point of Keats’s ode on the urn is that from this perspective the normal time of the living present and the temporal transcendence of the dream become indistinguishable:  insofar as we’re inside that fantasy of flight–the fantasy that existed only in the bird’s head for all those years of tree nailing–we’re outside of time.  In exactly the same way the urn’s unheard melodies confront us today exactly as they had confronted ancient Romans:  to attune ourselves to that inaudibility is to participate in the same experience that they had, and hence to step somewhat out of time.  Thus although this video ends sadly, insofar as time itself is transcended this sadness is transcended as well.

Similarly at the start of the movie “Before Sunset” Ethan Hawke describes how love can get encapsulated in a pop song that (like the urn and, especially, the experience of re-hearing an “old melody” Keats discusses in a letter [1350]) reveals “time is a lie.”