Omnia Mutantur…

…et nos mutamur in illis

The metaphor I suppose I would find most apt, if I could think of a sufficiently elegant way of formulating it, would be something to do with the Burgess Shale—you know, that marvelous geological record in British Columbia of the extraordinary evolutionary fecundity of the “Cambrian Explosion”. The larger analogy, you see, is that of Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium”—which is to say, the proposition that phylogenic history is not a continuous, gradual, only minutely episodic process of chance genetic mutation fortuitously preserved by natural selection, but rather an irregular succession of epochs of stability and ferment. Gould, of course, was arraigned for heresy by certain of the more inflexible guardians of Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, even as the palaeontological evidence came to his defense, but that is neither here nor there. Whether or not life evolves by fits and starts rather than up along a smooth, low gradient, certainly culture does, at least in the modern age. Even at this late modern moment, when everything is in constant dissolution and flux, there seem to be periods of relative cultural inertia punctuated by episodes of frenetic change. I was born in—and, in a sense, out of—the 1960’s, which in retrospect now look to me something like the Burgess Shale of the twentieth century. Even in terms of something as trivial as sartorial fashions and hairstyles, I can think of no other decade so easy to partition into distinct phases by year. One need see only a few minutes of a film made in, say, 1963 to recognize its world as one separated by a deep gulf from that of 1961 or that of 1965. That of 1968 might as well have occupied a distant galaxy. Of course, the infallible index of these things was the appearance of the Beatles from one album to the next; anyone who can look at a photograph of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from those days without being able instantly to identify the year it was taken from their garb, facial hair, and coiffures is simply too young to have a feel for the time. And that is merely a matter of the visible surface of things; something far more consequential was occurring in the depths.