The Cure for a Soulless Timeline
AI can do a lot. But it can’t do this.
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal—because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
—Achilles in Troy (sampled by $uicideboy$)
We’ve been hearing this idea of a New Romanticism popping up here and there more frequently. In essays, in articles, at the bar, and coffee shop. Once we started marinating on this idea and pressure testing it against the frequencies of the day, turns out a bunch of its threads are already woven throughout culture.
By romance, we’re talking about a mode of thinking and creation that concerns itself with the core, messy, transcendent elements of what it means to be human and how that relates to the mysteries of the world around us.
If the past decade has been aesthetically interested in where we fit as individuals into the vast human systems that’ve shaped our past and present, the current moment seems to be both zooming in and zooming out: there’s an increasing macro-emphasis on how humans fit into the vastness of nature and the cosmos and an increasing micro-emphasis on the human soul.
Whatever that means.
And this emphasis on soul, only makes sense. Even if we can’t really define what it means. It’s why we don’t really want an only AI-generated image, or song, or piece of writing. Somehow, it’s missing something that blends life with gravity, the living juice of experience. Not to say AI won’t be deployed in novel, creative, and useful ways that exceed our wildest imagination (and amplify humanity’s abilities), but there is an intangible human essence we still crave, in our stories and patterns.
We call it “artisanal” at the store. We call it “authentic” in our stories.
And that, we think, is one of the clearest signs of the neo-romanticism budding in culture.
Consider also, the historical context of romanticism itself.
On one side of the Atlantic, the movement inspired painters like J.M.W. Turner and the brilliant poets William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Thomas Cole. On the other side of the Atlantic, it spawned the transcendental movement brought to life by the painter Thomas Cole and his peers, plus writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.
This kinda romanticism—which emphasizes humanity’s connection with nature, with the mystical—arose in response to the conditions of the Industrial Revolution. Craft-based jobs were automated. People were moving away from the countryside and into the cities. Wealth consolidation increased for a few while living standards declined for the many. And there was a sense of existential crisis at this new and automated society.
Does that—ahem—sound a bit like you know, right now?
As AI, machine learning, and digitally-automated outputs basically threaten to upend the entire order of work and human output, and creativity as we know it?
It’s as weird a time as the Industrial Revolution was. And basically, if traditional Romanticism was back-then’s response to the world’s machinification, we posit that this neo-Romanticism is going to do sorta the same, only different.
We’re already seeing it in our consumer tastes: there is now bespoke, hand-made everything. From candles to snacks to clothing, we’re more interested in a products’ origins than ever. This may well happen with the media we consume, too: perhaps in a few years, we’ll pay a premium for human-made films, the way we now pay for handmade linens or whatever.
But we’re not just talking about our consumptive preferences changing, we’re talking about the nature of our creative outputs changing.
Consider again, the epigraph.
That is a quote dripping in romantic hallmarks—transcendence, human life’s death and beauty and flash-in-the-pan brilliance—yet it’s pulled from Troy, a movie based on The Illiad that’s pretty damn dated and wasn’t even that good in the first place.
This quote is positioned at the opening of a track called “Not Even Ghosts Are This Empty,” put out by the $uicideboy$ on a mixtape called I No Longer Fear The Razor Guarding My Heel (V). The album art shows the helmet of a Greek warrior, reduced with hip-hop aesthetics.
The imagery, the opening quote (and the lyrics that follow), places humanity in a mythical context through glitchy, mumbling rhyme and B-movie sampling.
Which is kind of a genius distillation of the neo-romantic vibes we expect to see more of: funky, even rough textures, fragments arranged to stir up novel emotions, a perspective increasingly geared towards transcendence and mystery. A basic emphasis on our ineffable, messy humanity.
And when you look around, the examples are already sprouting outta the forest floor of culture. For one out-front example, consider the sensation around Charli XCX and last year’s Brat summer. To be honest, we still have no idea what that means, but what we can gather is that it centered on being unapologetically messy and authentic and basically alive. It was individualist rather than collectivist.
Or consider some of A24’s recent outputs: The Green Knight is literally based on the chivalric ideal (and literary foundation of Romanticism, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight) and depicts humanity’s connection to nature—and quest for transcendence—in a setting of high romance and fantasy.
Or the recent topic of The Cure, Sinners, with its emphasis on traditional African spirituality and the transcendent potential of music.
Literarily, there’s Richard Power’s The Overstory, which interrogates nature’s vastness and interconnectivity in relation to human tininess. Same with Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood or Rachel Kushner’s (also recently mentioned) Creation Lake. There’s Odessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, which explores human life in all its superstition and shininess in the medieval ages.
And then there’s tarot. Crystals. Goop. Sound baths. Wellness retreats. All part of a broader desire not just for health, but for meaning. For soul.
Because soul: that nebulous human thing at the core of each and every one of us. It can’t be produced by AI, or photoshopped, or deep faked. Soul can’t be defined, much less quantified.
And we’d like to think this has always been both our fuel and fire at The Cure. Which is why our hopes are high for an emerging era of transcendent, apocalyptic, neo-romantic interrogations of what it means to be alive in 2024. We’re here for the mess. The myth. The longing. The heat.
Because creativity that burns as hot as the world around us might be the only real cure we’ve got.
So be a fuckin’ torch,
CONVICTS
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