Mythology reflects cultural ideologies and experiences. No one dreamed up elves as a fantasy creature; they are the product of vision and experience turned into story. Personally, I think the conception of a race like elves emerged as the first Westerner saw an Asian person (this is not racist). Imagine after centuries of living in English cities and villages full of houses and buildings of geometric Western design, looking at people with blond and brown hair, pronounced jawlines and large noses, a Western person stepped off a ship and saw ancient Beijing for the first time. The buildings were like nothing they'd ever seen: spikes and tiers of brilliant colours in the midst of oriental gardens and reflecting pools. The people were just as alien: beautiful round faces, lustrous sheets of black hair, eyes with mysterious and phantasmagoric countours and points. Confucian doctrine stressing harmony and sublimity fits well with the elvish values of peace at all costs.

In 2007, Tokyo is the Rivendell of the modern world. Compared with classical images of cities such as London and New York, brown art-deco skyscrapers from the 1920s, Tokyo, in a country wracked by earthquakes, is a neon wonderland full of sugarloaded colours and objects, with human-occupied space extending up, not out, and populated by people with a culture so amazingly different to our own but who seem to be moulded from the same shape. In the same way that Tolkien's (and even Paolini's) elves fashioned swords and jewellery and clothing of unmatched style and function, the Japanese, in the markets of Shinjuku and Akihabara, conceive robots and cars and mobile phones, technology that in the Western world seems to have fallen from another planet. In my opinion, Asians are the elvish races of the globe.

 

Here is the slightly racist part of the blog: Western culture seems to be founded on a history of violence and bloodsplattered glory. If a culture celebrates itself through art, music and literature, what can we seen in our own? Certainly, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with its honorific clanging of church bells, surges of sharp and ballistic violins, sounds of cannons and powerful horns is a celebration of war and victory: a thoroughly Western idea. In Shakespeare and Sophocles, none of the people who are hurt exercise the 'Let it be' of Chinese philosophy: Medea kills her children, Skylock clamours for a pound of Antonio's flesh, and Iago orchestrates the absolute destruction of Othello, his wife, and his officer- they all bloodlustfully strive for revenge.

Western history is in itself pretty ugly, but undeniably very proud of itself. We've beheaded monarchs in Versailles, hanged witches in Salem, shot black people in Texas. We've organised regimes of dictatorial hegemony; Czarist Russia, Fascist Germany; Colonial apartheid in Australia's beginnings. There have been genocides (oh the genocides) from Jews to Rwandans to Mexicans to Cambodians.

We also seem to pervert science. While the Chinese discovered gunpowder and put it in fireworks, we borrowed it from them to put in guns. We're the first culture to discover weaponry that can wipe out nations, and the first to exercise eugenic gene selection with a view to creating a master race. 

Sigh. We might have an ugly history but good things do come from turbulent history. There is no more stunning building on Earth than the Palaces of Versailles or Buckingham. Mozart makes unborn babies happier. Take everything with a pinch of salt.

 

I quite like Western culture, as I do Eastern (i just thought I might like to explode them a little bit)

Some of my favourite users of the English language so far:

 

From Macbeth by William Shakespeare:

 

From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

 

From Neuromancer by William Gibson:

 

From Othello:

burn like the mines of sulphur." 

 

From a JG Ballard review of William Burroughs' epic drug saga Naked Lunch:

 

From an appraisal of the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses:

 

Mass Hysteria is the precipitation of intense distress, fear or panic across the population at large, resulting in massive collective acts of violence or discord. It is the result of something that attacks a cultural sensitivity or realises a social fear: accuse a woman of being a witch in the 1600s and you'd have a mob of violently scared people hanging her by a lynch; release a warning about an expected plunge in the price of shares and you'll have a crash as everyone sells at once; tell the public that planes will fall out of the sky and ATMs will explode because of the millenium bug, and everyone in middle-class American suburbia will be shivering in their basement with six months of tinned food. Mass Hysteria is the stuff of revolutions and urban breakdown- when enormous sections of the population enter into frenzy without reason, the psychology of the individual becomes the psychology of the crowd: run where everybody else runs, throw stones where everybody else throws stones. Quite frightening but endlessly amazing.