Cultural Moments

The particulars of day-to-day life are like the silk in the spider web network of memories, experience and ideas that make up culture. These particulars form a unique, fleeting signature. There's no true, living external access into that web. Ex post facto, a person can gaze upon the stale, dead artefacts of a time, and ponder what it might have been like to live at a particular time and to see a particular work of art, or to partake in some event, but they really can never know.

Similarly, the work of an artist or an author or myth maker can be born in a network of associations completely apart from the experience of the viewer. Take Twin Peaks as an example. David Lynch's particular life experience and his generalized technical and artistic knowledge created images and stories that were digested by people who were a generation younger than him. The oddball quirks of the imagery in that show were already out of context for its audience, and now even those experiences are anachronisms.

The 70s childhood that formed my brain is unattainable to young people today: riding around in the back of a Volare station wagon with summer sun blazing in through the windows cooking the vinyl seats, taking dirt roads to the grandparents house while Kenny Rogers drones in the background beneath a conversation about bigfoot.

If there are any egregore, a good place to search for them is in those unique cultural moments. Those moments are almost palpably distinct things. They're entities all their own.