IT’S INTERESTING to see how history …

IT’S INTERESTING to see how history is distorted in the act of grasping it: how it bends to fit the mind of the person who takes it in. You can investigate a historical epoch and watch as others, arriving at disparate conclusions, paint aportrait with a selection of colors chosen to fulfilltheirneeds. A man is bound to feel that in the careless approach of others, he himself stands accused: is he not guilty of the same crime, of distorting history to his own ends, lacking merely the person with sufficient subtlety to call him to account?Joachim Fest said that the political maturity of the German people came only after the loss of their inner, spiritually romantic “interior”– the relic of feudalism that had not yet given way. This world of glorious Heroes and Grand Gestures which Wagner seeked to portray in music, and which Hitler forged a connection to largelythroughWagner’s operas, apparently watchingSiegfried30 or more times. Ah, Heroic artwork.One of the main differences between the lingering feudalistic mindset of Germany and the individualist mindset which was rising in theWest, was the relationship to authority. In the West, it was gradually being understood that self-interest could be reliably deferred to when dealing with one’s superiors– and even the concept of a superior, of someone placed aboveoneself in the natural order, was becoming incomprehensible. In Germany, respect for authority still had it’s unquestioning, deferential, semi-religious quality. Hitler’s image was crafted to act as a catch-all for stray deference: an intellectual, a man of letters, a soldier, a man furiously dedicated to his country, pick which aspect of him you want to respect, but by all means pay respect.Fest concludes his Opus with the observation that the Germans finally matured politically when they lost the belief in glorious past ages and future utopias. He said: “They ceased to believe in a past that did not exist.” That line stuck out at me: ceased to believe in a past that did not exist.The Great Trekis a series of documentaries about the destruction of the former Prussian territories, Silesia and the Sudetenland. As I have read many books written by Prussian refugees, I am always interested to hear the tone in which they air out their sense of remiss at their hard turn of fate: most commonly I find a wistful, remembrance-filled resignation adopted in old age, which overlays and betrays the powerful resentment and grievance of their youthful years. It is like a coat of white paint on the walls of a room that was formerly orange. As an old person, I presume it’s easy to make peace, with the grave in front of you; for young people, it’s clearly very hardnot to fight, when a fight presents itself.In my research into this topic I twice came across the figure of an august old Dame, describing with nostalgia the landscapes of Prussia and lamenting the loss of the beaches, fields, and the uniqueness of that place which –I imagine – speaks to former inhabitants in language inviolate, untranslatable to foreign ears.In these two particular cases, the women were both advocating the reacquisition of these territories and resettlement of refugees there. Although unlike Derbyshire, I would never advise these people how tofeel, I do have doubts as to the final reality of their vision of Prussia Regained. What kind of future do they want to find out there?I tend to the view that a person who does not live in memories and scrap-books is more alive than he that does, and as person who lives in the present, one often sees this adage confirmed in the contrast between memory and reality: “You can never go home again”. So I tendmore to sympathize with the view of one Sudeten-German who was glad that his home town,Duppau, had actually been deserted: this freed him from the pain of having to see it become czech. This point of view tends to the opinion that memories are sweetest preserved in all the irreality of a remembrance: the nearer you come to them, the more you seek to find thereality behind them, the more they fall apart and become dirt. To put it another way, the past could have no sweeter distillation than the way we drape it and frame it in our own minds– subtracting the ambiguity, the negative feelings, the less-than-extraordinary character which, we would be forced to admit, characterizes 90% of our time on this planet. Shakespeare made King Henry say these words:If all the year were playing holidays,To sport would be as tedious as to work;But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.____ _____The reality of history seems to depend on three factors: texture, emotion, and atavism. The moreof these three a historical passage has for the reader, the more profound the resonance and the more significant the history is to it’s reader.Texture.The ancient world is less accessible for us not knowing how to visualize it’s objects. What did abook look like to the Greeks? A vase? A jar? Yes,you can find some images. What percentage of books looked like that, what percentage of vases, jars, urns? What did the people dress like? Insofar as the description of events is concrete and occurs in the physical world, the process of building a mental model in which first to ‘view’ the actual events described in history, is extremely problematic. All of us have some vague knowledge of the scenery of ancient Greece and Rome– very recent developments now allow these visions to become quite accurate. But this world never impressed itself on your senses, it never grasped you, housed you, as anenvironment, and neither has a similar environment done so. The powerfully visual element of human experience is utterly lacking, and we are invited to use imagination to body forth pictures of Alcibiades and Plato: well, fine, but vivifying a dead world with pictures from your own fancy doesn’t square very well with the truth. People have to do this, otherwise they find it difficult to maintain interest in a mental model that they cannot “see” in some sense. Yet a texture spun out of your own mind cannot forever grasp your fascination as a source of knowledge: and this factor alone corrupts to some extent the study of history as periods become farther removed intime. The false texture imported from the present makes the mental models ever more implausible.Emotion.Would the two Prussian ladies want to live alonein Prussia? What made their childhoods so special to them? Very probably it was the presence of now dead family members. Other human beings form the framework in which we experience any large emotional reality. So to imagine that a place has importance without thenetwork of family and friends who surrounded you during your life in that place is misleading. Were it not for Mother and Father, the house would have no special memories. The presence of other people and shared experience gives thebasis of emotion to a place or a historical event.The past is less interesting because the farther back one goes, the less people one knows. This is probably why nationalists usually manage to know the history of their country and not that of others: the ability to achieve an emotional importance through kinship gives this history it’s interest. If your dad says English history is important, and you love him, English history becomes important to you.Atavism.History provides an opportunity for analogous personalities to seek one another’s remains andworks. Most especially, the “rarer” personalities can seek one another out: people of rare mental gifts can find solace in the writing of people with similar gifts. People with a certain propensity can find others of similar propensity.One of the strange historical links, which in it’s crass obviousness almost makes one embarrassed to be human, is the fact of Caesar visiting Alexander’s grave and weeping, Napoleon visiting Caesar’s grave, and Hitler visiting Napoleon’s grave.A more obvious atavism could not exist, than that which is demonstrated here.Notice I did not say that these factors drive historical interest. A good deal of fantasy also motivates interest in history: the handsomenessof the Middle Ages suggest themselves to manya mind for simply aesthetic reasons. I said that these three factors make history real: whether it is the history of your immediate family or the history of your nation, or the history of some ancient dynasty: these things breathe sufficient life into what is dead, to create a mental model that in itself could be viewed as a source of unique experience. Perhaps you felt yourself to be the reincarnation of Henry V: nevertheless the texturelessness of your mental model and it’s failure to stir unique emotions caused by human contact, will ultimately cause it to be discarded as an insufficient source of experience.____ _____In what sense is history knowable? What analysis can dissect the portions of human experience transmittable in text– from that part which inevitably is lost? Surely, notallinformation about our experiences is capable ofbeing conveyed: a large part of this information is unknowable even to the doer, and has been called subconscious. What will ultimately be transmitted in text would not be a very high percentage of the theoretical whole.I see three substrata that divide history, beginning from your own life’s experience in memories and stretching back to ancient history.Personal.This is the most complete sense of an experience, and encompasses all of what a person knows about his own experiences. We could add the excitement of anticipation and fantasy before the experience, the full experience itself, and the cold-blooded analysis that takes place after the experience: thus giving us more information than the person actually possessed at any one given time. In all likelihood an undistorted delineation of the anticipation of the experience was lost one week after the experience, and an honest sense of the experience was lost several months later:merely “summarized” for significance, which then becomes it’s defining characteristic:even though this was not the essential character of the experience as it was actually perceived. Most of the personal component is lost to history. Poetry is a chance for the personal component to live on in a very haphazardly altered state. Anyone who truly “feels” a poet may have breathed some of the same air as he did: at any rate, this is a poeticized and emotional connection which fails the criteria for scientific inquiry.Epochal/Factual/Memetic.This can be gained from a look at the material and spiritual facts of the era, and is one of the most productive areas of history where real knowledge can be gained. It is especially good for literary, highly abstract societies which makeuse of print: they inevitably betray a lot of their nature in their writings, much more than the mute testimony of rune-stones, spear-tips and Stelae. This is good for forming generalizations about life in this or that time period. Ultimately, itis unsatisfying because it lacks reality, no amount of epochal knowledge can create a compelling model in the personal dimension. This is also an important strata for atavism because one can see how different qualities of one people are brought forth more strongly in one period than another. Atavism however necessarily would require the preservation of the Personal substrata, in the simplified virtuous forms exemplified byPlutarch’s Lives.Racial and Human.Not alot of Englishmen retire to the mountains to sip tea and practice calligraphy and meditation. Not alot of Chinamen turn into swashbuckling adventurers. When a Chinamen looks inside himself, he probably finds less swashbuckling and more landlubbing, tea-sipping kind of passivity. Even the filth of the English nation, i.e. Sting, has to go halfway across the world to drink magic potions in a midnight ceremony with an Incan tribe (I read his memoir,Broken Music, to foster conversation with a would-be girlfriend–andI will never forgive myself!). In this way the reality of a mental model of a historical period would have to be cross-checked against known facts: the Afrocentric historical hypothe-shizzle has a few centuries ofempirical data going against the assert

Posted by Baapu Ji 6 years, 9 months ago