What is History? Turning Toward the Future
I’ve been reflecting a bit on history; not in the sense of historical facts like dates on which certain events happened, but on personal histories, and how we view ourselves in relation to our pasts, whether recent or distant. This song by Laurie Anderson came to mind. In it, we find Hansel and Gretel reflecting on a life lived in the shadow of their own legend. Lyrics below.
“The Dream Before” by Laurie Anderson Hansel and Gretel are alive and well And they're living in Berlin She is a cocktail waitress He had a part in a Fassbinder film And they sit around at night now Drinking schnapps and gin And she says: Hansel, you’re really bringing me down And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch. He says: I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love Was the wicked witch. She said: What is History? And he said: history is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: history is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called progress.
There is something about thinking of history as “a pile of debris” that is simultaneously sad and liberating. I recently posted about ancestry, and in that, there is an assumption of a standing, intact history. Again, I’m not talking about history in terms of chronological orders of events (i.e. The Stonewall riots beginning on June 28, 1968, or the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989), but in terms of our individual lived histories. And in that sense, our histories are always already debris. I know this sounds depressing and rather counter to much of what I said in my previous entry, however, I think that “history as debris” stands as a necessary corollary or counterpoint to the idea of ancestry. In a positive light, we can look at debris as the inevitable result of a lived history – a byproduct of the process of living our lives, just as carbon dioxide is a result of respiration; just as our bodies give off heat, or slough off dead skin cells, or how things in our bodies break down in order to make room for new cells. We, figuratively and literally, continually shed our skins in miniscule flakes and specks. The particulate dust that floats through the sunbeam coming through our window is both what we were, and, poetically, what we will become.
“History” is made up of the remnants of the life we’ve lived, retroactively recreated as we move away from it. From a individual standpoint, our personal histories are never accurate. No matter how well we may remember something “burned in our brains,” the reality of seeing, hearing, or even trying to live it again shows that our memories are reconstructions. As I used to tell my philosophy students, memories are not something that we store away as little video clips or pictures in our heads, as in the film Inside Out. I know we love to think of memory that way, because it’s the easiest for us to wrap our heads around.
But neurologically speaking, we don’t “store” memories per se – as if they are recorded sounds, images, or other sensory data. We only “store” the instructions to “recreate” the experience as a memory. That is to say, a “memory” is actually only the instruction to build an experience in our minds. Much of this has been discovered in the last couple of decades based on research for PTSD treatment. This, of course, means that there are plenty of ways for the “noise” in our present lived experiences to affect just how we interpret and execute those instructions to bring a memory back to mind. This explains why our childhood memories of a singular event can be so different for our siblings and our parents. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, because the mechanisms by which we recreate our memories can be affected by so many factors, both psychological and physiological.
So when Anderson sings about “history,” here, I read it as our personal histories consisting of the debris of lives lived. Our lives are very much “single use.” Once we’re done, our histories are subject to an immediate process of decay. Perhaps we gain a modicum of fame because our actions have been so impactful, that they last for a while (or are somehow preserved) by succeeding generations. But those stories are in the hands of others, and may, in fact, become something very different. Revision overwrites things, effectively effacing their origins1.
For most of us, however, the histories of our own lives are somewhat more tenuous. We have diaries and journals, but unless someone deems them worthy of being preserved, they remain debris in the unprotected sense. Back when I was teaching, during philosophical discussions about history and reality, I’d recapture the flagging attention of my philosophy students by asking them about old photo albums. “When you look back at those albums, do you know the names of everyone in pictures that were taken before you were born? And even if the names are written in captions or on the backs of the photos themselves, do those names mean anything? Do you know the stories behind them?”
I’d add a dramatic pause.
“How long before you are a nameless photo in a forgotten album?” That tended to wake my students up.2
Our personal histories are indeed tenuous – as they should be. We can’t think of them as solid objects that are etched in stone, because in living our lives in the present, we are necessarily revising and, in a sense, “overwriting” what we were. That doesn’t mean that people don’t remember us as we were, and that there isn’t value in that. There most certainly is. But how many of us, in the present lives we’ve worked so hard to create, particularly in our kink and sexuality, want to be remember only as what we were. For many of us, hopefully, who and what we were in the past act more like artifacts that indicate how far we’ve come. Yes, we can be proud of those past events, but we know that we can only ride the reputation of that past for so long. And sometimes, what we were proud of then, we’re not so proud of now.
In kink in particular, we value vetting partners and making sure that “reputations” are accurate: is that sterling reputation current? Are the people who are vouching for a partner being specific enough? Is there consistency in what we’re hearing? Or is it all just based on friends of friends, innuendo, and what we heard third-hand which was itself overheard on a crowded cigar patio? The only way to create consistency of reputation is through our actions in the present. And this doesn’t just apply to reputation and references for play partners, it applies to how act in our lived present, with our current partners. Are we holding steady to the contracts we created? Are we checking in? Are we revising when necessary? Or are we just on autopilot, inadvertently allowing the edges we maintained to slowly dull and become worn down?
What happens when we look back to our “history” and suddenly realize that something has slowly (or maybe suddenly) gone sideways?
But history, as an angel, who wants to go back … and “fix things” – in a way, attempting to “repair” what is broken by its own existence and living. And if we think back to our own histories – especially regrets we may have had, or at least mistakes that we’ve made and perhaps never quite made amends for – it becomes clear that we simply cannot go back and fix what has been broken. Progress is neither linear nor does it guarantee improvement. Simply because we’re aging or moving forward chronologically does not mean that we are improving ourselves, or that our futures are guaranteed to be better simply because it’s the future.
So when – not if – we fuck up, sometimes “fixing” is actually a process of building of something new. What we build may look like what we had before, but the big difference is that what wasn’t working before now does. In that way, it will be – thankfully – never what it was before.
We are not meant to go back.
We are not meant to live the same life over and over again.
We are blown into the future, and if we try to turn back , we can only see the debris of our life growing ever smaller, ever more distant from us. Turn around, and we can at least face our futures head-on, instead of backing into them with our eyes on what was and what can’t be changed.
Mama Vi spoke to this in remarks at SPLF about the Carter-Johnson Library. Having physical copies of books and manuscripts may take up space, but their material presence is more lasting than a digital one, and is also a record of the process of revision itself. When we compose electronically, what came before is overwritten and disappears immediately, as opposed to tracking physical crossouts and marginalia on paper. And these books, newsletters, drafts, diaries, etc. are very much debris, but debris which others have rightfully deemed worth saving.
One would think that question would lose some effectiveness in the age of digital photography and being able to store massive amounts of pictures on drives, cards, chips, and in the cloud, but this has only made personal histories even more tenuous. The “memories” of younger millennials and GenZs, are a forgotten password away from oblivion.
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