Taking a moment out from Tolstoy’s thoughts on historiography and my own thoughts – which are at this particular moment almost loathsome to me – to feel sorry for myself.
I am now doing what part of me very definitely does not want to do (but which, I must say, both reason and friendly advice both strongly advocate) and planning to go back to Brooklyn. Back to therapy. Back to… well, a journey which was interrupted and for which – at the moment – I have no stomach. That inner journey which seems to me now so loathsome and so… yes, repugnant. The worst epithets I can think of are “boring” and “safe” – which may apply, of course, but if they’re the worst things I can think of, what is wrong?
I have never wanted to live in the way that others advised me to live. Indeed, in all my adult life, I have never lived in one city for over two years’ time, and until this moment (and possibly beyond) I had no intention of doing so, except when it was time to “settle down” and marry and be (the word that just came to my mind is “boring,” but that is not what I had meant) what? To be what? My thoughts, when I’ve imagined that day, have always been that I would be reluctant to give up travel.
It is so much easier to listen to War and Peace and think about Tolstoy’s views on historiography, and appreciate the voices and smells and colors of a Parisian market, or walk along the canals here, or… anything. And if I had an eternity of life, that is just what I would do. For many years would I wander the world.
On this journey, however, I’ve begun to realize that I have not got an eternity of life. And that upsets me – is making me weep at this moment. I have very little time – perhaps 10 years before I will have to be ready to marry, or lose my best chance of doing so, perhaps 40 years more of my working life ahead of me, and perhaps 60 years more altogether in which to live. In which to accomplish all the goals I have set for myself, which would take about 200 years to accomplish.
Something must drop. Something must drop or I will run myself ragged and still not accomplish half of what I would wish. But I cannot let go – or think I can’t. It feels like tearing something out from amongst my heartstrings.
I like the movie Holiday because it’s all about a man taking part of his young years to go out into the world and find out what goes on, and what about it. To find out exactly what he’s working for before he continues to work for it. Well… I know at least in part what I am working for… and yet I have never had any serious conceptions of actually achieving that aim. If I think (as I had never yet thought before about 6 months ago) of a husband, it is only because I can never see myself actually marrying. To be quite honest.
I have lived, and indeed continue to live, as if I was the only person in the world. And screw everyone else. I don’t feel this, and my own thoughts are horrible to me right now because I am extremely ashamed and angry with myself for grieving people that I love (and honestly I would like to just crawl away and be invisible somewhere right now) – but I certainly act like it. As recent events (not just the events of yesterday and the day before) have amply proven.
I have asked for advice, and not taken it. I’ve asked for others to shelter me from problems I have made for myself, and in which they chose no part. I don’t say this to lash myself with it… but because I so hated to hear the truth from another’s lips and because I would not hear it from him… so I shall hear it from me. If I have not consciously been out to destroy my happiness (and whoever is?) I have acted as though I was.
The word “Revenge” comes to mind. Right now, in the back, somebody is gloating who will not speak to me. It is as if I keep peeling layers back on an onion… or, no. It is as if I hold half an onion which is seemingly fresh. But the innermost ring is rotten, so I excise that, only to find that the next, bigger layer is also rotten. So I excise that and find yet a bigger, and yet a bigger, and a bigger, and a still bigger, and an even bigger… that are all rotten. And while I thought that my self-destructive (or not MINE, but we all know that) tendency… or no, that’s not even what it is. And while I knew the patterns I act out, I thought that the damage was only confined, this time, to my not liking one particular job – which would have been alright, thought I, if I was not in Russia. But I was. And then the damage was confined only to my not liking my job, and my failure to secure the other job that I had hoped for. And then to these two plus the fact that I had been acting in unconscious ways to get myself dismissed. And then to these three plus the fact that I couldn’t find another job in Russia in time and found that I didn’t want to. And then to these four plus… you understand.
So what the little man is gloating over is my failure to see – or… no. My absolute intent and effort not to see what was rotten, when my conscious wishes and my feelings were directed towards wanting to see.
It is easy, I think, to say “but that was not me!” but… let us be honest here. I have the hands. And the (now spent) money. The ability to do things, including going to the devil or ruining my life or roaming half-heedless through 3 continents or what have you. So it was me. An unacknowledged bit, perhaps, but still me. I certainly chose to go to the devil.
Honestly, I know what I’m working for – which, also honestly, has nothing to do with my husband or anyone else except me. And also honestly, I know exactly what to do to accomplish it. So either I do not want what I say I want (which has been the case) or… what? There is simply no other option, as has been proven. If I wanted to improve, I’d do so.
Right now, I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to go outside, I don’t want to read, don’t want to sleep, don’t want to send my CV around for jobs in NYC, don’t want to think about where I’m going to live or what I’ll do when I get there… I just really don’t want to think. Because I’m tortured by recollections – disgusted, upset… and knowing that this isn’t going to do any good either.
I wish, like Tolstoy, that I could believe in determinism, or in the hand of god. Napoleon appeared because history needed him to play a role. This he did. He was sent to Elba, and when he returned the people acclaimed him because his part was not yet over. And when his part was over he was sent to St. Helena, and the actor disrobed, took off his paint and powder, and died. It is neat. It is even comforting in its own way – to be borne along by the times, and to do what I need to do because I need to do it, and have no choice in the matter, and had no will, and could not act otherwise. But to say that is sophistical: it is false.
Napoleon entered Moscow in late September, spent most of November there, and ran away. The Russian army, led by Kutuzov, followed him to the Russian border and tried not to engage – because it knew that the enemy was in flight and would destroy itself of its own accord. The Russians did not need to fight, because Napoleon’s army was in a panicked disorder and lost 9/10 of its men in the retreat.
(Comforting thoughts – those about Napoleon. I just went back and put them in after already finishing this entry. It’s stopped me feeling disgusted, now that I can think about Napoleon. But the more I think about Napoleon, the more I set myself up to do this in the future. This minute’s ease from my thoughts will bear its bitter fruits of disgust in some other season. Better to weep now – to pay what seems an enormous amount now – than to pay an even greater sum in weeping and devastation of life and friendships later. My dears… have patience.)
I have taken what I wanted – even if what I wanted was because I’ve been in a delirium – and now the bill’s come due. A neat little homily. And too simple. I really won’t have it be that simple.
I was watching Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner tonight, and as I prepared my own dinner, I began thinking about my grandmother.
There’s a scene in the movie where Katharine Hepburn says to Spencer Tracy something like “We brought her up to think that people who thought that whites are innately superior to blacks are always wrong… and when we said that, we did not add ‘But don’t ever fall in love with a black man.’”
My grandmother did.
This is something that’s always puzzled me a bit. My grandmother had black friends – or one black friend. However, this friend was never spoken of in front of her white friends, or invited to come when they were over. My grandmother invited her over and gave her a luncheon, but they ate at the kitchen table with the second-best china. And while my grandmother often told me that white people were not superior to black people and that it was good to have black friends, she always added that marriage between the races was NOT ok.
I began thinking… about stories that were told to me about my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was a businessman who did business with blacks and Jews in the 1940s-1960s, when it was very dangerous to do so – not because of the blacks and Jews, but because of what other whites would do. My grandfather’s business partner was a Jew, and I was told that one time in the 1950s my grandfather went out to survey a farm that he owned, and was met with “GO HOME TO GERMANY, JEW!” and a swastika spray-painted on the side of his barn. He painted over the symbol and went on working, serving on committees, and doing charitable work with Mr. Barman – his Jewish business partner – and Mr. Truth, his black friend and husband of my grandmother’s aforementioned black friend. He also laid down the law at home – refusing to support his alcoholic ex-soldier brother-in-law, who beat his wife and children. One night Great Uncle George got himself thrown in jail, and grandfather supposedly said, “Let him stay there. He deserves it.”
My grandmother, I was told, was a feminist who supported a woman’s right to work in the 1950s and 60s and held down a job while raising her 5 children. That she would have gone mad if she hadn’t worked, but that she always had a 3-course dinner on the table when her children and husband arrived home from work, baked pies and cakes from scratch for the whole neighborhood, sewed and netted and embroidered, and drove during the 1960s a huge metallic gold-colored Buick convertible named after a James Bond film. She had gone on an engineering scholarship to Cornell in the 1930s – one of only two women to enter the engineering school in that year.
I always used to think, “What happened to them by the time it came to me?”
The answer I always got was, “Well, they’re old.”
But no, that’s not an excuse. What happened to these brave, progressive, open-minded, tolerant, philosophical people? What changed between the 1960s, when my mother was a child, and the 1990s? How, in 30 years, did my grandparents turn from people who did charitable work and supported race relations into people who sat smugly back in their bank vault without ever giving a cent away and only associated with blacks behind closed doors?
The truth is… they didn’t. They couldn’t have. A person’s entire being and way of thinking and their psychological makeup doesn’t change that much, even in 30 years, without something big to give it a shove.
So… something either gave them a shove, or they were never progressive, open-minded, philosophical, or indeed anything else.
Who told me these stories of them? My mother – in the tone of “Well, they used to be so much better than they are now, so give them a chance…” but, no. She deFOOed when she was 18, and for 2 years neither saw nor talked to my grandparents. My uncle was a wild, drunken frat boy when he was 18 and only going into the Air Force and getting shot down over Vietnam “cured” him (as my grandmother said) of his wild ways. My eldest aunt got married at 18 to a drunkard who soon left her for a whole string of other women. My next youngest aunt ran off to Mexico. Only grandmother’s favorite did the “right” thing by going to university, getting married, and settling down. And that aunt is such a hide-bound conservative that there’s no penetrating her. She is the coldest woman I’ve ever met.
With such screwed up children, how could my grandparents have been what their children said they were? The answer: they could not have been.
My grandmother – though she is dead – has been the hardest family member for me to let go. It has been hard of me to let go of her memory, because she did not treat me as badly as mother or my aunts and uncle or my grandfather. She’s “the parent who got away.”
But that pedestal is crumbling, slowly.
For those who have seen the discussion I’ve been having on the FDR board, I must lead off by saying that this is NOT in any way a rant against the people posting in that thread. If anything, it is a rant against a certain deeply-ingrained attitude – what that is and by whom it was ingrained I shall have occasion to speak of later – that has taken hold of modern man, and simply won’t let go. It’s the sort of idea that I’ve wanted all my life to fight. That I have pledged my life to fight.
The “thing” of which I am speaking is the notion that our ancestors and their actions and mindsets are simply unfathomable. That we, at the pinnacle of technology, living in an age when man is no longer the measure of all things, cannot understand how ancient man thought and felt, what his cares and sorrows were, or that we can do nothing but measure him according to our standards, and have him come up short.
The truth is that things simply aren’t that different. Anyone reading this blog – I assume that everyone reading this blog is an exponent of western culture, and currently lives in the west – has MUCH more in common with any first century Roman than he has with any twenty-first century Hindu, or Buddhist, or Daoist, or [insert eastern religion here]. Any westerner has much more in common with those flowers of 14th century chivalry Jacques Lalaing or Enguerrand de Coucy than he does with anyone who has grown up in a culture which is primarily eastern.
Why such a veil between us and our ancestors? How did it come about?
Chiefly, I think, by the priggish and parsonic moralists of the Victorian era, that great ruin and ruiner of history. For in the Victorian era, interest in the Middle Ages as a sort of romantic time was revived. Victorians viewed the Middle Ages much as Rousseau viewed his noble savage. A sort of creeping eighteenth century sentimentalism crept into the Victorian notions of the Middle Ages. Anything that was not to their liking was either highly sanitized or overblown into a horridly crude charicature of the actual events/persons/mindset in order to provide some sort of saccharine moral lesson. It was in the sick and sickening Victorian mind that such abominations as “ius primae noctis” and other stupid and ahistorical notions of the right of the lord to sleep with a peasant woman on her wedding night. Yet this unproven and unprovable “fact” finds its way into the popular imagination, popular histories, and popular culture.
The Victorians had a need to be superior. A need to maintain their empires of the mind as well as of the flesh. A need to rule both their conquered lands and to maintain the notion that they had a right to do so by dint of their superiority. A sort of intellectual “white man’s burden” to clean up history and make suitable extracts from it. The Victorians re-interpreted medieval art, clothing, and literature to suit their own “refined” tastes. They had to be superior to medieval man, though, and so the era was re-characterized as 1,000 years of plague and war. Yet the plagues and the wars were much more common in the Victorian era than in the medieval! Victorian society was in retrograde. It was going BACKWARDS from the heights achieved by the Enlightenment, and it needed to cover its tracks. (This is why the myths still persist today. We are as a species nowhere near the intellectual heights achieved by the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or even the High Middle Ages, not to mention the Romans and Greeks. We are a species in retrograde.)
It is generally known amongst historians that any book written in the Victorian era is pure rubbish, and should not be relied on in scholarly works. (There IS some true history in Victorian books, of course, but this can always be taken from other sources, much better researched and written, and with more reference to primary sources.) And yet the Victorian histories are PRECISELY where most of the drivel that is fed to children in schools these days is taken from. The learning in schools, of course, is 100 years behind the forefront of historical research.
The veil was not always down. We did not always view our ancestors through the dark glass of centuries. No. The people of the Enlightenment did not view history as dead and gone. The writers Froissart, Tacitus, Livy, Thucydides… these were all their friends. The attitude was not of foreigners or distant strangers looking backwards at time through a mirror. The kinship was acknowledged. The Enlightenment acknowledged how much it owed to the Renaissance, to the medieval scholastics, and to the Roman and Greek historians. A wall was not set up between “them” and “us.”
Why such a difference between Enlightenment man and Victorian? The Victorians, much as I blame them for benighting and condemning my “friends” in the past, they did not cut their sins from whole cloth. They inherited them from others. From whom? From other people who needed the same sort of self-aggrandizing BS that the Victorians did. Yes, ladies and germs, from the Renaissance.
The people of the Renaissance were, of course, much closer in mindset to their immediate ancestors in the middle ages than we are. They therefore had a greater need to differentiate themselves from them than we do. Renaissance tomes are filled with interesting paradoxes – filled with a tension between the nobility, still living in the middle ages, and intellectual man, living in the new world born of commerce, ingenuity, and exploration. They tend to discount wholesale anything that came between the fall of Rome and Petrarch. The fad was for everything Roman and Greek. Chuck everyone and everything else out, and in with Cicero, Plato, Socrates, and Sophocles. (This would happen again in the Enlightenment, which was a reaction to the odious splendor of the Baroque.)
History goes in long cycles, I think. There was the eastern mysticism of ancient Egypt and the early Greek civilizations. Then came republican and stoic Greece and Rome. Then Byzantium carried the pale, flickering flame of humanity until it burst into high and glorious splendor in the High Middle Ages. The flame sputtered again in the wastes of the 14th and early 15th centuries, until the higher per-capita wealth left in the wake of the Black Death sparked increases in commerce and then, at last, a second Renaissance. This collapsed in the fitful struggles and decadence of the Baroque, which was rescued by the wonders of the Enlightenment, and… now we are again benighted. 300 years of… god.
Now, some of this is what the Victorians would have us believe. Weird, eastern, pantheistic Egypt. Straight-backed and philosophical Greece and Rome. Muddy, plague-ridden, benighted medieval Europe. A bright flame of beauty and grandeur in the Renaissance. Decadence and gain-seeking in the Baroque. The collapse of the divine right of kings and the ushering in of science in the Enlightenment.
All of these are caricatures. Some of them are useful caricatures. Not all. And the middle ages always, ALWAYS gets the short end of the stick. Because people can’t resolve its contradictions. They can’t appreciate them. That wall thus descends. Anything that we can’t make sense of, or don’t want to, we must discard, and certainly disown.
What would it mean, though, if you have more in common with a medieval peasant than a Hindu untouchable? What would it mean if you acknowledged that peasant, and his mindset, as similar to you and to your mindset? I’ll tell you what: Christians have the same violent reaction when contemplating the fact that we evolved from apes. It is the same sort of fear, revulsion, and disbelief.
I’ll let you in on a bit of a secret: a medieval peasant was Christian because he had to be. Not because someone would come and bonk him on the head with a sword if he wasn’t. We define mysticism as belief which is outside the accepted laws of nature. But the peasant didn’t know them. He didn’t know the laws of thermodynamics, except by what he could empirically observe. Kepler wasn’t around yet. Nor was Newton. The basis of science was not yet laid. The medieval peasant didn’t know the laws of nature that we do because he couldn’t. And, frankly, he had as much reason for believing in divine influence in daily life as we do in gravity. I’ve never seen anyone prove gravity to me. I’ve never seen the mathematics behind it. But I can see my watch falling off the table when I push it. And to a medieval peasant, the fact that it rained after he prayed to Jesus was not due to condensation in the sky of water from the oceans, but because he prayed. That, to him, was an empirical, observable fact. He had no other, and could have no other. No other belief was possible to him in the absence of science.
You can think of the rise of science in terms of your own knowledge. Did you study aeronautical engineering at age 7? No. You studied simple addition. Then multiplication. Then algebra and geometry. Then calculus. And then when you finally had the base knowledge required, you began to study applied science – if you ever did. Well… criticising a medieval peasant for being “supersitious” is like criticizing a 10 year old for not being able to show you the mathematics behind gravity. He doesn’t know because he can’t yet know.
There are, of course, many modern people who share the medieval view that things for which they don’t have an explanation are the divine will of God. They need God in their lives, at the switch, manning the controls. The fundamentalist Christian is thought of as “medieval” in his mindset. Yet it’s not even of the fundamentalists that I’m speaking. Medieval man was ingenious. He invented, he made, he shaped, and he worked with his mind and his hands. Medieval man was, in his crude way, a scientist. An empiricist. Look at any medieval castle. Just look at it. And try to forget skyscrapers. Try to forget the modern era. Look and think: this was built by MEN. By hand. Hundreds of men with hand tools. Hundreds of men working out how to get 1-ton blocks of stone from hundreds of miles away. Hundreds of men doing the calculations to figure out how to lift them. Hundreds of men hauling with all their might to place each stone. All by men. Look at Chartres Cathedral. A masterpiece of exquisite beauty. Made by men. Made with machines powered by men, and thought of by men. By empiricists and scientists living in that most “benighted” of all ages. You look at a cathedral and tell me that there was not greatness in men’s souls. And you tell me that we should not be proud to be their intellectual descendants. You just try it.
The Victorians, of course, stood at the pinnacle of history (or what they believed was the pinnacle of history) casting aspersions at the logical equivalent of mathematics-challenged 5-year-olds. And we still do the same today. We still teach our children the shopworn tenets of Victorian exceptionalism. And it’s really, really time we stopped.
I do hope that you’ll listen to this, my dears. In fact, if you listen to no other voice post of mine, I hope you will listen to this one. It covers… not only why I study history, but some interesting thoughts on cognition in general. Yes, my friends, a meta-cognitive post.
Stef asked me in 1098, and I’ve been asking myself for a long time… why I study history. Is it the lessons history teaches? Is it because history is challenging to study? Is it because it’s intrinsically interesting? Is it because I’ve been able to lord it over other people? Yes – on various levels – to all of those. And I’ll explore all of those in other parts of this series. But the primary reason I study history is the question of cognition. Of empathy. And of realization.
Without much further ado, here is the post.
…on this, the 1645th anniversary of the murder of Flavius Claudius Iulianus, better known to history as Julian the Apostate – last pagan emperor of Rome. I may still do one – focusing not so much on his history (which is VERY interesting!) but on his literary works and intellectual development.
The reason I’m not making a voice post about his life is because I simply cannot do it better than Lars Brownworth, who is a professional historian that has an extremely entertaining and damnably informative podcast series on the emperors of Byzantium, which I cannot recommend highly enough! (That link will open in iTunes.)
Please do yourself a favor and listen to his podcast on Julian, and indeed to the rest of the 18-part series. THIS, I think, sets the bar for historical podcasts. He relies heavily on Norwich for the history in this series, but that is not at all a bad thing. (I do recommend the books of John Julius Norwich for those who are interested in the later Roman empire.)
Even if you’re not normally a history fan, do give it a try. This means all of you. :P
So… finally a post about one of my favorite subjects. It’s… 45 minutes long. Sorry! But it contains a lot of interesting (hopefully) information. Let me know what you think of it, and if you want a sequel that tells what happened the next day.
The First Crusade – Origins, Siege of Antioch
Note: For those of you who like to read first-hand accounts, here are some translated primary sources.
On this day in 1478, a conspiracy to depose the Medici rulers of Florence was carried out with Papal backing. The conspiracy failed, but the consequences of the plot were quite interesting indeed!
This is an off-the-cuff lecture, so it’s a bit scattered. It combines political and art history. I’ll post pictures of the woodcuts I mention if anyone is interested. It’s only about 14 minutes long, so if you’re interested in history at all, have a listen!
If you like these, I can do more on occasion. :) Do let me know in the comments section what you think.
Filed under: history, self-work, voice blog | Tags: FDR, history, self-work, voice blog
This post both explains a metaphor that I use often and presents my take on a fundamental choice that everyone needs to make. Philosophy… or everything else? (I had to run file recovery on this thing but it sounds ok to me. Let me know if it sounds ok to you.)
If killing and bloodshed, the deaths of souls and murdering, belief in lies, setting lands on fire, slaughtering barons, shaming [worse?], giving all our praise to pride, loving evil, hating good, murdering women, killing children… if for all this one can in truth win the reward from Jesus Christ… if this is true, then yes – I agree! – Simon de Montfort wears a crown, and sits in glory in the sky.
