The Dream of History

The dream of history may be described as self-knowledge. Jan Cox referred to the academic discipline of history as illusory. The motive behind studying history, as with so many things, is probably self-knowledge. There is a kind of search for self knowledge which actually involves hiding from real awareness. Some intellectual pursuits give the satisfaction of scratching an itch while avoiding the shock and joy of real understanding which requires among other things a certain kind of courage. As long as the procession of sentences can continue, one is protected from the self knowledge that real objectivity involves, while garnering the faint glow of intellectual creativity and curiosity.

An example of history as preserving illusions came to my attention this morning in the email summary of a scots newspaper. I quote from the Daily Scotsman,and in the quote below merely ask that you notice the assumption that the individual is capable of conscious action and responsible as an agent of action. What is history without this assumption--biology? but here is the quote :

"Fact of the Day Today in 1625 Charles I came to the throne of England and Scotland. His reign would be turbulent and his clashes with the English Parliament, plus his handling of religious issues, led to civil war and his eventual beheading. Read more of Scottish history at heritage.scotsman.com"

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Thu, 27 Mar 2008

A Trained Seal

A trained seal is a nice picture of human verbal thought. I guess everyone has a graphic accompaniment to that phrase. A seal which is on a ball and managing to keep his balance. If this were not a metaphor one would feel repelled by the connotations of the brutality (which confined animals, in the zoo or circus, suffer necessarily by virtue of their entrapment if nothing else) this image would bring up. But we are talking of something besides seals, we are talking about the human intellect and I like this picture of it. Wobbling here, weaving there, so warbles mechanical mentation when it spills forth from the mouth (or keyboard). The interesting part of human speech is that, just as the seal can stay upright, there is conceivably some sense which others may agree is the import of the words being spoken. All the while what is really happening is at a basic glandular level and any resemblance to actual denotative substance is accidental.

And the ball. What could the ball be in this metaphor? Maybe the secret. Oh yes there really is a secret. It is just not hidden away. Skip the purloined letter, what about a purloined universe. By not saying more I am not being coy. Anyone can study the words of Jan Cox on his website, jancox.com., and learn far more than by reading my words.

What women know

This whole silly todo about Eliot Spitzer getting caught with his wallet open (silly except that such distractions, keep the secondary world alive) reminds me of the time Jan Cox pointed out offhandedly that lawyers marry beautiful women. I suppose men are artless when they investigate why such behavior occurs ( NPR interviewed such an academic student in the aftermath of the above incident, who has done research on why men visit prostitutes,yes really) but women know darn well how blameless men are, and yet they cluck away. I do not wish to dwell too much about this now, to avoid what Jan called "the suicide of the secondary," ,but there are examples to hand of women who dealt with infidelity in a sensible manner. I refer to Queen Alexandra, who invited her husband's mistress to visit him by his deathbed. My point is this is well within the bounds of ordinary knowledge, at least for women, at least it used to be. Why indeed do men visit prostitutes. Give me a break.

Another picture

Why is there no verb form for being a plate of sheet glass? A sheet of glass is a nice picture of reality. Words are like tape on the glass to make the glass apparent. But of course reality is never a noun, and the reality of moving, flowing glass is not the best picture of what we are pointing to. For the nonce, our sheet of glass is on a truck. Notice it is outside, inside being too hazardous to keep the glass intact, what with pushy nouns and verbs that bang in the mental interiority of modern consciousness . So the relatively unconfined outdoors is the milieu in which to glimpse our plate of glass, whizzing by on a truck. Everyone assumes they know about the truck, when in fact none do.

Words

Words are an airplane circling to land. Most want the airplane to land, creating an end, a period. Unless there is a defect which might affect a safe landing. Then the craft circles to use up the fuel and minimize the chance of an explosion which could destroy the passengers. A revolutionist, to use a term favored by Jan Cox, fuels up for the flight and after the craft is aloft, dives into the ground. The revolutionist wants to destroy the assumption of knowledge which never existed---i.e. the ordinary mind. The explosion sought by the revolutionist ...

A vista to avoid if you are committed to the orderly

The recent discussion about why history is now measured exactly as it was in the time of Christian historians, with just the labels altered to sound less religious, has another dimension. In fairness the historians deciding on how to label their dating faced the dauntingness of the unmeasurable and the human intellect does it's best to avoid that vista of the unfathomable. In this instance I am referring to the fact that numbering has to start someplace, and there is NO convenient place in a world accustomed to being able to start numbering with a definite historical event. The grand appeal of 1 AD is that it was nailed into (not a wood crossbeam but) a definable event. Now that this starting place is less obvious, where would the numbering start? It occurs to me that maybe 6000 BCE, which is reported to be about the time human writing started. But of course this is a convention too, and hardly less speculative than the recently popular system. And then we would have the clumsiness of some events being counted backwards from 6000 BCE. You do need an edge, even though the point which I would like to highlight is that there IS no edge to count from, not really.

Which brings up the extent the human intellect will go to to avoid realizing how mythical edges really are. That might be our next question.

What divides BCE and CE?

The conventions for expressing dates are a nice example of binary thought. What is any real difference between 11:59pm and 12:01 am. Yet they are considered a day apart. But what is fun to notice is the terminology that used to indicate the time before and after the supposed birth of the Christian deity. This used to be usage to which all westerners adhered in speaking of dates, regardless of their personal religious views. To do otherwise would be to be incomprehensible to one's readers. At some point in the 20th century the provincialness of this convention became so obvious that the iniitals were changed from B.C. to B.C.E., where the latter stood for Before Common Era. So we apparently are more cosmopolitan historians now. Maybe CE stands for Cosmopolitan Era.

Except----there is still this verbal gulf between indivisible worlds, a chasm signifying nothing except the silliness of which the human intellect is capable. On what significant grounds does history come galloping up to 1 BCE (rear up, perhaps,} and then leap across to 1 CE? At least the Christians had a reason which to them was a convincingly major event by which to order history. What could be the importance now which leads us to divide history into two severed pieces? Well, one thing is the new dating convention points to the tenacity of the human intellect in dividing everything into twos, a bisection which enables human mentation to reason (that is, hit the asphalt) at all. Still, for some, being able to count just to two, barely counts.