It Is Not You Who Are Mortal, But This Body Of Ours

I went to school to study history. On purpose I mean, like I had the option to take literally anything else but I kept going "Nope, I think this quarter it's going to be Latin American Labor Movements 1948-1970 and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays Cultural Hegemony And The African Diaspora In The French Second Empire," because those are choices you make after you've failed to make any meaningful, conceptual connection between education and employment.

History probably isn't what you think it is, a bunch dates to memorize and the accounts of Great Men doing Things of Note. Well, OK, it is those things. And all the Great Men are White Men, that's true. But to be fair, those are the only things historical people bothered to write down, so we're kind of stuck trying to recreate, say, a peasant narrative from the records of people who forgot to see them as, well, other people.

We do what we can, but the challenge is to try to construct and understand a perspective created in a world whose assumptions about existence, morality, humanity, expression and literal self-awareness all definitionally exist outside of this time. History isn't really "events," those are things that are decided on after the fact, and then propped up by a self-perpetuating narrative that sells books and limited series on the Military Channel. It's really flowing, churning, changing discrete sets of moments decided in an episteme, a liquid medium of understanding that has long since flowed out to meet the sea, indistinguishable from anything else. It's like trying to pick out one section of flowing river and asking it to stop so you can talk to it.

The only antidote to the obscurity is the first-person account, the primary sources, the rare and precious scraps of human thought that have, impossibly, managed to survive the million million ravages of disaster, decay and human ignorance. We make a big deal about Julius Caesar because we can just check in with him directly. A mid-level functionary like Daniel Pepys is famous because his account, his first-person account, survives. These are peeks through cracks in a wall of solid marble a thousand miles thick. Of course you can't really see a thousand miles so I'm not sure how a crack would be helpful, no matter how deep, but the metaphor isn't the point. The point is these things are hard to come by.

That's part of the reason why I keep doing this. I know as much as I may think I'll remember, years from now, months from now, even days from now I won't have the immediacy of this moment, whenever that is, to understand how it felt during the Iraq War or the election of the first black president or the global pandemic that shut everything down for months that one time in 2020.

Everything any of us experiences is a snapshot. But it's one your brain requires you to set on fire a little bit to make room for the next one. The thing that seems like the greatest asset to remembering--your actual, literal memory--is going to be the thing that causes you to rearrange facts and feelings and times and faces to fit a narrative that makes sense, that is re-tellable. But the lived moment is a giant fucking mess that doesn't care if you'll be able to recount it. Whatever fidelity you achieve later, part of it will be a lie. It has to be. All stories are lies, or rather fictive, if you prefer.

So when you can, write it down. You'll forget. I know you will. So do you. And you'll have to fill in part of what you forgot with something else from somewhere else. I set up a travel blog just for the trip I took with my kids to the UK back in 2016. I go back to it often and it places me there immediately, in a way fumbling around with the flashes of imagery in my head can't. Write it down. Before it's gone.

This week for example I'm going to remember that this was when the pandemic made me do crafts. Fucking crafts. Maybe this will be a turning point and in the future, when my thirty-year hobby of making bespoke cloth facemasks out of old T-shirts is a thing I can't remember not doing, this I'm now typing will be me saying to that sad, sorry version of myself: you resented every second of it. You remembered there were people with slightly bigger problems. And even though cutting three mostly useless facemasks from a T-shirt is pretty easy, it was stressful and irritating and scary. In the end they're smothering and inefficient and stifling and they look, smell and feel like literally everything we've had to lose over the last month. An unfettered deep breath of unfiltered air is a thing we'll all have to wait for. That's definitely something I'd never have considered I'd be writing down.