Pax Americana
History is a study of memory and it's reproduction. When nobody lives to remember an event, we need to fantasize about what happened to be able to empathize and understand the people of the past. Learning to develop a skill for constructing a fantasy that is closer to the lived memory of someone who might have been there is quite difficult, and often times quite disenchanting. It's way more fun to let oneself be swept up in the romance of ancient heroes and mythic dreamlands of worlds now past, especially as that past grows ever distant from you in tangability.
As such, a lot of people have a very romanticized sense of the past, myself included, which, when I think about it, can feel a little strange-- that was just how people lived in a different place and time, no different from each morning I wake and each meal I eat, these are people I could have related to and spoken to, shared dreams and aspirations or even just meals with. They don't exist anymore but I can still visit their graves and look at their mechanical watches and cutlery in museums.
But when you read about the past, the stories told aren't usually about them. It's about grand empires and power politics and the mechanics of economies and armies, and that all feels very distant from me, but I think at some point I recognized that maybe it had a deeper presence in my life, a sense of chronology relative to now, that I can see in things like...
how soldiers dress
the way people speak on TV
what's important to those around me
in architecture
in infrastructure
And it's very easy to find romance in the imagery of a soldier in years past, but when met with one in person, it can feel a little intimidating or strange. And I would never understand why people spoke like that on TV as a kid, when everyone around me spoke with an accent and manner particular to here. And there are these big and fanciful names for the time period that I lived in - Pax Americana, the Unipolar Moment, the End of History - even though it's almost hard to believe I lived in a time period at all, because nothing has really happened to me in this distant and sleepy part of the world.
When I put a name to things, suddenly it seems far more interesting, because it means that somebody will look back on this, and maybe feel the same sense of fantasy and romance that I did, and that seems kind of ridiculous to me, because nothing is romantic about how I live, and that thought almost disenchants the past, but really, there's no enchantment to it. I could think endlessly of genocide and cruelty beyond cruelty, and feel so very miserable, and that disenchants the past almost as much as realizing there is no less romance to here than there is to then. Yet, enchantment is here, and now, something I found despite all the horrible things that happened around me. I think there's a lot of value to that, that no world or time or place, past, present, or future, is somewhere special in particular, and yet if I managed to find beauty here, then I can find beauty anywhere
Our time and place is really exceptional in the grand scheme of things, containing forms of suffering both incomparable and deeply common to those of the past, so it's really hard to get a sense of if this is somehow the better alternative or whatever. I know on material terms, that I live in ways that are so very decadent compared to those of the past, but surely, that isn't the only metric for a good life, because despite comfortably I lie in my bed, there is a profound loneliness to be found coddled by suburban drywall. Indeed, if we want to ask questions as to what we would prefer between now and then, wanting to fight in or be a part of the great movements of history seems to be a central point of some views of the world: To have agency as a character in a greater narrative, not merely a number, is so deeply appealing when our lives are surrounded by myths of knights and princesses for whom the concept of fate seems very real, which to us is what precisely makes their stories myths.
But, maybe that isn't really a worthwhile question, if our suffering is more or less, because all the same, I know that I'm suffering. I know that I'm deeply alone in a drywall home, in quiet and depressing suburbs, unable to ever relate to those around me, drifting through gradients of neurosis and depression in the quiet of my room where nothing really happens, growing up with the expectation always that I would do something, go somewhere, be someone, only to have those expectations crushed as the world around me changed.
and yet
I could still find romance in this
I could still be loved.
I could still show love
and I shared in the beauty of the world with others
and our shared sense of beauty made it worth living in
So to all those hopeless romantics who read this centuries on, I love you!
24th of February, 2022 - 4:04 AM
As quickly as it came, it went. For the past week, the curtains seem to be closing on the mythical End of History, armies moving and diplomats speaking. All of the sudden the world seems so fast! It seems so much more alive than it was when I was growing up...
And I think what I got to grow up around was really special
24th of February, 2022 - 02:41 PM
Yeah.
23rd of April, 2022 - 12:09 AM
Perhaps that was somewhat overdramatic, yet perhaps somewhat fitting. Nothing actually changed with the events that transpired that day as far as how I lived went. I went to sleep in the same room and woke up in the same room. Months past, and the news seemed more and more bleak, and perhaps in countries more closeby, prices went up, but life continued as it had before, here, so I can't help but feel as if what I said was silly.
At the same time, I think it taught me a lesson in fin de siècle ennui. For many Europeans at the time, the move from the 19th century to the 20th felt as if a cosmic shift, even though the actual transformation of things would only occur nearly two decades later. Nothing actually changed, but it signaled an end all the same. It's really hard to demarcate historical boundaries, because they're not really perceptible things. You wake up the next day, the next day, another more, and entire eras can pass and you just keep moving. And for many people, it seems as if nothing has changed at all, if you live at the far corners and provinces of an Empire, which I happen to.
It's a really boring perspective, isn't it? Of some suburban loser from the middle of nowhere and how they felt about profound tragedies in far away countries. I guess that boredom is ironically what makes it interesting, and silly.
22nd of May, 2022 - 11:32 PM
Myth and narrative dominate conceptions of the past. In various forms, and in various ways, people seek to reproduce narrative conceptions of the past - something which never truly existed for those who experienced it - to a timeless present. In the particular, this expresses itself in the formalizing of titles, future ambitions, past accomplishments, and the various forms in which one organizes the course of their life into a larger story; in the general, it occurs in perhaps a more dangerous form, namely through reactionary sentiment. Though I loathe the term, for the connotations associated with it, and it's reconfiguration and usage by people in very particular ways, I rather ask one to consider it in an etymological sense, namely as reacting to the present, and seeking the past. One might take the example of Henri du Vergier, comte de la Rochejaquelein, a young counterrevolutionary who opposed the French Revolution, and who's life and death during the period brought with him the mythology of the past, as though the Jean of Arc who's stories and mythology must have filled his childhood dreams.
Mes amis, si j'avance, suivez-moi! Si je recule, tuez-moi! Si je meurs, vengez-moi! ("Friends, if I advance, follow me! If I retreat, kill me! If I die, avenge me!").
Most dominant of the forces among that which seeks to organize and mythologize time as it is would be capitalism, through the organization and structuring of time around the performance of labor. This may be seen most especially in it's relation to the industrial revolution, of which Lewis Mumford observed that the paramount invention of the period was the clock: Infinitely more widespread than the steam engine, fundamentally characteristic of western culture and society - such that it's ubiquity was often a source of puzzlement to Asian and African visitors witnessing European society, and among those countries westernizing, the implementation of clocks was an important part of that process - essential to the structuring of one's day around industrial labour. The quantification and standardization of time, as such, might be seen as something of a tragedy. I sometimes find myself noticing the passage of time relative to my activities, and find it a detriment to my ability to simply engage in the moment as freely as I wish.
Regarding the ways in which we attempt to make the present mythological, I found myself responding to this understanding of time with a certain hostility to an approach to the past as a mythology, followed by a sense of aporia faced by the ways in which it became difficult to hold this sensibility whilst also engaging with the past and future of oneself as real and concrete things with consequences and directions. But, of course, the present isn't only a timeless sense of now, but it includes the past and future as embedded within it, taking the present simply as the condition of experiencing the presence of the world around you, in all of what it will be and what it was, to be outside of time, effectively, to not be conditioned by the ticking of a clock or the presence of a larger story occuring around you, present outside of time thus constructed.
In my parlance I tend to find the term Narrativization occur to refer to moments in which I catch myself phrasing something according to a narrative form of the moment before me I am producing. Responding more as if a character, because it is characters who have conditioned the words and means by which I express myself. In these moments, I feel that I deny myself the world outside my thoughts, and act in ways that, whilst perhaps aesthetically pleasing, are inauthentic, superficial, and solipsistic; I am not a story, nor am I a writer, but a person, and what occurs before me is real in a way that stories are not. And that's scary, because when I make myself present, the world's presence overwhelms me, I feel like I'm drowning in every emotion within, and I struggle to attune to it, but if I keep practicing, and allow myself to feel the heartbeat of others, and the heartbeat within me, and everything intensely and richly so, I don't need to be guided by each tick of a clock.
In reactionary sentiment, a glorious past is how one escapes the intensity of the present. A story about an Empire is embedded in various aesthetic fancies, dreams, fantasies; it becomes harder to see things like poverty and war underneath it. Perhaps this is another act of narrativization, but it might serve useful to consider the idea of being present during the aftermath of having lost a family member to war in the conquest of foreign lands, without the same trappings of mythologization. Without trying to use one's historical imagination to paint a picture of old pottery, of the crackling of fire, a thatch roof, worn out yarn clothes, and wooden spoons and bowls, because death is not a fairy tale featuring stone castles, lords, and peasants; nor is war, or poverty, or history. Every bit of sorrow, and joy, and thought, and confusion, and realization, and each and every consequence is and was and will be and remains real.
RIP Henri de la Rochejaquelein (30 August 1772 – 28 January 1794)