Having been touched by Ken Parish’s movingly crafted reverie on his family sod tradition, I was struck by the comment from Ian; to wit, “I can only offer you the thought that ‘memories are forever’”. I agree, but, as a historian, I would say that, wouldn’t I? History, and I’m talking Herodotus, was kick-started on the notion that its job was to make memories. The problem at the time was that nature was forever, with the depressing exception of human words and deeds, which were destined for futile oblivion. Born into a world where everything else was forever, history was conceived as a lean against the eternal breeze; as a protest over mortality being the hallmark of mortals. The idea of remembering lives cut across the cycle of biological life, refusing the quietude of swinging within itself. History was conjured to memorialise deeds, events and words that interrupted the cycle; to arrest perishability; to keep the extraordinary; to practice remembrance. The idea of history as making the mortal immortal subsided, of course, as the discipline was integrated with the world of nature by the sense of history as a process, the understanding of which came to be regarded as history’s meaning (or ‘Spirit’, as Hegel imagined, poetically). Subsequently, when humans inverted the discipline’s original terms of reference by kick-starting natural processes themselves, as in splitting things like atoms, we entered the postmodern moment and our present condition, where everything might be possible (provided it’s in the media, but I digress). In these alienated circumstances, today we know that nothing is forever … except for what is ironically, yet popularly, said to survive in the hidy-hole of the ever so mortal human heart.
6 Responses to “I will love you forever”
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Would some Whitney Houston be appropriate at this moment?
Prefer some REM, but suit yourself el.
NOOO…. PLEEEEEASE… Emily sang it better, anyway.
El, you Scrooge, you. I thought this was a gorgeous post and I hope CS is writing a book about it. Have been thinking about it overnight. Maybe it explains the explosion, late last century, in hitherto-scorned genres like memoir and essay. One minute neither readers nor writers (and certainly not publishers) would touch them with a barge-pole and the next minute they were walking out of the shops.
(To say nothing of blogging.)
It might also explain why suddenly everybody wants to be a writer — the conviction that the only truth one can rely on is one’s own. Creative Writing courses are all that is keeping some Arts faculties afloat at the moment.
CS, where would you fit literature (hard core, I mean — fiction, poetry, that kinds of thing) into this scheme of thinking?
Thanks sweet Cat. I also appreciated your recent reverie (and will dwell on the last).
Agree with Pavlov’s Cat - very nice work, Chris. Reminds me that histoire means both story and history in French, and also of another great concept - anamnesis (picking up the ancient Greek theme).
Nice to read you writing about something other than rugby, Chris.
And that Pavlova post is great, you should all go read it.