[tmbchr]™

Each One Tells His Own Version



Aditi sent me this:

Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago.

That’s the belief of Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan who has been diving at the site to measure and map its formations for more than 15 years.

It’s from National Geographic and is a quick pastiche of something I have been trying to articulate to myself about how history works. History, I don’t think, is this monolithic entity we mostly unconsciously assume it to be. History is this sort of collective memory game we play and make up as we go, on the fly. Think about it: how many times a week do you hear some new bit of revisionist history: this new study suddenly proclaiming or this new scientist finally naming a great disorder or event or other civilized catastrophe? All history is is stories we tell ourselves about why things are the way they are right now this second. Why we’re not off living some other life, having some other adventures, which we can dream but can’t seem to make real? We make up and listen to lovingly stories we tell each other about our current relationships: why are you this to me, instead of x, y or z?

We do this all day, endlessly, with a glance, with a few simple words, put each other into a trance. You nod your head like mine and suddenly start feeling like everything is fine. If everything is really fine, has it always been, will it always be? This is what history is to us, this is what it is to me: the stories we continually tell ourselves about who we are and what will and will not be. The thing which becomes existentially terrifying, eventually, is that you can but don’t ever try to re-write it, and worst of all, when you do, it actually works.







6 Reader Responses

  1. cadeveo Says:
    January 29th, 2008 at 12:19 am

    Damn, Tim. I just was thinking about similar things, though coming from a different place:

    http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/vicarious-memories/

    You’re right, though. All memories have an imaginationary (new word!) quality to them.

    Have you revised your own history consciously? The last part of your post makes me feel that you speak from experience. I’ve thought about that undertaking at times.

    L. Ron Hubbard certainly revised his history to come into line with who he thought he was or wanted to be. Same with Richard Bandler, the NLP co-founder…’course, their results aren’t necessarily reflective of those of other “users” of the personal history revisioning cream. Those two examples are pretty loaded, I realize.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    January 29th, 2008 at 12:38 am

    Have you revised your own history consciously? The last part of your post makes me feel that you speak from experience. I’ve thought about that undertaking at times.

    Well the point is sort of that everybody is constantly doing that at every second…? You’re doing it right now, I guarantee it.

    {See also: Alan Watts, Wisdom of Insecurity}

  3. speedbird Says:
    January 29th, 2008 at 8:06 am

    His story.

    *

    A wise man taught me at school that the only history that really matters is what is termed ‘primary evidence’ - essentially, objects from the time under study. Anything written about the past later on is ’secondary evidence’ and is a very poor substitute. Most evidence about the past is secondary.

    Everything on the internet is secondary.

  4. Steve Mills Says:
    January 30th, 2008 at 5:27 am

    Everything is narrative from a certain point of view.

    I think i have said it before on this site, but I have a theory that you are constantly telling yourself a story about your past, about what is happening in the present and what you expect your future to be.

    And people revise this story all of the time. It’s like a meta program that we all run, keeps us moivated, gives us direction, shit like that.

    History is just the collective version of this, the culture is always telling itself a narrative about its past, its present direction and it’s future.

    Oh yeah, and that other bit of wisdom “History is always told by the winning side”

  5. Tim Boucher Says:
    January 30th, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    I think i have said it before on this site, but I have a theory that you are constantly telling yourself a story about your past, about what is happening in the present and what you expect your future to be.

    The Don Juan books are ALL about this very thing. See: erasing personal history. We’ve talked about this many times, but it’s another thing entirely for one to start actively living this way. It’s both disorienting and liberating.

    And people revise this story all of the time. It’s like a meta program that we all run, keeps us moivated, gives us direction, shit like that.

    Well put! And it’s extremely important because (1) we can make that story be anything, (2) we can work together to make agreements and exchanges about how it works, (3) revise and update on the fly when we find out things don’t work as they should, etc etc

    History is just the collective version of this, the culture is always telling itself a narrative about its past, its present direction and it’s future.

    History doesn’t just come from nowhere though. It comes from historians, story-tellers, singers, actors, etc. More on this vis a vis my carnival culture series: that’s where it is headed!

  6. This Is Drunk History - [tmbchr]™ Says:
    January 30th, 2008 at 6:20 pm

    […] Since we’ve been talking about history, this video sums it all up so perfectly. Just watch the damn thing to see what I mean: […]



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