Explorations and reactions from the liberal arts course "On History" at the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, January through March 2010. Located in Bangalore, India.
What is the difference between an event that terminates and one that begins a sequence? Or is it a historical event a sign of a rupture in a series and a point of metamorphosis from one level, phase, or aspect of the historical continuum to another? Or is it a sign of transition from one phase of a continuum to another?
This very Western way of thinking, based on preconceptions and notions that all historical events are based upon human interaction – human emotions, achievements or desires – gives importance to the addition of something new to the state of being. When I read this part of the article, it made me think – that’s it. A pretty simple understanding of what an event could be – Anything outside the ordinary, anything that disrupts the routine.
Then, Alan Badiou states simply – Being everything that is in the case and there is nothing that is not in the case. Nothing new can ever be added to being and there no event could ever take place.
Events only seem to occur all the time. Badiou explains the phenomenon as occurring when the knowledge of some unknown aspect of being is added to what had been previously known as being. But neither Badiou’s Eastern philosophy nor the opposite Western philosophy fail to include routine events that happen daily. It is assumed that an event only includes the unanticipated.
I think that maybe an event is anything that is in the case – that is being. Only until an event is noted is it labelled an event. An event can be anything from a fly buzzing in your ear, to the 9/11 attacks. The larger the group is that takes notice of the event, the more valid and accepted the event becomes.
“What we call historical truth and veracity-Intelligent, thoughtful comprehension of events and fidelity in representing them-nothing of this sort can be looked for among hindoos.”
During the modernist era people looked at historical documentation as a bank of facts; things needed to be put in chronological order and only the absolute truth was to be written. This could come in any written from all the way from a document to the diary of a traveler. As long as life was documented the way it was.
Indian culture took to documenting their past from a very different angle as a result of which it could be as if they looked at documenting history as something of little importance.
There have been many attempts to explain this phenomenon ranging from General lack of interest to Maya and cyclical time(because of which “there is no room in this scheme for the modern idea that man is the subject and agent of history”) But within these explanations Roy W. Perrett mentions that “Indian philosophy did not recognize either history or memory as independent sources of knowledge.” This is interesting because I personally feel that this statement doesn’t necessarily need to be a negative one.
Oral tradition in India has been around for centuries. The gurukul system where a student is to live with his teacher and imbibe his teachings through simply memorizing what the teacher says is a practice that still exists in niche areas of Indian culture today. Take Hindusthani music for example; despite having books on the subject students still learn simply by listening and memorizing the teachers tune.
What I am tryng to point out is that it is in this way that quite a lot of our history has been recorded. Rajasthan for instance has an entire class of people known as bhat, the genealogists. The role of these people is to keep track of your family line, specifically the male line. There are two types of bhats - mukhavancha bhat and pothibancha bhat. The mukhavancha bhat maintain genealogy records orally, not in writing. The pothibancha bhat keep a bahi or record in which they write down names.
Each family has to pay the pothibancha bhat for the writing of their names, without which their names will not be entered into his bahi or into the bhat's memory. The practice in Rajasthan is that the bhats visit families every three years and record in the bahi the names of children born, if any, in the families in the interim years. These people are walking encyclopedias of family lineage and their history. Most people have the misconception that these people only record the histories of royalty but it was for almost anyone who wished to keep their family history alive. This information has been passed down through generations of bhats and is still alive today.
Narrative, in Indian tradition is one of the most important ways of documenting this culture. Records of past deeds, experiences and people are all kept through stories, music or theatre. Wandering performers sing of a great sadhu or king of which someone who is inspired might make a song and so on and so forth. The process is constantly growing and evolving through a multitude of techniques.
When one looks at documenting history one must broaden ones perspective a little. All history in India is documented in some way,
Oral tradition being only the tip of the iceberg; It’s just that sometimes ones ways of interpreting could get a little more creative!
The allegory of the cave, at the first reading is fairly straightforward. It is a documentation by Plato of his teacher Socrates’ conversation with another student Glaucon, where Socrates uses various metaphors to explain the journey of a philosopher and original thinker who dares to look at things from beyond the prescribed point of view.
The cave is an elaborate setup, which is meant to represent the visual world or society. The prisoners who are chained and sitting in a row are individuals who are conditioned by society since birth and thereby look at the world in a prescribed manner. All these prisoners in the cave are looking at shadows of puppet showmen on the wall in front of them that is cast by the fire behind them. They see neither the showmen nor the fire, just the shadows and that for them is their reality. According to Socrates the fire represents the sun or light though he does not elaborate on who the puppet showmen are. This is the scene the allegory begins with and comprises the first part. In the second part one of the prisoners is freed from his shackles so that he suddenly realizes that the wall of shadows he has considered his reality all his life is but a small part of a wider scheme of things. He is dragged up the rugged ascent to the opening of the cave and made to look out at the world beyond – the sky the sun the trees etc. This journey is violent and tough. Then after getting accustomed to this new “truer” reality he has to journey back into the cave and rejoin his companions in the third part of the allegory. He is necessarily maladjusted when he returns since he has grown unaccustomed to the darkness and the men who have stayed in the cave all the while, resolve never to go out to explore anything in the fear of coming back disoriented and less functional.
That is the gist of the allegory, and though it is fairly didactic it still raises questions that are not directly answered in the text. The most obvious one perhaps is who are these puppet showmen and who is it that frees the prisoner and drags him up to the mouth of the cave and with what motivation? I believe out of all the parts in the allegory it is the character of the prison guard that is the most intriguing since he does such obviously contradictory things. In spite of keeping the prisoners chained for so long why would he suddenly decide to free one and forcibly drag him around to show him the things that have been kept at bay so carefully? The first impression that the prisoners are shackled by institutions, the state or figures of authority, is suddenly checked when one of the prisoners is freed, since no figure of authority would willingly make the individual look beyond the straight jacket. So the mystery grows as to what has kept these men shackled. In my interpretation the prison guard is our conscious minds with all its dichotomies and contradictions. Our consciousness keeps us focused on the “wall of shadows”, on societal realities common to everyone so that we can function and progress in ways both expected and relevant. At the same time there is a part of our consciousness which strives to break the mould, rebel against the system and experience a new kind of life and perception – and this exploratory side is at constant odds with the pragmatic side. Hence the journey into “enlightenment” or differential experience is always a tough one since one has to battle with one’s “saner and safer instincts of survival”.
A question that I posed in a class discussion regarding the allegory was whether the journey to the opening of the cave could possibly be done by more than one person: together? As I understand it that journey is necessarily an individual one because it is also an inward one. It is taken in the realm of one’s mind – from one level of consciousness to another and it is necessarily tough since one has to go against all the age long social conditioning, and the comfort zone of knowing that everybody is going to agree with you or vice versa. But then having made this tough journey and experienced an obviously more beautiful and wider reality why then does the actor have to go back to the cave? The reason is precisely because it is an inward journey, and the moment he tries to share his experience with anyone – translate his widened perception into words – he must speak in the language of shadows that is understood by the rest of the prisoners facing the wall.
The first parallel that comes to mind of this situation is the relationship between spirituality and religion. The former is a realization or journey that takes place at an individual level and is not an experience that can be shared. Religion – apart from its connotations of institutionalization and power – is simply a tool of communicating spirituality to a wider audience; in effect it is mass media that can be watched on a “wall of shadows” by those who do not make the inward journey themselves. In the process the experience is naturally diluted standardized and far removed from the authentic, but it is the only way it can be understood by a group. Similarly experimenting with hallucinogens might give you a wider experience of your consciousness but how do you translate the experience to someone else. Whether it is through language music or visuals it still remains a representation of the authentic, shadows which nonetheless may be communicated and understood in a social context.
“And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be reality clearer than the things what are now being shown to him?”
The first read of the article caught my interest and brought forward that old tutored righteous didactic voice from the back of my head. A man being released into the ‘light of life’ of candid reality from his endless physical position of facing a wall looking at shadows and false impressions, is an allegory that retains thorough connotations. But after my second and third read, I was tempted to re-quote Nietzsche’s popular comment “Plato was a bore.” Sitting above absolutes and unlikely ideals, Plato defines them as morally proper. I'd like to think though that Plato was more of a stargaze than boring, unrealistic idealism that, when the goal actually achieved by those seeking it, is clearly unnecessary and expensive, though deemed ‘ethical and moral’ (though the introduction of the article before Plato’s passage however isn’t as wholly illusory).
The long time period in history between Plato to Nietzsche cannot be argued- the gradual development of humans in the understanding of the mind and society would have progressed (not necessarily but likely) from Plato till today. So Platonic dialogue is viewed as an archaic, self-satisfied indulgent kind of dialectic, such as his opinion that there is one perfect version of Good for all people, whether they are rich or poor, powerful or weak, an unalterable Good which man should prize above all else.
Thus I see these two perspectives, both of which I can relate to- Plato’s theoretical preconditioned understandings we gather of life and Nietzsche’s practical experiential approach towards life. Plato’s ideas are today disguised as the ‘rules’- a foundation that sets the stage, allowing me to do whatever I want with those ideas. Plato’s ideas embody external authoritative figures. Nietzsche on the other hand is a part of nihilism, which negates one single objective voice of truth and states that the power resides inside, here embodying my mind and heart.
“...new methods (of looking at history) are essential for restoring traction to the public in a public-based political order.”
This is a theme I’ve been exploring for a while now, due to the courses I’ve been taking along similar lines. The basic point the author makes then, is that the main reason for resorting to the postmodern “method” is to subvert the centres of power that have been created on the basis of these institutionalized modes of thought. Governments, religious bodies, scientific and philosophical establishments in the last few centuries have all been built up from these “worldviews” that are being propagated, or have furthered the propagation themselves....thus creating for themselves strongholds of power and inducing intellectual strangleholds. Predictably, as these worldviews transform into unquestionable truths, so it becomes easier to construct an equally unshakable structure of power around it.
I’ve often thought about this notion of postmodernism being merely a phase, a transition into a new system of worldviews and accepted notions. Personally, I feel there to be little chance of that happening. While no one can really make adequate predictions on the nature of the “post-post modernity”, to me such questions are anyway irrelevant. Postmodernism is a change not merely in the shallow form that the previous historical transitions since the renaissance were, but a change at a far more fundamental level, a revolution in method as much as thought, “...a paradigmatic shift, nothing less.” So fundamental a change is this, that attempting to make accurate predictions about the future seems a bit daft. The postmodern mindset may survive, or it may morph into something new...both seem equally likely possibilities for now, but I somehow feel it’s one that could be self-sustaining. In the seemingly “anything-goes” world of postmodernity, it seems difficult to imagine any single view gaining a comparatively greater following (though this also might be an incorrect view, as it’s viewing postmodernism from a modernists eyes), and hence producing a large-scale change.
Oh well, I think my rambling there just convinced me on the uselessness of attempting to make any accurate forecasts regarding this issue.
Anyway, returning to my previous point, postmodernism seems to be forming as a reaction to these institutions. I think (and again, this may be my modernist-conditioned mind talking, but it’s still valid) there’s a danger somewhere of even this “postmodern” mode of thought being institutionalized in some way (on reading this, I’m wondering if the term “institution” will still be valid). Getting rid of absolutes also means not allowing for the same view to be held as an absolute, and I feel if this is not adhered to, and this mode of thought becomes rigid, there would be a risk of a very reactionary mode of thought forming, perhaps opposite in conception, even restrictive. This could be one such “code”.
But then again, why am i so afraid of this outcome? I guess some part of me can understand its existence, but it would still be a shame if we allowed ourselves as a race to stifle the diversity that could exist and demarcate boundaries in our minds.
..However, as a captive of the moral truth, Amery demands a right of resistance against what he calls the anti-moral ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ time that heals all wounds: “What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals and intellect...” Amery took an explicit stance against Nietzsche’s counsel to learn to forget and his notion that history must serve the present and future.
Around two months back I accidently spilt a tiny tumbler of hot tea on my study desk, which in seconds gushed through the rest of the table, onto my laptop, a new Mac.How did this happen? A normal every day morning- I went downstairs to the kitchen, picked up some hot tea in a tumbler, came back to my room with the newspaper, walked towards my desk and placed my tea. Leaning on the desk I noticedthat it was sitting a few inches ahead of the wall, so I gave the desk a slight nudge, the rest followed; the table shook causing the tumbler to jerk- the tea falling (flowing, flying!) rapidly across onto the harmless laptop that was shutdown and whose screen was even closed. This tiny spill of tea worth barely three rupees has caused a series of extremely large unfortunate events costing me more than fifty thousand rupees. Such is the nature of an accident; a freak accident.
When I read this sheet, this chosen quote of Amery’s stood out; it amplified the sting I was left with. I cannot claim that this was a crime that deserved justice and I apologize for creating parallels with his life threatening versus my materialistic situation, but in my head all I knew was that I had no option but to go back in time and change what was done. My mind saw no choices: I had to go back and un-nudge that table, that was the only way the situation would achieve justice. I didn’t accept the idea of time. And this is exactly how I relate to Amery’s quote “the time sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened.”
For a whole month I was in denial that the tea had spilt on and seeped inside the laptop, even though experts had diagnosed that the logic board and display had to be changed and that it was my only chance of getting the laptop to work. I didn’t acknowledge the spilling as an action of the past. I believed that I possessed power over my action and I could beat this fixed ontological idea of time, all if I could just undo my mistake. The fate of the present and future of my laptop were in my hands because I was planning on reversing time to my past to undo the damage done. My solution for attaining justice in this scenario was by getting the laptop fixed without spending a single rupee on it. So for that one month I ran behind every expert in the city, searching and begging for any manner in which I’d have the laptop organized and proper without paying a sole rupee.
Many of my friends and family kept telling me not to get stuck in the action of the past but to move forward and learn from the experience; I detested the idea of moving forward when I was nowhere in the future. These people who discouraged my fixation of the incident,also unconsciously dissuaded my goal of achieving justice, in whatever manner I needed to. They say when the laptop is ruined, it is an action of the past, if somebody fixes it, then it is an action of the present/future but not a reverse undoing into the past. I know my present was the past- I was living that moment of nudging the table for many weeks ahead, saw no logical reason why people kept explaining these three broken down absolutes of time- past, present and future...” The emphasis on the absence and irreversibility of past and historical injustice endows the time of history with something uncomfortable, something unjust and almost unacceptable in a moral sense.”
In today’s world, if you feel that your mind isn’t sitting in the present then how do you relate to the world outside who’re constantly judging and un-accepting of your state of being categorizing you in the ‘Universal notion’ of time... "The whole history of Western philosophy, according to Derrida, has been influenced by a certain conception of time that puts too much emphasis on the present and the actual to the disadvantage of the absent and in-actual.” Who is to decide what is in-actual?
SO when we discussed project ideas, i was in a state of complete confusion about how to take any ideas forward. i was in the middle of another course's project and was being influenced by the ideas emerging from that project (namely nostalgia) so my initial questions that were about time and the present and the nature of actuality were distorted into these new ideas. A little stepping back gave me a little more clarity in what i really wanted to explore.
I want to explore experiences of time. I want to explore present and past through the limits of physical time. The present is an instant, but the present is experienced in varying lengths of time. What we consider to be a 'moment' can range anywhere from being a second to many years. COnsequently, cosmic moments, as i imagine them, must span light years. How do days, weeks, months become measures of time when it is so relative? How do we describe some events in such close detail that makes them seem so rich and full of minute movements, while others remain rough sketches that are short-lived, brief. How do we categorize the beginning and ending of a moment when we want to re-tell it to someone? these are the questions I've been asking.
My project will be to create a series of photographic images that represent moments wherein each moment is represented by two pictures that trace its beginning and end. The length in physical time between these two images may vary from moment to moment. I already have a few sets of photos that demonstrate how experience of time is relative and how 'the present' varies from experience to experience. I will compile these images either on a blog or in a book and make notes on the time and date of each picture taken.
A more 'together' statement coming up soon. Please comment on what you think of this idea and add to it!
BRIEF- My work briefly is about women's shoes and their history and types..It came from my liking and facnination towards the many different types today. Women's shoes are as varied as women themselves..., thus i will try on focussing on the different personalities of women who wear these shoes. Today shoes are not only for protecting our feet but have become a kind of style statement, where people choose a certain type to suit their individual personality.
FORM- It will in the form of a book, or a photo album (not printed) showing different personalities of women and the kind of shoe suiting their personality. Ofcourse this album or handout will have the history of shoes and how they have evolved over time, with Illustrations of different shoes. It will not be text heavy.
BRIEF - My personal history in music - how i saw it and how i see it. My musical experience in the last 5 years, ever since i got into Electronic Dance Music (2006). Music has played a major role in my life - the people i know, the memories that i can remember, etc - all vaguely relate to the music i listen to.
- Talking about the different genres that i have gotten introduced to.
- The events that happened and will happen each year
- My thoughts, then and now. - Also involve people's view - (a short interview)
MEDIUM - A Sketchbook-like booklet or a graphic novel
Will be using sketches of characters in my life and minimal text. (eg, conversations between people) The sketches will start from black and white (past) and progress to colors (present)
Am looking at something simple and more on a personal level which could involve a bit of humor in the conversations.
Along with the the booklet will attach samples of the kind of music i listen to. In a form of a CD or a chip.
every place talks of its history. However, every person absorbs and remembers different parts and aspects of it. Thus it forms a collective history and every one derives their own little memories from it.Our Project aims at understanding this personal and collective history of people living in Bangalore. This revolves around the change that Bangalore has faced through the years and the various events that have occured.
Medium: ~ Voice recordings and visual data. E.g Radio show, collage etc.
Aim: ~ To get people to go back in time and revisit their memories and place themselves in the context of bangalore as they remember it first.
~ Since individual memories are born out of collective memories, it will be interesting to observe the picture formed when both are put together to form one big historical picture.
~ To also observe the differences of opinion and the different aspects which are important to them.
"The past is not merely the precondition of the present, but a condition of it." - R.G.Collingwood. (from the article Time, Presence and Historical Injustice by Berber Bevernage)
When we recollect the past, do we actually reconstruct it? When we are talking about history, are we referring to the word 'history'? Or an idea? Or a memory? Or history itself (which only exists post the event which it describes, and is hence different from The Event because The Event in its present state is not called The History)? We construct 'the idea of the past' in the present. But we call it The Past. This is problematic. What is The Past? Events, people, experiences, places, sights, sounds, smells, emotions. All that put into one word. This one word makes us recreate these experiences based on what we know from our own memories and others'. These experiences automatically do not 'exist' as we imagine them, because they are labelled past. There is always the dichotomy between what we are trying to recreate now and what has already happened. Yet we try to describe these histories to the realest details, so that they may transcend our man-made boundaries of time (near-real being near-existence, being near-presence, being near-present). The way in which we view time itself might be the reason why we can't make sense of it. I don't experience days or hours or minutes. I experience time organically, non-systematically. Who's to say what my past is and what my present is? It seems to me that for the benefit of communication, we've brought down richer experiences into flat dimensions. Hence arise terms like 'anachronistic', 'warped' or, my personal favourite - 'absurd'. What's with that?
This is an initial mind map. I want to explore ideas related to "the present" or "actuality" and how the past feeds into it. I want to come up with a simple story that talks about how we can never really capture the present, and how we always view the present only when it has transpired into the past. These assumptions are primitive, I know, but I'll hopefully have some more arguments over the course of this week.
"To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience."- George Kubler (1962)
This statement opened me up to a lot of thought about the ways in which we perceive time. I don't wish to compare the nature of animal experience to human experience because I do believe that animals too make informed choices that we cannot detect. But I do know that the common human experience is pretty much how Kubler describes it - the line of time is constantly dotted with choices and thus we divide a continuum into so-called instants. This idea of dividing time into an infinite number of instants seems problematic to me. Because then, we depend on certain measures by which we define our own experience of these instants. There is an argument i came across:
1. What we see, we see as the present. 2. We see motion. 3. Motion occurs over an interval.
Hence, What we see as present occurs over an interval.
So then, what is the present? It seems to be more than just an instant (because 'instant' is not a quantifiable term), it is experienced at varying lengths in different situations by different entities. Yet we seek to define the idea of a past "present" by trapping it into the space between choice and action..
Is this a western philosophy of time? Why do I find it logical yet problematic all the same?
These are some of the questions that are emerging out of Kubler's essay and are feeding into my project inquiry. More soon!
"This preference for reducing all experience into a more powerful flow; the themes and patterns are few in number but their intensity and of meaning is thereby increased."
This line seems like a perfect destination to the long journey of the article. It sums up the importance of everything in the article. Since History is largely the interpretation of the past, I feel its true beauty is in it being imperfect, hazy, transmitted, retold and reinterpreted and unfolding into numerous forms, in the contemporary and relevant times. The attached meaning to the art, apart from its orignal intentions, tell their own beautiful history. Be it the tool used, the form, the experience, the exagerations, together with different mindsets of historians, resistances to ideas, imagination etc make up History. The history of History.
" The visible portrait of the collective identity, whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self image reflected in things is a guide and a point of reference to the group for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given to posterity" The 'material culture' throws light on all the above things and more. All materials used, expression, beliefs and challenges, all reflect and narrate a beautiful History without any words. Since the author says that the beauty of the art is anyway incommunicable. Although it can be experienced, understood, empathised with and connected with. Thats where a Historian comes in where he is able to communicate the invisible.
"..,the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in violation and in action" Although the author talks about the bifurcation system in the humans , he spoke about the funneling of experiences in the above quote. They seem to contradict to me at first. But what probably the author means is that the experinces which get filtered dont hold so much of our interests, signals of which could be carried down arranged in a sensible pattern.
"Prior to 3000B.C the texture of transmitted duration ........in all their meanings" This instance reminds me of Cosmic Calendar where time is mapped. From birth of the universe till this second has been spread over one calendar year. The past few thousand years have just been a milisecond or something at 11:59 pm on 31st dec on the cosmic calendar. I think a Cosmic Calendar is a very good example of an astrologer and an historians work.
"This reciprocal relation of real surface and deep illusion is apparently inexhaustible"
“The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant; only when they are few can actuality seem full.” Upon reading this statement, I am reminded of two other quotations I came across recently: a)”When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”-Sherlock Holmes, and b)” An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”-Laplace In short, I don’t really see the validity of this statement. The author, like Holmes, seems to be assuming that the full set of “possible” events and outcomes is a finite quantity, and hence that actuality is, to some extent, accurately determinable. The second quote states that once the actuality of the present is realized, the future would cease to be unknown, and would perhaps be something we could directly experience in the present (I am, in a way, comparing it to a point I made in one of my previous essays). But it seems that actuality is something that will never be even moderately known to us, so the amount of thought that goes into this subject just seems to be a little futile. As the author mentions, the inadequacies of our senses prevent us from ever attaining actuality, an obstacle even our technological advancement cannot overcome. But it’s interesting to note how the nature of actuality can actually differ between species, or even, people. Prior to this i assumed actuality was merely a description of existence, and everything that goes into it, including events from the past. But the author’s argument that the events from the past cannot be known to us directly, and only through (rather dubious) signals, hence should be excluded from the definition of actuality, does make sense. The point he seems to be making here is that our senses, and only our senses, can actually receive direct inputs from the world around us to shape our notion of actuality. Here, i wonder if that’s an assumption that can be made...and whether our senses are actually “perfect” enough to be making accurate sense of the world around us. But then again, i guess we’ll never know any alternative. But one point i don’t really agree with is how he claims that since “the perception of a signal happened ‘now’, but its impulse and transmission happened ‘then’”, we have to exclude the past from notions of actuality. It doesn’t matter when an event actually occurred, and when the signal was sparked and transmitted, as time itself is a subjective quantity, dependent on the space and nature of observation. Hence, all that should matter is the perception of the signal, not the generation of it.
We are looking into myths and construction of beliefs from them as our subject of interest. Our basic source of inspiration is the conflict between two different worlds of the objective and the subjective.
There has been a concept of " The World " and " My World" around different civilizations.
For example, presence of Sun is one objective truth and complete dependence of life on Sun is why it is worshiped around in different civilization. But the heat and light of Sun falls different on different geographical parts of the world and hence, for the people there the Objective presence of Sun is interpreted differently according to their subjective experiences. Still certain civilizations have constructs that believe in world being as one concept ( like Greek civilization) whereas some don't have this concept which leads to multiple interpretation and their existence as myths and stories.
we will add more description later about how we are exploring this domain of formation and existence of History as narratives.
Here is how we are going about the story ...
We are using time as a metaphor our context of subjectivity and objectivity. Sun dial was used as one of the first devices to read time. Obviously since then how the time was measured and understood had been different throughout the globe. But what happens when we travel across these time-zones. Time is obviously a experience as well. This is where our abstraction comes from.
“Now and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.”
An illustrative analogy runs through my mind: metamorphosis, a range of caterpillars transforming into brilliant butterflies…colors, shapes and sizes. Over150 million years of existence, largely consistent in morphology, but who says butterflies aren’t evolving everyday?
It’s interesting though, what if we never had any structure existing while entering the world? What would we fall back on? With no past- could a space exist just in the present? There would be no concept of time if it does, as time is comprised of the threefold- past, present and future.
New life always survives and grows by using that which came before it- seeds use the soil-water-sunlight, birds use worms-fruits and man began by using nature and then man used his ancestor’s precedent creations- tools, methods of food preparation, survival techniques etc. It is a fact that we wouldn’t be where we are if not for our predecessors- the mistakes, inventions and journeys they followed, allow us to use the present as our starting line.
‘Replacing’ though is a tricky concept, reminding me of the quote- “Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of- Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses” Jacob Bronowski, English scientist and philosopher. When being replaced things are different yet somehow in someway cognate. Moments take full circles and come back again to form some celestial unknown balance. Like meeting an old close friend after many years, the chemistry would most likely remain the same, but life would have changed so much individually that the friendship is never the same anymore, no matter how identical the relationship is to the past, the meeting in present is all that’s vital.
The passage talks about change. Two kinds of change: one that is of renovation and the other of a complete breaking down to create afresh. But change for most of us is a modified continuity of the past, and that is in the larger sense no change at all. Lets say I am a part of a popular social gang, then I see how ugly it is so I move to another popular social gang- that is no change at all! The ‘change’ is still confined to the same boundaries. History has seen many such external changes, mere reconstructions. As J. Krishnamurti idealistically states, change cannot come out of influence, it cannot be induced, it can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines. Only this sort of change could shake historic patterns that need shedding, allowing us to settle into fresh original figures.
