Outwardly things are still as shitty as can be – social
restrictions, curfew, cinemas still closed, Simon Russell Beale going to play Johann Sebastian
Bach in London and I can’t go đ, and
STILL I cannot register on the National Theatre website to stream their
productions (Shhh…!), and on top of that: “Uncle Vanya” is now on DVD – IN THE
UK!!! (Fffff…! Hate my life bogged down in this shithole where the only thing
you can ever do is shop. Didn’t miss THAT though I basically haven’t shopped
for over a year. đĄ) “Inwardly” it’s going upwards again. My head, seemingly
so empty, appears to have had time and leisure to put things together or
address them systematically while I was getting my hands dirty in the garden or
was traipsing through the woods and efficiently slamming things about at work.
Now I only have to find time and sit down and catch up with the eminent thoughts
pouring out if my brain.
One of these I found when I was sitting on a park bench with Claudia commemorating Shakespeare’s birthday – though all we really did was watching the squirrels and thrushes – but at some point we always get back to HISTORY. I realized how inefficient I felt still being unable to even IDENTIFY the problem I have with the historical approach to texts. But this time my mind obviously put itself to it while I was busy elsewhere and presented me with the unwelcome discovery that part of it probably is quite personal and based on an inferiority complex. One reason I am passive aggressive about history all the time is that I never learned any of it.
I even knew that I was wasting my time in a totally useless school, and also that this mattered for who I would turn out to be. I knew back then that it wouldn’t do for me just to acquire a degree, it really mattered that I acquired that KNOWLEDGE. (I also knew I would have been really unhappy in boarding school as I am exactly the kind of person that gets bullied and excluded, but this wouldn’t have been the only alternative there was.) The problem was, I think, that I didn’t dare take my education more seriously than my parents did and confront them about it. As, at the time, we lived in the ILLUSION that women were treated equally, we never acknowledged that they were not. My brothers dared to request all manners of things, and, if they were insistent, got them in the end. Implicitly, we girls knew that we were not relevant. We were wrong, of course, although this reality was still in the future. Like most of the reality we are facing now was still in the future … But that’s ancient history now. I just get fascinated with the fact that I have always been keen and able to analyze all kinds of problems, just not the ones I had myself.
Moreover I believe that my education is not the MAIN reason for me not to have learned anything in the long run. Knowledge can always be acquired, even at my age – and nowadays you just need Wikipedia, which I use way too seldom. It is that knowledge and MEMORY, in my case, is organized not according to the principle of mass but of relevance. And that I always insisted, contrary to experience, that this SHOULD be so. Instead of gobbling up knowledge, I am asking questions – respectively digging holes - and these questions – or holes – determine what is relevant – respectively, what goes in there. I remember what seems relevant TO ME. I totally understood Sherlock in the series with Benedict Cumberbatch who has to DELETE useless knowledge, and don’t understand people – nor have I patience for them – who gobble up any knowledge they can get and even REMEMBER it and release it at me indiscriminately as proof of their superiority and prowess. Though I do find it relevant that the earth moves around the sun, there is a lot of equally basic knowledge that I deleted, or “downgraded” (as deleting is in fact damn difficult, if not impossible. I’d like to know how Sherlock does it!). So, for one thing, there is a lot more knowledge than I think, it’s just stored according to relevance, and not much of it is immediately available. (I’d do badly in a pub quiz, at least when it is not multiple choice. I am rather good at multiple choice!). But – and this is the main point – what is there usually gets released the moment it BECOMES relevant. Especially when I am writing, I am pleased more often about what I remember than pissed off about what I forgot.
There is a lot to say for this kind of dealing with knowledge and memory – not least that it requires a minimum of effort! đ– but, like all great achievements, it entails considerable setback. I was aware that I could never have become a good historian or archaeologist or biologist or literary critic – or writer, by the way! - without putting A LOT more effort into acquiring knowledge and doing research than I usually do. Comparing myself to others, I’d always feel inferior – thence the passive-aggressiveness. I tend to ridicule the way other people are inefficient with A LOT of data, and learned much too late that this is the wrong way of dealing with it. Instead of looking down on them, I believe now it would benefit me greatly if I could figure out what they are actually doing with that knowledge … (to be continued below.)
Somehow, just by analyzing my shortcomings, I proceeded a few steps on the way to identifying the question. It is the kind of question nobody “in the trade” seemed the least bit interested in when I was at uni. No wonder that I ended up with fundamental doubts about the profession I was being trained to do, as there were so many things just stated but never put to any kind of test. Of course they were “just” theories, but there is probably no profession that produces such an insane amount of theories – almost all of them derived from other areas of expertise! – and never even bothers to implement any of them FOR USE. To do this turned out as one of the main objectives of my blog – though the method remains doubtful, not least to myself!
(I remember now, studying analytical philosophy and theory of science, I really wanted to find out if there were RECOGNIZED rules of establishing knowledge in literary history but never got round to it. Maybe my intellectual hubris was limited after all, or was it just time running out …? Now I would never be able to go back to all that, therefore my efforts are basically vain - but when did this awareness ever stop me?)
As far as I could identify it, it is the question of how exactly the historical knowledge of the reader – or the historic “mindframe”, which is NOT the same thing! – is used in reading historical fiction. It was always stated as a fact – and I believe that it is so! – but nobody ever tried to establish how it works or what we students were supposed to do. I also suspect that it is not just the biggest and most complex of questions but inevitably linked with the context question(s) I raised in my last post – which are already quite complex. Maybe a “context theory” would even be a promising way to approach this? For example: How do we “use” the mindframe? Are we trying to “put it on”, changing us, and is this why we enjoy this game, enlarging our horizon like some kind of virtual reality …??? But I am overtaking myself, being only just arrived at the beginning of asking the question. And – dĂŠjĂ -vue! - I feel as if I was writing this thesis after all …
I realize that I did rather a bit of groundwork establishing a text theory that actually works – and, sorry to say, this is more than any literary historian ever did! – so, hubris still firmly in place … The next requirement, though, would be to come up with a similarly basic and usable theory about history, respectively: historical knowledge – which I consider to be far beyond me. (At the moment!) And then I’d need to come up with a definition for the “historic mindframe” … I am actually looking forward to this one! đ Finally there would be the follow-up question – the crucial one! - about what “we” are actually doing with our historical knowledge when we are reading. I actually mean not just me but ESPECIALLY people who consider it important to always activate the historical perspective and constantly think they would need a lot more knowledge to understand historical fiction. Why is this so, and what are they actually DOING with it?
Maybe if I really put my mind to it – or rather if my mind puts itself to it anytime soon … This might still be a good year for a big writing project – no distractions whatsoever! ☹- beside my biggest needlework project ever … Who knows? “Fate is inexorable!”
