"Hey, The Ice of Boston is Muddy" How a Song and a Moment Explain Why I'm Where I Am in Life

              [This is a story, comprised of old themes and tired, over-told bits of my past, that I am preparing for a story slam in Columbia, SC]

        

                “So I guess the party line is I followed you up here, well I don’t know about that, mainly because knowing about that would involve me knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about myself… that I’d rather not admit to right now”

I didn’t write those words. Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment plan, a man with a far sharper mind and tongue than I, wrote them back in the mid-90s. Now, the Dismemberment plan broke up in 2003, which was still a few years before I was “with it” enough to have heard of them. If memory serves, I think I started listening to them my freshman or sophomore year in college.  I’ll have more to say about memory later, so hold onto that.

But it was this song— "The Ice of Boston," and that line in particular that really sucked me in and made me a ravenous, devoted fan – It often takes one intensely provocative piece for a new artist to grab you, to be able to appreciate other things that you wouldn’t have had reason to before.  Well, "the Ice of Boston" was absolutely it for me and the Plan.

                 

              It’s about a guy, who’d evidently, and inadvisedly moved to Boston, following some chick. He’s alone, despondent, and snarky, drinking champagne naked in his apartment on New Year’s Eve, trying to avoid thinking about poor life choices, and ranting about Gladys Knight and the Pips. A famous music critic called it one of the “greatest not-getting-laid anthems of all time,” and I’ll let you make your own joke as to why I would gravitate to a song with such an ethos.

            But it is an amazing song, and if you haven’t had the joyful experience of screaming the chorus as loudly as possible, while thinking of someone who doesn’t love you as much as they did, then you’re missing out.

In itself it’s not much of a story. It isn’t worth your trouble, and it’s barely worth mine “Hey, this guy likes this song, by this kind of obscure band." But, "the Ice of Boston" is deeply enmeshed in why I live in Columbia now, and am able to be here to to tell my story. I’ll explain:

                

       As the D plan was becoming me and my best friend’s favorite band, the early 2000s were drifting into what is uncomfortably enough my 4^th decade on the planet. As Jon and I wandered from our native Florida to France together, and then me to Chicago, and him to Seattle—we reinforced in each other an ever renewed passion for that band.

           It became one of our strongest points of connection, which is saying something for a relationship like ours. We’ve been friends since 7, and I’m quite certain that we both harbor resentments towards the other for not being born a woman. Well, perhaps not him, he is seeing someone right now, and she does look better in a two piece.

            

            So, the summer of 2010, I was in Chicago, and I was caught up in the twin joys of a recently broken arm, and a recently broken heart. I tell you, facing one genre of pain to a degree that you’ve never had before is one thing, but I had never before had either emotional or physical pain to that extent in my life. Taking them on at the same time was… well, it was a mindfuck.

            The details of my broken heart are their own rollicking story, which I suppose I can save for another slam. But I will provide you with the skeletal details, if you’re curious.

Her–a writer, exceedingly hip. A razor sharp wit. We connected on music, traveling, and clever conversation. The things  that I am guaranteed to fall for every time. For the sake of balance, though, she was probably more than a little pretentious. I didn’t see it then, maybe I would now. Me – I was along for her ride. We fell in and out of love over the course of 3 or 4 months. I had a whole series of things that I desperately needed to work on in myself.

The standard sort of problems of the "who I was and where I was going in life" variety, and her breaking up with me sure did give me reason to try to be a better person. To give a shit. One fantastic thing I can say about her is that she made me cry for the first time in years, and for that I am genuinely thankful.

The arm break… it didn’t make me cry, but I did almost pass out from the pain. The story itself, well that’s fairly mundane: I was biking to work, and then I wasn’t. I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden I was falling off my bike… and, in a genius move, I decided to break my fall with my elbow. My elbow was broken along with my fall. I guess I just have terrible instincts. There’s a Seinfeld episode about that.

So these two events happened within 3 weeks of each other, and I was, pretty obviously, a wreck. Added to that was the irony that I was about to start school, at Depaul in Chicago, that fall, and I had just broken my writing arm. Not just that, I was studying history, while being pretty decently tormented by my own, recently-been-dumped-in history. A lot of forces were at work here. Oh!  and did I mention that she worked at my favorite bar on weekends, lived two blocks away, and had just gotten hired at one of my best friend’s office!?

My lifestyle, I felt, was going to have to be remade from the ground up.

I kept trying to get her back. Every week, a new attempt. It was Christlike 40 days in the desert (I remember it was exactly 40 days after she broke up with me that I last tried to make contact—the mind is a funny thing) I tried to convince her that she was wrong about me, about us. Appeals to reason, to logic, to rationality, none of these are particularly helpful. Hell, I’m sure she thought I was a bit unhinged. Hell,  I’m sure she was right.  In retrospect she seemed genuinely worried about me—worry that I willfully interpreted as reason for hope.

The last sad attempt was in Seattle. Jon had returned to the US, and we spent several days hanging out in Chicago. And by hanging out, I of course mean, Jon would help me and my broken arm cook, clean, and do things like tie my shoes. All while I talked in circles about Kate. The man is a saint. I love him, and love him desperately. He was moving to Seattle to be with his lady, and we were going to take the train together out there.

46 hours. My best friend and I.  Fellow travelers through life, through the South, through France, and now through the West.

The Midwest. The Great Plains. The Rockies. The observation car. We had an overpriced dinner and bottle of wine on the dining car while the train sketched its way through Glacier National Park, with the sunset framing it all.

On the other hand: 46 hours.  We were too poor to afford a sleeper car. Jon is not good at sleeping under the best of circumstances, and I had a recently broken arm in a soft cast. I was on some sort of powerful pain killer that made my arm feel a bit better, but made me disturbingly emotionally detached. Emotional detachment is fine in moderation, but two much of a good thing, you know….

Ergo, by the time we arrived in Seattle we both were zombies, having maybe 4 hours of sleep between us, for the whole two day trip. And I was, if possible, more despondent than before. There was something in physically distancing myself from Chicago, from Kate—moving away by train—that  must have motivated, compelled, driven me to make one, quixotic, last effort.

We’re in South Carolina, so, I could rather make the easy analogy to Pickett’s charge. But, I discussed it with Jon, and with my cousin who I was staying with in Seattle, and I decided to make one last bold effort to have her give me another chance.

Lovelorn people fall back on clichés. That itself is practically a cliché. I am certainly no different. Or maybe I’m just different by virtue of being worse. But the tenor of that last phone call had all of the expected rhetorical flourishes. I apologized for not being the man she needed. I tried to own up to the stupid things that I thought she didn’t like in me. I tried to convince her I could change – a veritable greatest hits collection …. But somewhere inside, I think, I knew, that she would shoot me down hard and fast. I wouldn’t have made that last attempt if I wasn’t prepared for that. So even though that call was for her, as I’m sure you know, that call was for me.

So, for me, for my pride, and for Jon and our immature humor – so that I could embed in that conversation something that she was oblivious to, something that I could always remember happily no matter how things with Kate and I ended- in trying to win back this woman that I loved, and unbeknownst to her, since she wasn’t a Dismemberment Plan fan (which should have told me all I needed to know) my resolving salvo was an homage to the quote that I started my story with: “I was sorry,” I said, “because when we were together I didn’t want to admit that I needed to make changes in my life ‘mainly because knowing about that would involve me knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about myself, that I’d rather [have] not admit[ted] to [back then.]’”

She did shoot me down. I knew it was coming, and didn’t fight it. After I hung up the phone, I called Jon and glibly told him what I had done. How we would be talking about that D Plan line in a new light, with a different subtext from now on. Sometimes maturity is realizing that it’s ok to be a seven year old now and again.

So how did I get from there to here? I lived in Chicago another 9 months, and even though both my heart and my arm did get a lot better, there were a lot of stops and starts along the way. Still, that period really demanded of me to take charge of myself. Be a bit more responsible, less of just a bystander in my own life – and all of those other coming of age clichés. It was also when I was seriously attacking my professional life in a meaningful way for the first time in at least 5 years, if not ever; it Started me on a road that would eventually lead me to the USC history department, to Columbia, and to Drip.

So using that song, in that conversation, was me wanting to have some “good” come from a dialog destined to go the way that it did. It was a juvenile inside-joke between my best friend and I, and, it just felt good to say it – but it was something else, as well.

I was purposefully making a memory. Jon and I talk about that song, that moment, a lot, and he’s even told people about it, who’ve never met me. I sometimes fantasize about emailing Kate, to tell her about it, but then I think about it for 5 seconds, which is long enough to remember all of the reasons why that’s a terrible idea. But, it means something to me, and weirdly enough, it means something to Jon, too.

The Dismemberment Plan played a reunion tour this past winter, and had a show in Chicago. Jon flew in from Seattle, and we lived an evening we assumed we’d never get to have, a D Plan show. And The Ice of Boston, as per tradition, was their closing song.

                                                                                                       .

So what does any of that mean? I hope I’m not just some dude, who gets to talk about some song I dig, some girl who dumped me, and some joke I made. But rather, I hope that there is something more important at work here, and I think I’ve got an idea or two what that is.

I think that with memory, like with relationships, the points of connection that you have matter infinitely more than those that you don’t—whether those that you don’t are connections that have faded, or maybe just the ones you think you want, or think you need.  And even if those connections are magnificently random.

If you’ve watched anyone you care about radically lose their memory, then you know that whatever fragmented filaments of a shared memory that you have become pure gold. And those bits of gold can be made of the most disconnected, inconsequential stuff.

But honestly, how much of our own memories are of the same sort? What the mind holds onto and what it discards may have some deeper logic to it, but what that logic is far surpasses my understanding. And, while there is a certain randomness, it’s those bits of unconnected memories that you have yourself, and that you share with others – that lyric –  the way that Kate and I first caught each other’s eye … and the last—my reflection in the window on the train –Jon and I trying, and failing, to sleep--  the fast-approaching pavement when I broke my arm — they're the atoms of stories, and they hold a reservoir of power. And they’re all there, the remnants of some irretrievable past.

 I think that if memories have any power at all, it’s only when we weave the disconnected fragments to try to tell a story;  when we try to get at what they mean for the us in the present, and try to get them to point us in the direction we should be headed towards.  And we use these memories to diverse ends; the same ones are reassembled to tell different stories at different times, and that's the never ending project of interpreting and reinterpreting the past. I’d be naïve to think that that process is always constructive. People don’t always look for the good. Or maybe we just don't know what "the good" even is.

But, at our best, we use our stories to build relationships, and try to do things better. They inform how we understand the present, and suggest better ways to live our lives. That’s asking a lot from a story. Stories have power, sure, but to do all of that?

Our stories are often woefully inadequate, I’ll be the first to admit, but sometimes woeful inadequacy is better than nothing. Sometimes it feels good just to say the right words, at the right time, in the right place, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s heart or mind.

And as much as anything, and more than most things, that is why I’m here.

Moments Can be Monuments to You (an autobiographical essay that I wrote for class)

            I am wary of traditionally structured autobiographies, having been frequently been advised that such accounts can devolve into a triumphalist narrative in which the writer serves as their own protagonist; defying obstacles and overcoming adversity, until finally reaching the artificial endpoint in the decision to write. If this essay does conform to such teleology, I hope it is for more interesting reasons than self-aggrandizement. The self-revelatory nature of the assignment has forced some curious choices. I should state openly and from the outset that the way I understand why I “do history” is integrally connected to the rest of my occasionally coherent if not rigorously systematic understanding of the world on the whole. Therefore, I draw on disparate themes: relationships to friends, family, the church, spirituality, and politics, and I make divulgences about meaningful experiences only faintly and tangentially related to my subfield within history. I hope this does not read as evasive, but rather as an attempt to articulate my development as holistically as possible in eight pages. Well, seven and a half after this tedious introduction.

My understanding of history in relation to “the past” is like that of maps to the places they depict. A history is a story of the past, often supported by varied sorts of empirical evidence and is hopefully a useful representation and exposition of the past- but should not be confused for the past itself. By that definition, history contains elements of both art and science, which I feel holds its greatest appeal, importance, and resonance. I have developed this understanding through my early education, my undergraduate experience at Florida State University, through disorganized study in my four year interregnum from the discipline, on its resumption at Depaul University, and through innumerable hours with friends and family on road trips, and train rides, coffee, beer, wine, and whiskey. 

 As I hope is the case for us all, the way in which I interpret the world and its history is no exclusive function of academic training, but is animated by the extraordinary and commonplace relationships I have had, and am fortunate enough to maintain.  How the story of me and my best friend (whose life is so oddly and beautifully integrated with my own, following in lockstep from childhood through early adulthood in France, while following a similar course in personal development) has such an overwhelmingly emotional pull necessarily comes to mind when I construct a historical narrative. My aggressively subjective and personal experiences undergird my understanding of history as much as my social and academic ones.

Maybe it’s just social conditioning (my favorite childhood book was an atlas, and I did get rewarded in 2^nd grade be being allowed to read the encyclopedia in the corner) but to my recollection, I have always thought in historical terms, to one degree or another. The majority of my childhood was wrapped up in trying to KNOW things: discrete facts about the past, the timeline of events, and where things happened. I benefitted from a rather simple idea of what it meant to know something about something and was quite satisfied to memorize facts, figures, names, dates, and all the other things that the average child hates about history, as if they meant something in and of themselves. For all the effort, I don’t think I really learned much of what is important about history, but it does make me a damn good pub trivia player.

My professional aspirations are hardly a reach considering my background and family history. I was raised in a family that put high esteem on higher education. And while my father’s family is almost exclusively white collar professionals and scientists, my mother’s is guided by my grandfather’s legacy as an historian and my great-grandfather’s role as a Methodist churchman. Since I was principally raised by my mother, it is her extended family and its ethics and values that shaped my early worldview.  My immediate family emphasized the arts and humanities, even as they became increasingly under the sway of what I perceived to be an overly politicized version of evangelical Christianity. As I have come to understand the world under different terms and to follow different assumptions than the vast majority of my family, I am fiercely joyful that I remain close with my family and communicate quite openly with most of them. Our relationships walk the tightrope of seeking commonality, acknowledges difference, and tries (though I often fail) to avoid a dogmatic or possessive relationship to truth. 

When I entered Florida State in 2003 I embarked on two distinct projects, history and philosophy, that I kept at arm’s length. After a brief foray into political science, which I found to be a far too limiting discipline for my interests, I began a course of study in history which focused on the politics of the Antebellum United States. As remains the case, this concentration is profoundly personal and also (one hopes) a fruitful intellectual project, with utility and validity within academia and the wider world. My family’s history and identity as Southern certainly underlie and motivate certain strains of my inquiry. My own mercurial and problematic self-identification as a Southerner on simple “materialist” grounds (I was born in a place traditionally considered the South, to a family that has historically resided there, ergo I am Southern) inspires a sensitivity to the role of identity and self-perception in history.

       

     As I pursued a degree in history I also began a study of philosophy, instigated by the frequent pestering of my good friend and former pastor. I began to rebel from what I considered the intellectual weakness of the version of Christianity I was accustomed to, and graduated to a form of Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy which I found satisfyingly mentally stimulating. My exposure to academic philosophy was integrally useful and important in my understanding of history, both in terms of sharpening my mental acuity, and in providing a vantage on the long view of history. Even so, my worldview remained limited by youth and impertinence. (Even as I write that, I am aware that it is the nature of things that in a year’s time or less, I will be attributing the drivel of this essay to my defectively youthful twenty six year old mentality.)  

It is my fallible recollection that my understanding of philosophy remained very much on the surface. I may have been able to discuss some of the ideas at some length, but instead of inspiring a deeper introspection into what it means to be, and how one should act, I was comfortable with using the pantheon of great ideas solely as conversational play-things. This relates as well to my sharpest criticism of my study of history: I was quite comfortable with memorizing and synthesizing, and used that ability to largely avoid wrestling with the important underlying issues which lay at the heart of the profession and the crux of historiographical debate.

Since I was unwilling to be deeply reflective about the heart of the profession to some important extent, my personal dedication to the craft was necessarily weak as well. Nothing in history is utterly mono-causal, and the initial inglorious collapse that I suffered at the end of my undergraduate career was certainly accentuated by a strong personal and emotional element (read: break-up with a long term girlfriend). Added to this during the spring semester of 2006 I received rejection letters from each graduate program to which I applied, including this institution. Still I am convinced that my lack of rigorous dedication to the craft of history, largely due to never allowing myself to be seriously and intimately challenged by the material played a pivotal role in my collapse. I abandoned my senior thesis, shut myself off from the world and my professors, and barely escaped with my bachelor’s degree. I felt at that time quite certain that the study of history, which had given me so much purpose, was closed off to me for good. This was not a good time.

I found myself rather directionless in the months after finishing at Florida State. This was not altogether a bad thing, and my ennui did eventually manifest itself in some productive ways. I began to disavow myself of my previous goals within academia, and otherwise assumed a lifestyle somewhat typical of service industry worker in their early twenties. Still, having lived my entire life in the South, I was restless for some different experience. Historically, I have not been a serious trail blazer, and my eventual move to France was neither arbitrary nor unaided by friends and family. A former French professor made me aware of a little-known French Government program which sponsors fifteen hundred-odd Americans a year to teach English as a second language in their primary and secondary schools. Roused by a chance encounter with a coworker (and now a dear friend) who was repatriating from Tallahassee to Sweden, encouraged and inspired by my step-father, who spent three years working odd jobs around the world after being wounded in Vietnam, my best friend and I applied. I was accepted to the program and moved to France the year after I graduated, he followed the next year.

         

   My experience in Europe was unquestionably transformative. I was exposed to many ways of being which differed sharply from that which I was habituated. I learned a new language, grew acclimated to existing within a different culture. I lived in the context of new and different values and assumptions, while experiencing the tensions which existed within French society as an outsider.  The entirety of such an experience necessarily informs how I view the world I come from, and provided a new vantage for considering the sweep of American history.

The schools I taught in drew a large percentage of their students from France’s ethnic minorities. While I attempted to teach the children of immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Portugal and elsewhere, I shared an apartment with a North African man who was living in France illegally. We remain good friends, and sharing some of his experience while interacting with my students gave me a window into a deeply unfamiliar world. Seeing ways that the French state and culture dealt with, or ignored, systemic social problems rooted in an impossible to disentangle mélange of interconnected issues of class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and religion profoundly impressed me of the immense difficulty that a society faces as it moves forward in time. As I resume a course of study, my time in France informs my understanding of how history is the terrain on which different social groups vie for self-justification, vindication, and pity, in the political realm.

 After two years in France, I was still resolute in my unwillingness to make serious plans for the future. Nor did I have a mind to find a way to meaningfully contribute to society. I am inclined to think that courage plays a large role in doing anything worthwhile, and I certainly lacked the courage to either re-approach my past failings in academia, or what I perceived as the root causes. This is not to say that my time was wasteful; I gained a wealth of experiences that were deeply moving, and will continue to inform my worldview. I think that getting out of a comfortable or familiar situation is useful for that; it seems to open up the mind to possibility. Even if that feeling of expanded possibility never amounts to much beyond the feeling, it can lead to productive mental stimulation.

I began to read broadly, putting aside American history to take up biology, (non math-based) physics, some literature on cosmology, linguistics, politics, and a good amount of non-American history. Even though my reading was guided more by whim than by rigor, I feel that engagement with disciplines outside of the narrow scope of my subfield has served me well.  I modified my thinking on a number of subjects and took up a pursuit of some of the essential (if almost certainly unsolvable) existential questions. For some time I embraced atheism, which I found to be problematic in some interesting ways, and have since developed a comfortably uncomfortable and uneven relationship to a concept that could be called God. Through the duration of time away from school, I don’t feel that I fundamentally retreated from a sense of the importance of history, nor my passion for it, even as new stimuli inspired a slow but profound shift in my understanding its role in both individuals and society.

After two years in France, I decided that I wanted to return to the United States, but had no intention to really consider the future in a concrete or pragmatic way. I was certainly addicted to traveling, so I decided to move to Chicago. I had two very close friends there already, and I knew several who had the city in their sights. I found a decent restaurant job, a decent apartment, and a series of less than decent roommates. Living in Chicago was mostly positive, even, or especially because of the growing pains I experienced there. In the process, much to my shock and horror, I encountered the genre of people that had not drifted around Europe, but were instead engaged in the pursuit of serious and tangible goals. Theirs was an example which I initially resisted, and was the source of intense discouragement; my hand was eventually forced.

With a great deal of practical and emotional aid from my friends and family, as well as the reestablished connection of a former professor at Florida State, I reinstated an inquiry into professional history. I took courses at Depaul University in the Fall of 2010 with the intention of defining the particulars of a research focus and my approach to history, while building the relationships necessary to negotiate the minefield that is the application process. While I initially considered myself open to stray from my erstwhile subfield, my interest was revitalized. As I prepared the seminar paper that would serve as my writing sample, I developed a new and more pointed interest in the literature I had abandoned at the end of my undergraduate career.

 Nothing in history is utterly mono-causal, and the mindset with which I returned to academia was accentuated by a strong personal and emotional element (read: break-up with a short term girlfriend, and a long term left arm). Sometimes the universe is coarsely lacking in subtlety, even if our interpretation of the lessons to be gleaned are the subject of interminable debate.  For me, these events were pregnant with meaning; personal experience has a way of driving home abstract ideals. The heartbreak and arm-break that I enjoyed mere weeks before I started classes gave an irreplaceable immediacy to my quest for meaning. The irony of breaking my writing arm at the outset of restarting school was the subject of many a wry joke (including this one), but I also found it strangely motivating. Experiencing emotional and physical pain in quick succession also gave me some insight into mind/body dualism, but that is the subject of a different and far more boring essay.

I do take some satisfaction mixed with chagrin that my story to this point follows the all too typical narrative of the twenty-something trying to find their way. There is certainly some value in taking a break, even if one’s sabbatical is neither intended nor organized under a principle. The law of unintended consequences is most often invoked to condemn the well-intentioned, but in my case it might be used to show that good results may arrive when none in particular were sought. The particulars of my research interests have remained similar over the years; 19^th century American politics has deep roots in me. However, I hope that the past several years’ experiences will serve to open me up to deeper insights on an old and well-trod subject. 

Our stories are often woefully inadequate, but sometimes woeful inadequacy is better than nothing.

[Written at a family reunion in Gulf Shores, AL, though my mind was taking me elsewhere]

Even as an aspiring historian, I have spent embarrassingly little time thinking about either myself as storyteller, or the role of stories and their smiths in the world.

 Historians, it is said, do make certain claims to the t(T?)ruth of their stories, which sets them apart from other storytellers. The stories they tell and the words they use are intended to be as congruous as possible a description of a disappeared past. In that way, the historian is a sort of cartographer of temporality. In fashioning maps, their own contribution can, or should, rest as the elucidation of the physical record- though the real stuff of history (history in this sense, as the creative act of individual historians) is the debate of what stories can be constructed from the evidence before us; the contrast of differing viewpoints and philosophies is of course ever ongoing.

There is that old line that goes “There is no such thing as new history, only new historians” and the still older one that reminds that “there is nothing new under the sun.” (And besides, matter is neither created nor destroyed) I suppose there is some truth there, but the domain of the past nevertheless does continue to grow, and the wisdom of old clichés is not discerned without some wrestling.

The last volume of history may be no more correct than the first, which is quite likely to be the case. It may be that the last word will take its name and place on the timeline merely by accident of history—one final, forgotten (perhaps forgettable) unromantic oeuvre just as humanity by either whimper or cataclysm finds its stories unneeded, or unwanted, and itself unable or unwilling (or happily unpresent) to relate them. But enough waxing apocalyptic.

I think though that I’ve devolved too far into unprofitable speculation on the Philosophy of history (or the philosophy of History) when all I really wanted to say was that there seems to be such great power in stories, and that the historians craft taps into that power. As it goes with such things, this is but one account, and anyone else would present it differently—perhaps radically so.

There does seem to be great power in stories, but it could rather that the power lies not in the stories themselves, but beforehand, in the very impulse to tell them-- In our desire to make ourselves known, and to express ourselves at present by an exposition of our past, to give an account of our development.

We perhaps best understand --or at least best explain ourselves-- as a series of point A’s to point B’s. How we then frame, package, contextualize, and present our stories, how we color-in our past and put flesh to the bare bones of individual and anecdotal fact may tell as much about who we are at present as it sheds light on the Truth of the past, or how the past became the present becomes the future.

 Our act of coming to know each other by means of telling stories about ourselves-- explicating why, the fuck, in our view, we are where we are; and in turn listening to others tell theirs--gleaning the stories for fact and stylization to understand the person before us. Perhaps we attempt to weave together the smaller stories into a (buzzword) master narrative of how we (or We) understand ourselves in grande totale. I know that old master narratives that I believed to be living have become anecdotes themselves as they were subsumed under the awning of a newer and grander story—as points A, B, and C needed to be reconciled with the emergence of points D, E, and F. Narrative does need to be coherent as long as we live in a universe governed by laws that we can understand mathematically.

(I know there are numerous other means of coming to know someone— though perhaps many may be uncivil, uncouth, salty, or sultry—maybe even overtly aggressive. These sundry devices have their advantages, and any well rounded individual should utilize a broad repertoire of techniques in the effort to engage and understand the world. History is but one such tool in the shed.)  

I fail to find rest in a perfect comprehension, but am ever-interested in how certain folk are more inclined and attuned to the exchange of stories than others.  Of those sharing such a general temperament, what mechanism accounts for the proliferation of stylistic diversity and the different intentions, rationales, and emphases that underlie the storytellers’ basic impulse?

 Since we are of course part of the natural environment, and can be at least partially explained by it, perhaps an analogy to biodiversity would help elucidate the aforementioned proliferation of stylistic and intentional differences. Nature abhors a vacuum, and part of the story of life is that if life can find a niche, it will happily fill it. It seems there must be a connection there, but it also seems that my abilities to maintain and expound on it have largely run dry.

I do know, and have experienced so often right here in Gulf Shores that the act of telling stories has a unique power. The ritual of recitation is both the struggle to hold onto oneself, and to reestablish and shore-up the bonds that so delicately hold us to each other. We are left with only the present and the promises of a future, mercurial and finite. And then they are so bittersweet, telling stories! But, that’s how it goes.

A Memory, An Aside

    "I've never felt so overwhelmed," I deadpanned. "Classic Mitch," she responded.

    That exchange illustrates- and is my strongest point of reference to- my slow acceptance of the disconnect between my own feelings and my uneven ability to impart them to another. At times I feel transparent; a palpable sense of self-revelation, which can be either blessing, curse, or both. Or neither.

    Other times I feel opaque. This isn't to say that I exist in either one mode or the other- things are always more complex than that. Rather, and depending on the subject and the object, my sentiment ebbs, flows, dissipates and wells inside me in impossible to fully articulate or to understand.

     And these feelings- perhaps more than their reception-  are under semi-constant reevaluation from new vantages, as I assess the results of actions taken.

    Though I may feel that my interlocutor may see right through me, or right past me, it is -- to my thinking-- maddeningly unverifiable. Maintaining a relationship is (shockingly) both a matter of the emotion of the subject, and the facility of relating that emotion to the other. It becomes a matter of language, as we speak of "love languages," and we unpretentiously talk of "being on the same page."

    I think that language is important, but it is only a tool. I feel that emotion is important, but is useless when encased in the heart and not imparted. Communication is crucial in bridging the divide between persons, but the substance that is communicated in myriad ways can't be disentangled from the act of communication.

   I think what is important -- beyond metaphysical speculation-- are the choices we make, and our ability to follow through on them as the results make themselves known.  
   
    This shit is hard.

    Is emotion what matters in relating between the individual and something external to that individual? That marriage of selfishness and selflessness has to exist- but by what mechanism?

    Connections, it seems, are punishingly difficult. Still- we make them all the time- or feel we do. Is that what matters?

On The Other Hand

    I may have been willfully misleading as to my intentions in creating this blog, both in my description of its tone and its scope.

   I seem unwilling to break myself from an academic writing style. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this, but it does point to my level of comfort in this form of expression. Much of my life has been spent in an unquestioned and unexamined belief in the inherent superiority of this manner of imparting thought and emotion to the world.

    Embarrassingly, I have only in the very recent past come to accept that expression takes legitimate form not only in written and verbal form other than the academic style I have so admired and sought to make my own, but in many MANY Many many extra-lingual or verbal forms. Photography, sculpture, music, painting, poetry,  and many other mediums-- which I have never meaningfully explored-- I am obliged to accept these as perfectly as legitimate as any of which that I have engaged myself.

  The reconciliation of this rather basic fact has occurred largely in conjunction with (and partially caused by) my return to a pursuit of academia. My question is this: if academic language isn't to be the standard, the apex of expression, then what is it's role? Why is it important? Why am I pursuing it?

    More important for the purposes of this blog-- Why am I using it's structure to raise questions pertaining to its limits, its limitations, and its inadequacies? I think these are the questions that I will be exploring for the near future. However long that might be. For now, here is my all-to-simple postulate.

    Sometimes it's just nice to be comfortable, even if you know that it won't and shouldn't last.

Love and History

    I have been in love, I think, at least twice. Neither of these experiences ended with the results I might have hoped for. Which is fair enough, in the last analysis. I best understand romantic love as among other things: an alogical and unverifiable feeling that the universe exists to facilitate your coming together, the marriage of selfish desire for the other with the selfless giving of oneself, and the desire to see and to feel the world through the other, to be unmetaphorically connected in to the other.
   
   It is the last of these provisional definitions of love that I would like to draw from in this post. Everyone has written everything on love, and done a fantastic job of it on the whole. I don't intend on adding anything exciting to that corpus. I would rather address how I see my pursuits of love and of history as efforts toward a similar experience.

     I hate uncertainty. I think that that sentiment is fairly universal, but people come to terms with it in diffuse ways. I have chiefly sought certainty through two somewhat broad avenues: people, and factual knowledge. If both of the last two sentences are true, then it is only fair that I have been deeply challenged on both of these fronts roughly concurrently.

    I seek certainty in my connections with other people. When I find someone who I want to pursue, in any respect, I work hard to get to a feeling of  being "on the level" with someone. Its tellingly inchoate, but that's always my desire-- and its less a spoken stipulation, and more a feeling that I get, and I hope I share. My own history has conditioned me to not expect to lose the important people from my life. I'm young and this is changing. It's forcing me to accept that I will lose people, some of them before I want and some that I never want to lose at all. And never on my own terms.

   A recent conversation with my friend Tommi reawakened not so old memories of how history used to safely be a memorization game for me. I am an excellent memorizer, and very motivated. It kept history safe, a fairly unchallenging effort in learning what has happened. While I knew that there were different opinions on why things happened, historiographical debate was ancillary to my quest to know all of the "what's" available to me.

   The intellectual leap that changed this game was my final acceptance-- kicking and screaming though it is-- that "history" or History, is not "the past". Rather, that history is merely the representation of the past based on laughably fragmentary evidence and is subject to perspective, bias, politics, power structures, the nefarious influence of historians own inner demons, romantic inclinations, memories, identities and myriad other inputs which vie for control of how we think of the past in unsearchably complex ways.

    This acceptance of a post-modern understanding of history has left me feeling decidedly uncertain. Occasionally my quest for certainty has tried to find a back door by being certain that the my definition of history in the above paragraph is unquestionably true. No such luck. It seems that every foothold is a temporary one and that a certain sense of unquestioned certainty- a place to call home, and for home to last forever- is out of reach.

    I am unable to avoid the connections between how I view the past in my own life, and in the life of the world. On the whole, this is a good thing, since the two aren't really separable, and it helps avoid the cognitive dissonance of compartmentalizing ones thinking. It has made it difficult to keep my personal and professional life separate. Everything is a double edged sward, I suppose.
  
    I am unable to deny that our understanding of history is inexorably governed by perspective, and that objectivity is an impossibility, apart from achieving  godlike transcendence. That I find this position rather untenable has left me in an awkward position. If that is true for history as a corporate exercise then how true it must be in my personal interactions. This has left me with various attempts to reconcile my acceptance of the impossibility of certainty, and my unending desire for it.

   My best effort is in emphasizing the primacy of emotion. If a person, if the past, is not certainly knowable; if there is no set of indicators, no appeal to an authority that will let the mind rest, then in both cases I feel I must shift to feeling. The feeling of doing the impossible.

    The Truth of the past is lost, our representations of it are incomplete, and even localized veracity is unverifiable outside of referencing sources which only demand more questions. A certain knowledge of the past, beyond unconnected snippets is as impossible as time travel; our ability to comprehensively untange causality is even more futile for the past as it is for the present.

     Romantic love, with its inexplicable emotional intensity has the added problem of immediately requiring that temporal actions to a feeling that seems to defy time. As we reconcile living in love and living in the world, we face the constant reminder of a gulf of perception, experience, and sentiment which we can't overcome any more than we can physically be the other person.

    In experiencing love, I long for the feeling-- intoxicating and ephemeral-- that the pedestrian alienation which separates two people has been bridged. Despite my awareness that the past is an abstraction, what I want from history is the same feeling. The feeling that I am envisioning and representing the world as it was, outside of my own perception. I seek the feeling that I can't hope for perfection, completion, or an all encompassing general exposition of all of the past-- that would be an exercise in recreation. But in my effort to understand a particular aspect of the past, I aim to have that same feeling of connectedness to something outside of myself, which I can't know, can't fully experience, can't be.

an introduction

    My friend Aron encouraged me to start a blog and put my thoughts down on binary. So, in what is a once every several years ritual, here goes. 

    I have very few promises to make concerning the nature of this blog. It's far safer to proffer ideas as to certain tendencies that I may follow as this vehicle takes shape. Safer still, I will give you a list of negative claims to start with.

    I can't promise that I will post frequently. I have made concerted efforts in the past to keep the interested world involved in my life through this medium-- and have failed to keep my end of the bargain.

    I can't promise I will be truthful. Occasionally I may attempt to bare my soul a tad. I can't promise that I will mean what I say-- which is, I think, distinct from being truthful. I'm not sure what I want from this blog. I'm not sure what it's purpose is. I hope that that will burgeon me forward rather than hinder me. Occasionally I might revel in my supple usage of English. From time to time I will almost certainly try to say something profound. I will check my comments with gusto when this happens.

    Editing is a new animal to me. Only the very recent past has borne witness to a Mitch who writes several drafts in the effort to refine my thinking on a topic, and to better clarify my expression of it. I don't intend that the writing on this blog will exhibit such efforts. Not to say that I won't edit-- write and rewrite sentences in the attempt to find better words for my thoughts. The real point of this blog, I think? is a somewhat free-form outlet for lose ideas that would otherwise get lost in my mental clutter.

One can only hope I can be concise.