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.