Ghostly intervention facing east appeared several years ago, old shed west of I-5 in Oregon between MP154 & MP159, Creeks Elk & Anlauf.
Our desire for simplicity is understandable. We like our stories to have plots, for life’s messiness to form a neat arc. In reality, we don’t get to start at the beginning. We’re thrown into the middle of things, into the chaos of history. Hari Kunzru
Embi: Whether the world has been created or is still in the process of being created, must we not, since we are here, whistle at one another in that strange dissonance called human speech? Or should we be silent?
Pastor Jón: History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish our of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. Halldór Laxness
With his conception of history In War and Peace, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they "involuntarily" participate in events whose meaning is "concealed from them"), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.
Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. Milan Kundera
Poetry,
suspension bridge between history and truth,
is not a path toward this or that:
it is to see
the stillness in motion,
the change
in stillness.
History is the path:
it goes nowhere,
we all walk it,
truth is to walk it.
We neither go nor come:
we are in the hands of time.
Octavio Paz
HISTORY: Behind the Seen/Scene
In distance: Historic Interstate 5, following Historic Highway 99, following the Siskiyou Trail, following an older network of Native American footpaths connecting the Pacific Northwest with California's Central Valley, following...
BUT WAIT. California artist Ed Ruscha has something to say: I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.
HISTORY KIDS, 2013, lithograph 29”x28”, from the Mountain series
NOTES
Hari Kunzru, from Complexity, Harper’s Magazine, January 2021
Octavio Paz, from Vuelta (Return, 1969-1975. Eliot Weinberger, trans.
Milan Kundera. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1995, Linda Asher, trans.
Halldór Laxness. Under the Glacier, 1968 in Icelandic, trans 1972.
Ed Ruscha https://edruscha.com/works/
https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2016/ed-ruscha-mountain-prints/
CODAHistory. Inscription. Revision. Version. Translation. Interpretation. Memory. Story. Myth. Legend, Fragmentation. Obscurity. Erasure. Disappearance. ...
