reading and writing
reading and writing 2 pages
” As you write a response to this lesson, I would be curious to know how you conceive of historical time. I would be curious to know how you think a concept of historical time might shape the way a single event in history is regarded by a historian. For example sometimes historians write about an event moving history forward or setting it back and this implies a direction, a destination (what is it?) and a getting with the program. You dont have to write about these things Ive expressed a curiosity about. You can write your essay anyway you want. Please, dear students, try to have fun with this. If you dont take it so seriously, I will bet you that you will learn more that way and certainly write better that way. If your way of having fun is by taking things very seriously and driving yourself crazy in order to achieve perfection, then do that. But you dont have to do that. After writing about time, its organization and its defiance, I thought to leave you with two paintings that can join the images youve already imagined about this long subject. ”
1
HISTORY AND NOSTALGIA
The Organization of Time
In the context of a university class today, the phrase the organization of time would be taken to
indicate something about time management and its corollary stress management these
indications come from midlevel management and their concept is how to use your time wisely
in order to achieve your goal. The goal is to reach higher. And to help the world, of course,
along the way. You, and the world, reach higher together, in the same movement, in the same
managerial organization of time. But even in this natural habitat of our meanings the phrase
the organization of time indicates a sequential continuity between past, present and future a
direction, a goal, a sense to what is now in relation to what is not now. In essence a script in
which each moment in time must remind itself that it is only an actor.
Much can be learned from looking at everyday phrases if they are looked at from outside of their
everdayness. And this doesnt involve insomnia, nor is it simply a matter of sleepwalking.
Consider that how a person a student today is told to organize his or her time conveys a
concept quite identical to what the creators of historical meaning have always intended to
convey. What does this event, or this moment in time mean? The meaning of the this, or the
now is found either outside of itself in the spectrum of time of which it is only an episode, or
inversely, the spectrum of time is found to reside fully intact within each moment of its passing.
What would the writing of history be without meaning? What else can a thesis be besides an
assertion of meaning? an assertion addressed to someone looking for lost meanings. Despite
our current absorption into scientific sounding language which is as evident in history as it is in
any other discipline, for academia speaks in a single language regardless of its research thing
despite the metallic, or indeed electronic sounds of our language, the way history is written today
has not changed in its fundamental axioms from how it was written, or told, or imagined in its
very beginnings. Perhaps historians, among all academics, should entertain this hypothesis that
change and non-change are both constants in history. The terminology in which we express
historys meaning changes (today it is difficult to distinguish between history and sociology) and
the instruments we use to materialize our terminology changes (we can be digital, we must be
digital), but underneath these distracting layers of clothes, the body of how historys meaning is
conceived is remarkably settled in its place, and unable to escape itself.
The idea of this lesson is to present to you some of the essential ways that historical time has
been organized by the poets of time, also known as historians. Perhaps you will see that
historians you have in turn already been organized in your concepts and categories by how
historical time has historically been organized for you. I am speaking of our assumptions which
we are already half aware of, but which we might wonder what to do without.
Please forgive me if my language seems like the verbal equivalent of the over-use of technology,
or the verbal compensation for the under-use of technology. I promise to be as tolerant of your
verbal vices as I am of my own. I actually believe it is more fun this way. And by breaking the
parallel trance that akins the historian to the industrial worker both of whom only have fun in
designated timeslots after hours we can even imagine bringing the spirit of play right into the
heart of what most of the rest of the world regards as strangely boring: our beloved subject. No
love is lost this way.
2
So, how has historical time been enduringly organized through history? This question leads us
back to myth, which is bound to offend historians scientific pretensions since they appear
from this point of view as nothing but pretentions. My premise is that science has not saved the
world from darkness, it has only cast darkness in a different shade. Science has not abolished
superstition or belief in an almighty it has simply become an almighty superstition in its own
right. So why not go to the source mythology itself to see where the historian, and especially
the scientific, progressive, Marxist historian derives his, her, fundamental concepts? For
someone this might be like a journey into the historians unconscious, for others it might be like
a theater of the absurd for we will be discovering something that is clearly already here in what
we already think.
The first premise of mythology any mythology, from any part of the world is that the world
itself is contained within each persons life. If I may hijack the title of that silly song from the
eighties, we are the world and so the discovery of truth moves in two directions at once:
outwardly into the world and inwardly into ourselves. Starting from this premise the world is a
person (or even a vampire, since vampires are persons too), and like a person its life is measured
by ages. The ages of the world are the essential categories of historical time, since history
naturally concerns itself with the world (however widely or narrowly the world is geographically
conceived). How is time organized in the terms of a persons life? In between birth and death
something happens, hopefully it can be called maturity. Regard nature and you see the same
organization of time: fruit is the best when it is mature, is it not? And so history, or the course of
the worlds time, must also follow this ubiquitous rule: from birth to death, with maturity always
arriving later than desired. Infancy, childhood, the really fun years, and then old age and death,
how could it be otherwise? To accept lifes rules and to organize your time in accordance with
how time itself is already organized is an eternal mark of wisdom and the study of history has
always been there to make us wise, even when it makes us laugh. History moves like a life,
says mythology, and so by studying history you are bound to learn how to live in accordance
with life. Be aware: in this archaic formulation you the person (who now assumes the role of
student) are at the center of your studies, not your finished product (your essay, your book, your
career) which can easily float away from you like a balloon.
The stages, or the ages, of a human life transposed onto the history of humanity, or the history of
the world: this is a foundational organization of time. But then a story has to be told through the
piecing together of these stages, or ages, or chapters. A story with a living idea for the living.
And an idea is alive only if it is incomplete in its telling if it leaves possibilities opened to be
interpreted by the reader. Imagine for a moment that death is a part of life, and not its opposite.
Life feels most alive when it forgets this part of itself, when it forgets its own death. For in death
everything is settled, and there is nothing to say. A complete story, which leaves its reader only
the two options of either agreeing or disagreeing is like a life obsessed with death with
finality, with conclusion, with resolving things, with getting it over with and getting to the point,
the end. But this demands that the readers mind be dead, or that it fake its own death for there
is no room left to think or to imagine when being addressed by a discourse that leaves you only
with preordained options. All good stories are incomplete because all good writers know that
they are never the sole authors of what they write their readers are their co-authors in the
invisible novel written in the mind called Making Sense of What I Read.
3
A story with a living idea for the living. Ive drawn a portrait of a living idea a knowingly
incomplete idea that acknowledges the life of the reader, and that allows the reader the space to
formulate her, his, own ideas in response to whats been written. But then there is the question
of the living. If life is experienced as a preordained destiny bound by immutable rules, then it is
not experienced at all. Therefore life doesnt become itself it doesnt realize its own ideal if
it is too aware of itself. This is why a fanatical relation to truth is dangerous, and usually
visibly unhappy. Knowing how to forget, knowing how to lie and deny and defy, knowing that
illusions complement the truth and yet nonetheless remain its opposite all of these silly things
seem quite essential to living seriously, or seriously living. Here you might notice a paradox: on
the one hand historical writing and its organization of time present the reader with rules of how
life is organized in the domain of nature, in the domain of an individuals existence, and in the
domain of the worlds existence (or history): from birth to death, with a peak somewhere in the
middle. But on the other hand, I have said that a living idea of the living doesnt tell the whole
story and doesnt sound like a recitation of rules. A paradox. From the Greek
formed of (par) meaning beyond, and (dxa) meaning belief. Who can write beyond
belief, beyond what he, she, thinks to be true is a magician, a poet. Beyond a writer.
Academically written history has a strange relation to magic and poetry, but especially to magic.
While on the one hand historians like to write denunciations of the historic persecution of
witches and other magical practitioners, the way they write about this thing is generally devoid
and utterly intolerant of any magic at all. Another paradox. Because paradoxes arent
abolishable by the power of will or the power of law or the power of science. How did magic
become just a thing? Is that not a magical operation in itself?
Golden Memories
All that Ive written to you so far in this lesson about the organization of time and about stories
aware of their own incompleteness is based in Hesiods poem, The Five Ages of Man. Hesiod
was a Greek poet, a writer of mythology, who wrote around 700 BC, the same time as Homer.
In his book Works and Days appears the poem The Five Ages of Man which in western
civilization has provided an enduring concept of how historical time is organized. I give you the
poem to read, dear historians who hate poetry.
And now with art and skill Ill summarize
Another tale, which you should take to heart,
Of how both gods and men began the same.
The gods, who live on Mount Olympus, first
Fashioned a golden race of mortal men;
These lived in the reign of Kronos, king of heaven,
And like the gods they lived with happy hearts
Untouched by work or sorrow. Vile old age
Never appeared, but always lively-limbed,
Far from all ills, they feasted happily.
Death came to them as sleep, and all good things
Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land
Gave up her fruits unasked. Happy to be
At peace, they lived with every want supplied,
4
Rich in their flocks, dear to the blessed gods.
And then this race was hidden in the ground.
But still they live as spirits of the earth,
Holy and good, guardians who keep off harm,
Givers of wealth: this kingly right is theirs.
The gods, who live on Mount Olympus, next
Fashioned a lesser, silver race of men:
Unlike the gold in stature or in mind.
A child was raised at home a hundred years
And played, huge baby, by his mothers side.
When they were grown and reached their prime, they lived
Brief, anguished lives, from foolishness, for they
Could not control themselves, but recklessly
Injured each other and forsook the gods;
They did not sacrifice, as all tribes must, but left
The holy altars bare. And, angry, Zeus
The son of Kronos, hid this race away,
For they dishonored the Olympian gods.
The earth then hid this second race, and they
Are called the spirits of the underworld,
Inferior to the gold, but honored, too.
And Zeus the father made a race of bronze,
Sprung from the ash tree, worse than the silver race,
But strange and full of power. And they loved
The groans and violence of war; they ate
No bread; their hearts were flinty-hard; they were
Terrible men; their strength was great, their arms
And shoulders and their limbs invincible.
Their weapons were of bronze, their houses bronze;
Their tools were bronze: black iron was not known.
They died by their own hands, and nameless, went
To Hades chilly house. Although they were
Great soldiers, they were captured by black Death,
And left the shining brightness of the sun.
But when this race was covered by the earth,
The son of Kronos made another, fourth,
Upon the fruitful land, more just and good,
A godlike race of heroes, who are called
The demigods the race before our own.
Foul wars and dreadful battles ruined some;
Some sought the flocks of Oedipus, and died
In Cadmus land, at seven-gated Thebes;
And some, who crossed the open sea in ships,
5
For fair-haired Helens sake, were killed at Troy.
These men were covered up in death, but Zeus
The son of Kronos gave the others life
And homes apart from mortals, at Earths edge.
And there they live a carefree life, beside
The whirling Ocean, on the Blessed Isles.
Three times a year the blooming, fertile earth
Bears honeyed fruits for them, the happy ones.
And Kronos is their king, far from the gods,
For Zeus released him from his bonds, and these,
The race of heroes, well deserve their fame.
Far-seeing Zeus then made another race,
The fifth, who live now on the fertile earth
I wish I were not of this race, that I
Had died before, or had not yet been born.
This is the race of iron. Now, by day,
Men work and grieve unceasingly; by night,
They waste away and die. The gods will give
Harsh burdens, but will mingle in some good;
Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men,
When babies shall be born with graying hair.
Father will have no common bond with son,
Neither will guest with host, nor friend with friend;
The brother-love of past days will be gone.
Men will dishonor parents, who grow old
Too quickly, and will blame and criticize
With cruel words. Wretched and godless, they
Refusing to repay their bringing up,
Will cheat their aged parents of their due.
Men will destroy the towns of other men.
The just, the good, the man who keeps his word
Will be despised, but men will praise the bad
And insolent. Might will be Right, and shame
Will cease to be. Men will do injury
To better men by speaking crooked words
And adding lying oaths; and everywhere
Harsh-voiced and sullen-faced and loving harm,
Envy will walk along with wretched men.
Last, to Olympus from the broad-pathed Earth,
Hiding their loveliness in robes of white,
To join the gods, abandoning mankind,
Will go the spirits Righteousness and Shame.
And only grievous troubles will be left
For men, and no defense against our wrongs.
6
Translation by Dorthea Wender
You have heard of historical optimism, progressivism, positivism, promised lands, heaven,
building a better future, and reaching higher at some level it is all the same. But before
civilization became so perky, it was tragic and yet maybe for that very reason it was happier.
Hesiod names his ages which are defined by the races who inhabit them according to
metals which proceed in a descending order: gold, silver, bronze, then the non-metal the heroic
age inhabited by people who thing they can defy the rules of metals, and that indeed is what
makes them heroic and finally iron. The Iron Age is the present. Not just Hesiods present:
Greece in 700 BC, but the present of anyone who reads the poem and enters its idea and then
looks out at the world from within the poems feeling. And the Iron Age is not a happy ending.
The Iron Age sucks. Why? How? Lets look at the poem again.
What made the Golden Age golden? What made it the best? And like the gods they lived with
happy hearts untouched by work or sorrow. The inhabitants of the Golden Age had happy
hearts. This doesnt just put the human at the center of history, it puts the heart at the center of
the human. The heart, which indicates a feeling, or aura. In symbolic language the heart is
always paired and contrasted to the mind. But the mind is not at the center of Hesiods poem
the story of the poem is not about the minds accumulation of knowledge, or even its loss of
knowledge. The poem, taken as a whole, is about the breaking of the heart. But before we see it
break, lets see what it looked like once upon a time, in humanitys childhood. Untouched by
work or sorrow was the heart, implying that work and sorrow have something in common: they
dont make the heart happy. This may seem obvious as obvious as the tasks we have to
fulfill, the stress they cause us, and the mutilating effect they have on us when our minds are
inundated with them and we cant find the time to reconnect with our hearts anymore. Thats
just life, get use to it, says an unhappy common sense. But who can accept so easily the
argument in favor of sorrow, even when that argument is armed with all the logic in the world?
Ok, heres a compromise: work and be sorrowful sometimes because you have to, and then in
your off hours you can be happy again. Or how about this one: If youre really clever youll
learn to love your own work and sorrow, and by doing that youll be better at it and so then
youll have that happiness plus the happiness that you can invent for yourself in your off hours,
and then youll be stoked. Both of these arguments imply a compartmentalization of life: work
here according to a set of rules that you must obey, and be free over there where you can make
your own rules. But what about this one, to speak politically for a moment, to speak about now:
work badly, try to bring in as much as you can of play into work, since the fight for basic
survival is far behind us and we dont have a reason to be so stressed out and unhappy anymore
if not for a perverse love of sorrow itself.
Observe the scene described in the Golden Age: people did not work, therefore they did not
produce and possess many things. Therefore were they poor? Poor means feeling a lack. To
understand the feeling of poverty all you have to do is want something very badly. Something
that you dont have and cant convince yourself that you can possess. But in the poem All good
things were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land gave up her fruits unasked. Happy to be
at peace, they lived with every want supplied. How could these people not be poor even though
they didnt have a lot of things since they did not work? Do you think that perhaps Marx read
this poem when he elaborated his theory of primitive communism in his scientific system of
7
the procession of different modes of production in historical time? Note that there are five
modes of production in Marxs poem. And if you think that modes of production sounds
better than ages of man then perhaps you also have a proclivity for techno music. And there is
nothing wrong with that. Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism.
Five. This is not a coincidence. And the differences are important: communism and the Iron
Age are not the same thing, indeed they are opposites. But well get to that later, at the end.
Returning to our question: how could the inhabitants of the Golden Age not be or not feel
themselves to be poor, despite their relative lack of products? The fertile land gave up her
fruits unasked this isnt just a description of the life of hunter-gatherer societies, although
some maniacal historians will tell you that it is, because for them indeed it is, because they are
maniacal. Maniacal means they let their focus on ideas (and orders, which are the perfect
example of ideas) blind them to the experience of life. Could it be that the fruits of the land
are not just a basket of apples? Could it be that apples are not just food, and not just
commodities with a value? Could it be, dear Karl, that use-value and exchange-value never
really were the only real values in life? Do we know anymore how to be happy with what life
gives us for free? The fruits of the land can be read as a metaphor of the things, the
impressions, that life gives to us naturally without asking anything in return. You dont have
to earn it, you just have to allow yourself to experience it. Like a child. If we have lost this
ability over time over the time of history but also over the time of our personal history of
growing up it might well be because our work (the activity that separates us from the feeling of
play) has not only produced more things, it has also turned everything simultaneously into a raw
material (an object to be worked on) and a commodity (an object to be bought). The space to
wander and to wonder about the fruits of life has noticeably shrunk, dear southern Californian
suburbanites. And security concerns protection against danger have certainly contributed to
this shrinking of the world. But the internet is endless!
We arrive again at a paradox: the same activity that produces wealth, meaning work, deprives
us of the ability to feel ourselves wealthy (to enjoy what is free) and it leaves very little of the
world still free to be enjoyed. Perhaps this could be called our para-box.
How did the inhabitants of the Golden Age treat one another? They feasted happily. They
were happy to be at peace. Think about feasting the next time you eat a meal alone. Or the
next time you cook alone. It is not the same food. But what if I like eating alone because then
nobody judges me? Then you are right and I am wrong. But lets move on. Food, historically,
has been a symbol of happiness, and not just nutritional survival. To eat to feast with other
people means to share happiness with them. This concept, and this symbol, is imbedded in our
language. Look at the word companion, or compaero, it is the same word. It is from Latin:
cum (with) panem (bread). What is companionship? What do you do with your friends? With
the people you love? Do you not share your joys? Are you not companions because you enjoy
the same things and ultimately enjoy each other? The inhabitants of the Golden Age were happy
to be at peace with each other, which means they didnt fight. Maybe the only Golden Age that
ever really existed in history was called a happy childhood. But isnt that what we recreate in
our small islands of communism in the world, where we dont exploit each other, dont dominate
each other, dont play Simon Says even in the absence of Simon, and just be? It matters. It
8
matters just as much as what we read on the news, or read in history books. Even though it
rarely makes its way into either one.
How did things begin to change? How did they fall? What appears in the Silver Age that was
not there in the Golden Age? It is strife. Strife appears. And what disappears from the Golden
Age to the Silver Age is harmony. What was the cause of strife? It was wanting too much.
Because want can be dangerously endless. And this is bad. Even though we might not see that it
is bad, because all we see is that the thing that we want is good. In the Silver Age a child was
raised at home a hundred years and played, huge baby, by his mothers side. Spoiled? Under
lockdown? A hundred years? Like Gabriel Garca Mrquezs novel A Hundred Years of
Solitude. What happens when people are overindulged in their comfortable isolation from the
world? Are we talking about ancient Greece here, or about American suburbia? But can you
blame them? Can you blame us? An excess of love (agape nurturing love, by his mothers
side) made love impossible. A paradox, a recognition that even non-love has an essential place
in the world so that love may continue to find itself alive. When they were grown and reached
their prime, they lived brief, anguished lives, from foolishness, for they could not control
themselves, but recklessly injured each other. The cause of strife living anguished lives in
which they recklessly injured each other is foolishness. And they were foolish because they
could not control themselves. They couldnt control themselves because one hundred years is
too long of a time to be receiving everything you want from the person who nurtures you. But
how nice it is to nurture and be nurtured! Yet once outside of the womb-like home, the huge
baby could not understand that not everyone else loved him like his mother. And this made him
upset and volatile. And ultimately bitter. Could it be that only someone who loves the world too
much expects too much love from the world? More than it can give? I told you that the pre-
perky world is tragic. Tragic for an excess of love. Tragic for still being the present.
And so then things get worse. Strife becomes violence, and violence becomes a pleasure.
Violence becomes a pleasure! Beware. This has been known to happen to people who love their
work too much, because when you are in the work mindset you see the world as a layered mass
of objects, and this already is violences form of foreplay. Getting back to the history of the
heart, the inhabitants of the Bronze Age had hearts that were flinty-hard. Love did not
disappear from the hearts of these terrible men, it simply found its object in another mirror: in
flintiness itself: in harshness. They loved the groans and violence of war. They loved war. It
is like saying they loved hate. Or they loved to hate. Moreover, they loved to see other people
suffer: they loved to see their opponents groan. Maybe it made them feel strong. Anger is
always righteous, but rarely is it right. Here in the third age of Hesiods poem the world is
already unbearable. Problems prevail everywhere, and harmony is only an echo. This cant be.
There must be a way out.
The Heroic Age. Very simple, some people thought that the way out of war was simply by
winning. No, not very simple, very simplistic. The winner gets the spoils and can go retire at
the Earths edge and enjoy them. Each man for himself, me for myself, I win, goodbye. I have
seen the Earths edge, it is somewhere in Tustin. It is a great real estate investment, there are
great schools there, even the supermarket is great. Yet if you are not great, people are unhappy
to see you. You are disturbing their greatness and making it less great. But then you wonder, if
greatness is so easily disturbed is it really that great? Please forgive me if you live in Tustin, I
9
know that not everyone there is like that. Actually I dont know this, but I assume this. I present
you with this suburban example because it illustrates the achievement and the problem which
are the same thing of the Heroic Age. The problem is imagining that you are not part of the
larger world, and that your own happiness doesnt intrinsically depend on the happiness of the
people around you. You can pretend not to see others, or banish them from your immediate
surroundings, but then you have put yourself under siege and chosen to live in a fortress of
denial. The heroes of the Heroic Age live on the Blessed Isles islands, the symbolic location
of separation from the world. Hesiod calls them the happy ones, as certainly they are, but do
you remember the lyrics of the David Bowie song? We can be heroes just for one day? One
day, one little neighborhood looked at from the outside it doesnt seem so heroic at all. It
seems tragic at best, and pathetic at worst. The Heroic Age is an exception, even in its name,
even in its concept, since heroism is by definition exceptional. It is a response to a hope a hope
to leave the general fracas. But since it was the fracas itself that gave birth to hope, hope once
it is made a value in itself remains umbilically attached to the very problem it wishes to escape
from.
And in the end today appears. Hesiods day. And yet he wishes it did not. I wish I were not of
this race, that I had died before, or had not yet been born. What is the Iron Age? Now, by
day, men work and grieve unceasingly; by night, they waste away and die. They work to
produce, but they are neither wealthy nor happy. Maybe this is not just because of being
exploited of the fruits of their labor, but because they imagine that fruits cant exist at all without
their labor. And yet they are too tired to eat them, much less admire them as aesthetic objects.
By night they waste away and die does that mean that they just watch television at night
because they are too tired to live, and so they console themselves with watching other people
living? Babies shall be born with graying hair. from the hundred-year childhood of the
Silver Age now there is no childhood at all: no time of life without worries, symbolized by
graying hair. Does that mean that babies are already worrying about their GPAs and which
universities theyll be accepted to? Father will have no common bond with son, neither will
guest with host, nor friend with friend; the brother-love of past days will be gone. No family,
no friends, no community. Just an ensemble of isolated, atomized individuals always afraid
and angry with each other. It is as though Hesiod is describing a feeling in the air. Have you
ever breathed that air? Men will dishonor parents, who grow old too quickly, and will blame
and criticize with cruel words. Wretched and godless, they refusing to repay their bringing up,
will cheat their aged parents of their due. Long before the industrial revolution and Marxs
scientific discovery that capitalism tends to reduces the family relation to just a business
relation, this poem describes the very same nightmare. Men will destroy the towns of other
men. In Greek the word translated as towns is (plis), which has a meaning larger than
the material concept of a town or a city. is the root of our word politics, and poltica. It
is also the root of our word polite, which indicates manners and behavior. To destroy other
mens does not just mean to destroy their buildings and their economic infrastructure, it
means to destroy their entire way of life. It means to destroy them immaterially hence
culturally and spiritually as well as materially. In the scenario of the Iron Age, it means to
make the victims of the destruction just as miserable as the perpetrators of the destruction. The
just, the good, the man who keeps his word will be despised, but men will praise the bad and
insolent. Might will be Right, and shame will cease to be. Greed is good, greed is necessary,
greed is a right. Learn these lessons now, empty heart, so that you emptiness isnt so lonely.
10
And shame? Today we talk a lot about the negative attributes of shame, specifically, about the
cruelty of unfairly shaming a person. But have we forgotten shames positive attributes? In
the sense that there are things that I would be ashamed of doing because they are below me? A
world without shame is a world without a sense of decency and decorum, a world without
politeness that makes collective life in the plis (the city) unbearable.
All of lif
