Who? We? Who we? What "we"? Which "US"(U.S.)?
>INSTEAD: history as honoring the First Days,
>history as the record of events that made earlier events more a part of
>Time by confirming them, a view backwards in which the focus is at the
>start, not the now, in which the genealogy is not about us-now, but about
>what Time has made far realer than we shall be for millennia (if we're
>lucky; many people don't get to be ancestors because they have no
>descendants to look back on them, all Eve's sisters, for instance).
I'd still maintain this IS the tradition of dominant history, to "honor the
First Days..."
but let's try this with some imagination. "...a view backwards in which the
focus is at the start, not the now..."
now, if I get my pomo/critiques right (and I agree, it's no drum song, but
hey it's Western literacy we're talking about right?) then the "reading" of
the view is
unavoidably
framed by the "now"... hence the inherent limitations of looking in the
first place. And let's face it, when I look back I see a very different
view than you. I see ... I see...
9 million women tortured and slaughtered as "witches" in a span of less
than 300 years. You do the math. Tell me again about this view?
are you mourning? the loss of ...history with a capital Aitch? some
Lacanian letter?
>
>If Yeshua ben Mariam of Nazareth was elaborately contextualized in a
>genealogy of the House and lineage of David the King, was that modernist
>honor to the former, or traditional honor to the latter? if the point was
>to show the prophecies fulfilled, what was the point of the prophecy? in
>the modernist view it seems to be that David guarantees the credentials of
>Jesus as a Jew of a house in high favor with Yahweh ... but it may have
>meant in its day that Yahweh would confirm his favor for David's house by
>honoring him with descendants who would make him forever remembered, and
>most real in Time.
>
>On the grand cultural-historical scale we recapitulate the simple issue of
>autobiography: the meaning of the tale is constructed by the tail. Does the
>tail look backwards or forwards at the head? jay.
it would be too easy to suggest the tail is looking up its ass,
'cause, well, anyway: the tail isn't looking.
the head is looking at the tail and imagining some kind of tale that
reflects the view from the tail,
which is its ...well, y'know...No matter how you gussy this with mirrors, I
mean, seems to me, it's always the head making stuff up about the tail.
the tail isn't looking. the head uses to tail to steer it around. in other
words,
the Now makes Then "then" by design.
sadly, really, if it hadn't been for the millenia of ignorant brutalities,
oppressions and abuses, and the ways these are maintained today, in the "now",
history would probably be a lot more fun, a lot easier to revere.
but the whole
thing is so corrupt. Even the institutionalization of History is corrupt. I
mean. What a bloody betrayal *that* turned out to be.
how we worship death, this is pretty much what history (with a Western) is,
primitive death rituals for the excessively literate.
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca