We, as Americans, have not been witness to many joyous occasions in the last ten years. It’s been a decade racked with tragedy, scandal, depressions, and disasters. I can say that even in my own entire lifetime (a mere, but sometimes long, 29 years) my national and international memory is not exactly something to celebrate. We have not had the opportunity to witness a particularly positive history. I don’t mean to insinuate that it has been bleak in its entirety, but it has been rather difficult for me to recall more than a few historic moments I could celebrate, rather than mourn.
History is a difficult thing to define. Linguistically, the Random House Unabridged dictionary has 8 different contextual meanings. These for the most part are uninteresting to me. They seem too limited in scope, arresting, rather than freeing. Language is, I think, inherently arresting, it requires us to categorize, paraphrase, and summarize our thoughts. This is often difficult for us to recognize, because spoken language becomes such a dominant form of communication that we believe that even our thoughts are regulated by it. So formal, institutionalized definitions should be approached with a recognition of their limits. We must be able to see their constructions, accept them, and then try to move beyond them if it so required of us. Continue reading…
