A Safe Gambit

I created my first blog back in my first year of university, when I thought I could write much better than I do. Looking back, however, it was a pretty useful exercise: even if every post was my attempt to 'creatively' describe some horrifically some pseudo-intellectual thought that entered my virgin mind, it got me writing.

One of those 'deep' thoughts was the idea of a one-sided dice. For some reason I always thought the idea was neat, ignoring the laws of physics and the fact that a dice has to at least be two-dimensional to work. One thing I've come to appreciate in history is that no one is ever going to give you an objective point of view. That seems as self-evident as the sun being "bright" and giant boulders being "heavy," but if we accept that, we have to realize that not everyone agrees.

Still, one thing I sometimes find troublesome in historical writing is that we don't allow our subjects the chance to grow. Textual archives don't lend themselves well to demonstrating the organic growth of an individual, and try as biographers might, human beings given life through historical narrative seem to travel from one event to the next. (With some exceptions, of course.)

With better archival documents, pictures, and even audio and visual evidence for contemporary individuals, it has become much easier to document a person's life. But they're still stuck in that infuriating historical limbo, growing only at the writer's command. I blame it on the retrospective approach: looking for clues in a human being's childhood to explain why they were grumpy somedays, or said something rude to a nice old lady another day. We don't let them be human. Somedays we're just grumpy. Somedays we just don't feel like leaving the house. The pseudo-psychological analysis is whittling away history's agents - humans - into autonomous of behavioural psychology. It's a problem that isn't easy to fix.

It's not what interests me, either. I celebrate that we aren't rational. I celebrate our mistakes, our faults and our lies. We are not always bound to deep-seated memories of childhood, or a traumatic event that might explain our actions. We live and we grow and we change. Some people less than others.

This blog is document my own thinking and writing. Hopefully it will develop and evolve over time - even if, as some people believe, we can't really change who we are.

If that's true, then, while the results might always be the same, at least we can change the rules.