This Soil We Have Created For Ourselves

History is an errant and pliant concept that haunts dreams and fevers the imaginations of the living. It refuses to be fixed, and in its continual motivation for disobedience, it compounds society’s motivations to relate to its recorded events, moments, and changes that have led to a tacit knowledge of the present. In this, history challenges our reliability as something impartial or bearable. In abandoning fixity, history presents an uncertainty more than it offers a solid foundation from which to draw rationality. We covet the narrative of history for our perception of its functions as a way of illuminating our beliefs, however poorly tendered. Significant themes are redressed in history, and they reform institutions and cultural movements alike. These themes and stories of the past can be borrowed from, bent, and modified to assign a new script or character. The wary citizens of the present use these themes to illustrate and compel historical episodes into backing credentials and reference points for the propaganda of the now. As the noted theorist and historian Frederic Jameson has pointed out, a license to regard history and its moving components as fixed is to err on the side of incaution as a gesture of mutable conscience. As per Jameson, “Always Historicize!” is a crucial and significant response to the problem of history, the past, and its manipulations from the present period. History at best is a condition that suggests reverberation and echo are its main currencies. There is a relatable notion to history and the past, but one of which can never be exacted by someone who did not experience it firsthand. These echoes and reverberations can be considered convenient when they fulfill a confirmation bias in political terms. In that same example, they can destroy rationality in favor of misread or a mythologizing that tends history as insoluble and its rubric supreme.