The history of now
Like me, you have maybe been reminded recently about history. Someone maybe told you about the Spanish flu for instance, and how people wrote novels during it. Or other times in history - world wars, for example, you may have been reminded, were much more trying than what we’re enduring now. This is, of course, true, and sometimes it’s wonderful to gain a sense of perspective from the worst times in history. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to think of the times in history we don’t know about. The unrecorded. The times when people thought, “well that wasn’t much of anything”.
Public Service Announcement: everything is not significant, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Confused? Same. Let’s sort this out.
Did you know you can search through digital photograph libraries in museum and library catalogues online? You can do this with an intention (for example, to find an Important Moment) or you can, to use and old style bookshop word, browse. Browsing old photos is kind of wonderful, because, even without a narrator, a narrative starts to form. You see flashes of personality, little bits of story, none of it studied in school but all of it kind of familiar and yet distant. Like they can almost see you back. A little girl with a dirty face using a stick as a shot gun, decades before you were born. Long gone, and yet there she is, suspended mid mouth-noise: pew! Pew! And you feel like you could know her, if you only made the effort to peel back the years.
History is full of people watching caterpillars.
People throughout history have stopped, frozen, in the middle of nature, thinking they heard something, muttering half-words to themselves in quiet reassurance.
There are, in history, literally billions of forgotten or abandoned cups of tea, cooling in the background while humans argue and play in the background.
The sea, historically, has done a lot of glistening.
Wind has been busy, too. The history of wind is complex and impressive. It has invented, alongside humans, many significant things, generated lots of power, assisted in the migration of several peoples, been an accessory to murder, and flown a bunch of flags.
Many people, from many cultures, across many eras, have held the hands of history’s main players, made them breakfast, sung them to sleep, loved even the worst of them and rolled their eyes quietly as even the best of them leave their dishes in the sink or whistle too loudly or forget to bring in the rubbish bins.
Nature has, wherever it is, managed, throughout human history, to sneak up through the bits we have tried to evict it from. Grown between the cracks, climbed up the walls, smashed through the boundaries.
It has watched us, its across generations, attempt to shape the world around our ideas - ideas we only have our tiny lifetimes to develop - and it has grown around us, trees climbing slowly to the sky, water wearing down rocks, mountains exploding, lava cooling, all while societies come and go.
People have been late, missed countless trains, turned up to find nobody waiting at the agreed place, felt their hearts sink low in their chest, pretended not to in case the people they don’t know think they’re as disappointed as they are.
History has had some bad guys, but maybe it could have had more. Some of them were nudged gently in the right direction, loved in just right way, shown a way of applying themselves in just the right way. Or, less lovely, they’ve been managed by unthanked loved ones, absorbing their bad behaviour, allowed the world to believe they are good citizens, bearing their unkindness alone.
History is full of people writing novels and being heroes and doing great things or triggering moments of enormous import. It is, though, presumably, also full of insignificance. Lovely or slight or quiet little moments of insignificance, without which things would be a lot different. Maybe.
Abandoned cups of tea, quietly growing trees, loud annoying whistling - all of it is history, happening all around you. Public Service Announcement: just because there’s one story doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of stories. Some of them are terrible and some of them are lovely and some of them aren’t about very much at all. Even during the greatest Naval battles in history, the sea quietly glistened. Here’s to the glistening, and the tea, and the people staring out of windows. And to all of us together, watched by the trees.
This was first printed in The Big Issue.