Unhistoric Acts

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 21 June 2016.

The Death of King Arthur by James Archer

I read this today and can't help but share it.

I would like to bring back this focus to the George Eliot idea that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

Also, John D. Rosenberg's notion of Arthur as the “Female King,” who “triumphs over time by never having entered time.”

Also, Eliot L. Gilbert's statement that “history, simply by existing, exhausts possibilities, leaving its readers with a despairing sense of their own belatedness and impotence. And this despair in turn leads to anxious quests for novelty, to hectic avant-gardism, and in the end to an inescapable fin de siècle ennui.”

Gilbert's statement, probably 30 to 40 years old, and in reference to a time period more than a century ago, is even more true today, as the Mary Pilon article illustrates. As she puts it, "Taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, with or without a mug in the frame, is a way for all of us to become our own historians, grasping at tangible evidence of our time on the planet."

I also love the reference to the Susan Sontag essay on the topic, which I think I read back in college:

Sontag wrote that cameras were “predatory weapons,” that they are “fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” The camera, she said, was replacing the gun, “the hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture.”

Nick, the central anxiety in Arthur White then is not “an obscure death,” but rather the fear of being turned into an object, as with screaming characters near the end of Too Many Cooks who have been replaced by their chyrons.

So I love that word ahistorical on a number of levels. One level is the idea that many are, as Nick puts it, “fighting for a space in a world that has no allegiance to them nor their ideas.” As Nick points out,

The newest artist is the most interesting one. The unknown performer is the most sought after. These days, an ideology with the upper hand holds the loser's cards. Weakness is strength; the meek are now inheriting the earth.

The other, perhaps unrelated aspect of ahistoricity is the fact that our posts are made public weeks and even months after the fact, so, in a world of buzz feeds and hot takes, we are at least five subjects behind.