What is history?

Because we accept history has no form, we sometimes allow it to work around us without examination. Other times, the qualities of history are scrutinized, dissected and examined until they evaporate. History needs to be practiced so it is divided into many practices. Law, archaeology, anthropology contain obvious actors. But biology, chemistry, and economics, the forward momentum granted by capital progress, all exist within relations to the past.

History has matter and it matters

The tenants of history specialize in self-examination. History wants to write-in its own importance. It forms institutions to support itself, the people in the institutions (“the institutions”) discuss online or in speeches how looking back and forward have become of equal importance. The distribution channels are like rivers now, perpetual until they dry up.

History flows out like water from a sprinkler

Though history is a series of projected ideas, it is still subject to gravity. When it comes from the sprinkler head it moves upwards and outwards before being distributed. Some history evaporates and is never read. Other history lands and pools and eventually moves down the sidewalk in a stream, seemingly on its own, filling in the cracks.

History works itself

History extricates itself from bodies and paper. History can be categorized but much of it becomes excluded, escaping to act on its own without being watched. History acts apart from its actors. The actors (“us”) can only push and pull it, but it is difficult to break. With experience and power it seems the push and pull can be exaggerated. But it lives on its own plane, above us, casting a shadow as it transitions to form around us.

When did this start, and does it matter?

Who was the first writer of history? The first one to remember? The first one to act and think about it again? Some history isn’t real. Lots of it is partially real. No history is actually real. Sometimes objects can stand in for history. The objects, natural and unnatural, tell us things that make up histories. Feelings can be history. Often, the only real history is that which exists internally, within the actors. When the historians contain their own histories it becomes more truthful. The only actual history happens privately.

Where history stays

History is changed by pressure and changes pressures around it. When history is contained, it seeks out the nearest cracks to work its way out. History can escape one container and enter others. Between each person, place or object, the histories can change: from private to public, working into new forms.

- text by John Patterson

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Review: History is a Passive Translator by Lauren Lavery in Peripheral Review

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