DECEMBER 28, 2019 – I must confess: I’m a skimmer. With an exception now and again (ask me how the Torrens Assurance Fund works under Minnesota law—a few years ago I had to learn it), I’m very much a generalist. Whenever I decide to “go deep” on one subject or another, I soon discover I’ll always be far closer to the surface than to the bottom. This is axiomatic, since rarely does a subject have a bottom.
So it is with history. I read some, study a little, but I’m woefully short of a full understanding of an era or epic, let alone an epoch. This leaves me frustrated. I feel a compulsion to develop a theory of history, some over-arching understanding of at least some segment of it, yet I know enough to know I’ll never know enough.
The same goes for politics and economics. What theory best explains these two inevitable aspects of human existence and organization? Strive as I might, I have not discovered any “unified theory” for how humankind organizes itself or how it creates and exchanges goods and services—or how humankind should do any of these things.
And then there are sociology, anthropology, psychology, about which I could fill only a single page, double-spaced in very large font. Atop those are all the hard sciences and . . . drum roll, drum roll . . . computer science—cymbal crash! No theory will appear to me in any of these overlapping departments.
Lately, though, I took a run at American history. In the course of not really knowing what I’m talking about, but rattled by absurdities in the headlines, I threw everything into the blender, switched it on “high” for a suitable length of time, then poured the resulting mixture onto an imaginary canvas to see what might appear.
The canvas was not blank. It came pre-worked, dotted with disparate indigenous groups who used neither wheel nor sail; people without domesticated animals and thus, who lived in a largely virus-free world. This condition would spell their doom, for virus-free meant immunity-free.
The blender contents—newcomers to this continent, with their viruses, their technologies, their religions, their organizational powers, their compulsion to “own” and control the earth, and above all, their numbers—oozed out over the canvas, covering it entirely, indigenous dots and all. Over the centuries, the invaders and their progeny turned the canvas into a special MOMA exhibition piece. Art like no other—part complex collage, part towering sculpture, part blaring loudspeaker, part beautiful painting, part atomic arsenal. Critics would call it big, rich, poor, crazy, sane, awful, great, gawdy, just, unjust, elegant, corrupt, stupid, brilliant, horrible, wonderful, war-mongering, peace-loving, powerful, and above all, perplexing—not because of any special creed or curse nor by divine sanction or diabolical motive but by an organic mix of time, space, location, numbers, and momentum.
This piece of concept art is still in the making, constantly changing, for better and for worse; for worse and for better.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
This is perfect.
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