My mental circus, inside and out.

On history

One of the truly maddening things about historians is their relentless control of the past.  When I was with Mark, he never let a single "error" of mine go.  If I was sick, if I wasn't charming at a dinner, if I was ever irritable, in a bad mood, he would bring these moments up years later as evidence of my flawed nature. Worse, he used email from four years back as evidence of my flaws in character.  It didn't matter that most of our conversations had taken place on the phone, that I had spent months living with him.  In the end, only these emails counted, and whenever I tried to present my own analysis of our situation, he would return to these emails to disprove everything I had to say, presenting his interpretation of them as inarguable.  This was his successful technique in Memory Underground, where he disproved Miriam's memory by checking it against other documents and Nazi records. In the end, it mattered little what Miriam had to say about herself or what she presented to preserve her dignity--she was that which had to be corrected by the priest of truth, Mark, who could reveal her to herself.  How maddening it was.  In the end, I wished I had never sent him a single email, that I had put forth nothing that he could use to construct me as an avatar in the theater of his life.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 28, 2005 12:35 | link | comments (1)

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#1  24 April 2005 - 07:11

 

Hi, you may know this already. If not you may find it interesting.

http://www.publicappeal.org/library/nietzsche/Nietzsche_untimely_meditations/on_the_use_and_abuse_of_History.htm

JoeLondon

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