This is a thinking piece. Not a thought piece as that places it in a frame of completion that I do not experience. I am groping toward a better understanding of history and story. I am reaching for a better view of the web of connection in what has gone before.
I am working on a story of Valencia. The first chapter will be on the founding of Roman Valencia. I will mention that there were people here before the Romans, but we have very limited information about them. We can know that they were here through archeological findings, but we do not hear their voices in the historical record for little or nothing they wrote has survived the years. Our writings are remarkable as they provide an opportunity to receive some portion of the mind of another.
That may also provide a form of time travel. Often, we imagine time travel to be a way to be present in a former time. It is usually imagined that we arrive whole in a time and place where one can experience that time, those people, that place as if it were our own. We tell time travel stories as if our presence there will give us a better understanding of that time and place and people. But would it really provide that? Our experience of today is merely imagined to be complete. We do not know everything in our own experience of this moment. Our view of today is clouded by the fog of our own hopes, fears, prejudices, and expectations.
So perhaps it is that our time travel in an historical account is as pure or more clear than any lived experience of that moment. Reading a book or viewing a documentary film about a period of history is time travel. The sense in which it lacks accuracy is the sense in which our experience of the same period might also lack authenticity. My understanding remains clouded by my current perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and prejudices. The work is to try to identify and move past these occlusions to my view of the history that I read or write. But at the same time, I need to work to avoid an absolutist view of “accuracy” that can prevent both exploration and enjoyment of the history that I read or write.
And all this is ephemeral. All this passes away at some point. We can build on the past. We can learn from it. We cannot, however, achieve perfect preservation of the past or of the present. All our lives are about constant change. We learn more about this every time a physicist finds deeper understanding of the patterns of our universe. I am doing some reading about a quantum understanding of consciousness and the possibility that we have an evidence based way to understand the human soul.