History, Fiction, Memory

 Like lions, tigers, and bears without the music.

There is an idea I ran across recently which I have attempted to fit into my "Road Tripping" story: that the past is not inflexible and the future undefined.

I may not have developed it well enough in what I think of as a novella, which is, in fact, a slice of a novel.

The latest thing I have read along these lines is the following from Elliot R. Wolfson's The Apocalyptic Secret of Judaism and Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Books of Jacob”

...The advance to the future, accordingly, is naught but a reversion to the past that is, paradoxically, a return to where one has never been. The past thus persists in the present as a vestige that is reconfigured anew each moment. Memory, on this score, is not the regressive repetition and reliving of past events; it is directed forward and therefore may be considered the progressive reconstitution of what has taken place in time.

The scholarly recounting of history should be construed as a futural remembering, or a remembering expectation, that is, an act of recollecting that has the capacity to redeem the past, not by describing how the past really was but by imputing to it meaning that it never had except as the potential to become what it is not. The radical possibility of time as future implies that the past itself is only the past insofar as it is the reiteration of what is yet to come. It follows, moreover, that the duplication of the novel—the return of the same that is different—undergirds the movement of the circle of being and renders ineffectual the distinction between actuality and possibility insofar as the moment at hand can be considered actual only in virtue of being possible and possible only in virtue of being actual. I surmise that this geometric notion of temporality that is circular in its linearity and linear in its circularity shaped the narrative landscape of The Books of Jacob and the somewhat unusual decision of the author to paginate the text in decreasing numerical order.

I will also cite this essay as a pointer towards the Eastern European writers, a place from which we might find a way to tel our own stories.

sch 4/14