History, Literature and Music

All through school, I just could never get my head around History. It started out inauspiciously enough, with plain ol' history, which was the usual stuff about kings and tribes and war, and on a good day, pestilence. Then what should to my agonized eye appear but: The History of the Kings of Israel. (Israelly important to know this stuff?) This was when I first realized that there was History, and then History of this, and History of that. History of Fashion, History of the Theater, History of the Bible, History of Medicine, History of Methodism. It dawned on me that plain ol' History was merely the history of politics. 

When did I first become interested in History? It was not all at once; it happened obliquely. I was given a book of Letters of Composers, a fabulous book that everyone should not only read, but own. It started with the letters of the composers of earlier times (all in translations) and proceeded to the letters of Tchaikovsky, and he wrote some interesting letters. Schumann, as you could expect, wrote up a storm, but Mozart gave him a good run for his money. Once I had read this book from cover to cover, suddenly I had an actual mental image of what these guys were like. It was startling for a kid of sixteen to realize that they were quite distinct personalities. (OK, so I was a pretty retarded sixteen year old.) Then I happened to get my hands on an enormous book called the Oxford Companion to Music, which had actual engravings of the masters, enormous full-page portraits of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, and so forth. And Mendelssohn. I was beginning to take Mendelssohn seriously. I had heard the famous violin concerto, of course, but I had assumed that old Felix was a two hit wonder, at most. But as I grew more interested in his stuff, I began to take note of the pictures available of him. About this time, too, my high school principal had given me a book to read called Johnny Tremain, which was all about Paul Revere and the revolution. I began to get interested in people such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and William Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln followed soon after. Years later, it was as I was watching Little House on the Prairie on television that it struck me: half the guys were dressed in knee-length breeches, like Franklin and Washington and Bach and Handel, while the more affluent storekeepers dressed like Lincoln and Mendelssohn. By this time I had seen a portrait of Oscar Wilde, and he looked as like Felix Mendelssohn as made no difference to me. [The knee-breeches were going out of style, and the full-length pants were new, and initially more expensive. Eventually, people wore pants most of the time, while they used their old breeches for farmwork, etc. You see this too in the Little House on the Prairie tv series, where breeches were worn for work, and pants for Church, for instance.] So it is that my insight into history, which was based on the idea of contemporaries, was sparked by my interest in fashions. 

Soon afterwards, I became interested in the middle ages, the early renaissance, and ancient Greece and Rome, all spearheaded by my interest in clothing. (I'm by no means a natty dresser; for me fashion is the study of the clothes of other people than myself.) What people wore explained a great deal about what they did on a typical day: fighting, or keeping the weeds down, or bringing in a catch of fish. 

Yet another dimension was opened up when I began to be interested in the History of Mathematics. It so happens that the History of mathematics is less important to mathematics as such than the histories of other subjects might be to them. Mathematics at work is in an eternal present, which has subsumed all foregoing understanding of the subject. Still, it is intriguing to learn what the fathers of the subject dreamed up to accomplish something that is done today in quite a different way. As one learns about mathematicians of the past, their costumes and portraits, too, establishes each of them as a contemporary of a musician or a politician, or an author or philosopher. These isochronous layers, to coin a phrase, serve to make sense of the motivations and accomplishments of all these important figures of the past, in whatever field they worked. It is similarly interesting to analyze the stories of the Bible in terms of the level of development of the culture in which they were set. Abraham, for instance, was a stone-age nomad, and his sacrificial knife is often depicted as a flint implement. By the time Solomon came around, they were bronze-age, and presumably there are biblical sources that will establish the precise chronological and cultural facts, in terms of religious specifications of how things were to be done. (I'm keeping a straight face here with some difficulty, but that's why it's called a religion, because it doesn't make much sense.) The Romans, of course, were ultimately deposed by iron-age barbarian warriors, if my memory serves me right, and at least the current thinking in the world of speculative fiction is that the greatest legendary weapons of ancient heroes were probably forged from meteoritic iron. 

As always, the anthropological implications of the various lifestyles, from hunter-gatherer, to nomad, to farmer, inform the stories one reads. Thus History reveals itself as the ultimate application of the principle that connections are the path to assimilating information into knowledge. To the consumer, History is simply a matter of structuring facts and events into some semblance of cause and effect. (To the purveyor of history, the Historian, it is much more: it is a matter of persuading one's readers of one's prejudices, and is a subtle skill. But since they make money out of it, they can do their own damn writing and not look to me to do it for them.) 

To end, The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley presents the legendary King Arthur of Britain as one of the earliest kings of the post-Roman era. Her point of view makes amazing sense of the clash of the pagan and the Christian influences in the story. To a Briton, the Arthurian legend is probably connected with various landmarks, the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, Salisbury Cathedral, and the Holy Grail legend, which would serve to place it in a vaguely historical context. For me, though, it was Mists that provided that invaluable service. (Many critical reviews of Bradley's novel focus greedily on the fact that it was supposedly a feminist perspective on the Arthurian legend. In fact, Bradley does far more than simply provide a feminist perspective: she presents the action from the point of view of Christian expansionism, a potent force which complicated the gender issues in many ways. But from our vantage point in the 21st century, it is no longer necessary to use feminism as a crutch to bolster an analysis of a literary work. Feminism should illuminate everyone's thinking, rather than that of a few isolated feminists.) 

Hardest of all, in studying history, is to understand the mind-processes of the protagonists, carefully allowing for the fact that the intellectual environment of another age is simply different from ours. Genocide, for instance, is abhorrent to us. But that attitude is the result of history. As we go backwards, we must judge genocide by Hitler differently than genocide by Genghis Khan, or the Crusades, or the Aryan Invasion of Asia, or Cortez in Mexico. Though abhorrence is inevitable, the same abhorrence for the same crime at different historical times simply becomes an obstacle to understanding history. 

Archimedes, who could be wrong