(Hecataeus, Genealogies)
By Aled Gruffydd Jones
Historians are omnivorous creatures. If they’re really lucky, they dine out at the classy restaurants, with their à la carte catalogues, of the State Archives, or our National Libraries. If not, they’ll happily feast on roadkill, the accidental and arbitrary bits of the past that have somehow limped, battered and worn, into the beams of their headlamps. Beware too of the fondness of historians to carry out the odd mugging as, cameras, voice recorders and notebooks in hand, they hunt hungrily among the unwary for other people’s memories, private letters, old photos, any scrap of food. Their prey, always, is us. And just as we write the stories of others, whether we like it or not they will write our stories too.
The past can play its own tricks, though. Sifting through nineteenth-century political diaries in the old British Museum, studiously serving my long apprenticeship to this least sullen of arts, it suddenly struck me that I was being played. Amid all the detail of furious daily activity, the really juicy bits, the deep moments of clarity, the most revealing reflections, tended to be concentrated into just a few days of the year, usually the same few days between Christmas and New Year. Away from the noise of Parliament and Press, brandy in hand in the wintry quiet of country estates, those busy people had time to think, to zoom out, and to fix their place as individuals with agency in the churning, unpredictable world of events. They may have been scribbling down notes for their own memoirs, but, intentionally or not, they were also laying down audit trails for future snoopers like me to pounce on.
What then of us, as we ride out our own bewildering, sometimes terrifying, often heartbreaking Covid-poxed storm? How will its stories be told by those who didn’t live through it (but who in time may have to endure far worse)? How will they deal with our experience of fear, confusion, anger and grief? It’s out of our hands, of course, but what we can do is leave for them some minor traces of our inner selves, and of the people, places and objects we wanted to be remembered. So, let’s reach for our stand-ins for those Victorian bottles of brandy, and try to fix our times in something more solid and resilient than the transience of memory and events.
That fixing should and will take many and varied forms. My own professional work at a research centre some 1,500 miles away continues unhindered, unchanged, an early indicator, perhaps, of the shape of work to come, where distance is measured less in miles than in bandwidth. But every so often I break away from my screen to stand at our kitchen window and, dazed by its immediacy, I take snaps of the street below. The camera records: two elderly men sitting on a brick wall on a bright Spring morning sharing a bottle of schnapps, a pair of curious buzzards circling a clear blue city sky, a child’s watercolour rainbow, three socially-distancing dancers, a party of defiantly unmasked Mormon missionaries, our Community Police Officer returning a bag of stolen groceries to the Co-Op, joggers momentarily distracted by a ‘Thank you NHS’ poster in an Estate Agent’s window, six mourners standing two metres apart on the pavement as a funeral cortege drives by in the rain.
Stories in 3x2, they fix a particular state of mind at a particular point in time, nothing more. But, strangely, that matters. While we may have little interest in tomorrow’s historians, they’ll almost certainly take a lively interest in us. Like Hecataeus of Miletus, living through the disruptions of the Greco-Persian wars, writers of this storm also ‘write these things as they seem true’. Unlike my political diarists, though, maybe we should do so less with an eye to posterity, which can and will look after itself, and more as delicate and durable acts of witness.
Aled Gruffydd Jones is an historian, now attached to the Centre for Modern History (KENI) at Panteion University, Athens.