Zoological History

Fascinating things happen when people will not let go of the past.  Their houses fill with useless things, piles of receipts, brochures and programs, old prescriptions and half-full jars of marmalade lying feet deep between submerged furniture.  Hoarding, an inability to part with inessential oddities, marks the need to persist.    

Our memories play tricks.  When a strange smell lights our minds, a recovered memory of a time when we were first surprised by such a scent visits us, and we are quickened.  The idea that perhaps we are inhabitants of a haunted spiritual house, one much bigger than we had assumed, teases us like a treasure map.  A memory that can explain every vague inflection of unease might be just out of reach, and so we dare not throw any clue away.  What other survivors of memory, isolated to an island by the dominating current of our passing days, alone in a semblance of innocence, untouched or examined, getting weaker every year, are straining at any sign of a visitor, full of news from the moments in which they too were part of the unconcerned cadence of thought.  They should spring up and warm us with their long repressed meditations, talkative once again!  

Memory, the iceberg, is constantly calving.    

Maybe the tour ships sent to the arctic seas are full of historians.  Enjoying the spectacle of the secretive giants, icebergs, showing their hand as if they knew something ponderous in their submerged secret parts, tourists must feel personal implication when the roar of rending ice marks the shearing off of the berg’s unity.  It is as if the iceberg were unable to maintain all of itself in the face of time and events, and so we know more about its future than its past, sharing in a voyeuristic appreciation of approaching dementia.  Gawkers line the shipboard rails, hovering above the abyssal regions as the ancient iceberg loses its mind.   Being in the company of icebergs is thrilling as spying on hoarders is titillating.  The swirling corona of items, the strata of semi-cogent debris have a resemblance to nature itself.  There is a logic, a law at work waiting to be discovered by some pioneer. 

Nature is essence at work.  Much is at work in the house of the one who never casts away, who only gathers.   The one who gathers is largely unknown, hopefully made knowable by evidence, the evidence of a life lived.   There is an empty gravitic center to the house of trash that differentiates it from the purely accidental town landfill, therefore the hoarder is the personification of a black hole.    A collapsing star is remarkable because it retains its power to attract as it loses its ability to radiate.  Pursuing this collapse would be dangerous, because it gains disruptive attraction as it falls inward.  We only know it is there because of the warping of light, the piles of stuff and the sucking in of all around, speeding inward toward a blank center that tells no tales.  Within the black hole lies a history that cannot be written, and within the house of the collapsing self lies a history that won’t be written. If only an historian could devote life and attention to compiling the history of each collapsing soul who cannot distinguish significance among their belongings, perhaps those souls could not collapse inward, but come into being. 

Historic archives abound in these haunted places, but lack a common interest.  They are immense archives of a life.  We wish Shakespeare had been messier.   The common interest of people exhibits itself in curation of the past, or perhaps more correctly in imagining the past.  The idea of what should be collected and what thrown away certainly defines an era.  A civilization that could no longer understand itself, could no longer understand what was trash and what was treasure, and one that kept everything because all things were worth the same, would be a story without a story teller.  The lack of historical consciousness brings about a reactive yearning for the lost past, and an ignorance of forces at work, like the calving of icebergs, or the monstrous gravity of a black hole.  

For some reason, people enjoy zoos.  I certainly do.  Wandering through the zoo now is different from wandering through the zoo in the nineteenth century.  Then, we would likely have seen animals in cages along a walkway, dangerous oddities placed in our path to remind us of the power of civilization.  Today, we pride ourselves on ‘habitats’, places arranged so that we may observe the creatures in situations that might exist in places where the animal is normally found.  Of course, this is situated by the zookeeper’s imagination.  

Like an historian, the zookeeper places the elements of the story, the zoo, in some way that connects them to what is important.  In a circular sort of way, this importance is in the mind of the zookeeper, but we know also that certain forces beyond imagination are at work.  No one of us imagined a rhinoceros into being among the crowd of creatures, but we know it is there.  It is up to us to make sense of it.  

 The zookeeper of people is an historian.  Certain things are up for display because they are deemed important.  Certain ways of displaying things are thought up, supposedly replying to the nature of those things.  Nature being the exposure of essence, we are involved in making some inferences about the essential nature of the creature being displayed.  We care for the exhibits, cleaning up around and after them, guarding against a return to chaos or incoherence.  We do this because for some reason people enjoy knowing about themselves, just as for some reason we enjoy knowing about animals.  

Is this activity necessary?   In one sense, yes, it comes from a need within.  In another sense, it doesn’t have to be.  Imagine history, like a zoo, abandoned because of war or upheaval, unvisited and unkempt.  Imagine a zoo that no one was interested in anymore because of pressing economic concerns, or perhaps just a dislike of predatory animals.  What happens to that zoo, that history?  The zoo doesn’t quietly disappear, and history is still there too, grown up with weeds, full of potential, self-cannibalistic and  feral.  A history with no one curating it, making sense of it, keeping the lions away from the gazelles, is a pile of appetites.  Those who stumble upon it after neglecting it will sometimes be surprised by a nest of poisonous vipers, left to brood over their nest while feeding on exotic and rare birds, who in turn disappear forever. Inexplicable now, certain beasts with certain habits will browse among the scattered bones of unimaginable creatures, and certain crowning predators will be accidentally loosed upon the unimaginative people who neglected them.  Once the past was entertaining and informative.  Those who were bored and inattentive will now find it gathered on their doorstep, unforeseen and hungry.  

And what of memory and the desire for happiness?  Neglecting the past does not remove the need of the soul to understand itself.  Failing to care for the past, both in our own lives and collectively, is a messy thing.  Living in a haunted house full of indecipherable details, no one having cared to collate and label, is what happens when the momentum of culture ceases, but the bow wave continues from behind, swamping life.  

The past will exert its force.  It is the job of culture to stay ahead of it, not to fall helplessly back into undifferentiated chaos.