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Everything is of its time. Everything. Why is that so difficult for people to understand? Seriously.
Sorry. It just gets to me every so often. Had a lecture today, Historical Geographies of the City, and we watch a silent film from 1921, on Manhattan, and there were people sitting there just going 'buh?' at the screen. What's this thing for? What's it about? Why is nothing happening? It just ... alright, it annoyed the snot out of me. Same way watching classic Who with someone used to NuWho annoys me, because they keep complaining about storyarcs that span six episodes where NuWho would do it in one, and faster, thanks. It just ...
Things are of their time. Pace, sensibility, language, ideology ... it's all of a place and time and culture. A personal viewpoint, too, but even that is through the lens of the culture it's in. Even radicals are shaped by their culture, because they are reacting to it. You have to accept that, to enjoy it. And its easy! Come on, people, how hard can it be to just slow down for sixties television, or embrace the baroque for 18th century literature, or accept the melodrama of silent film?
I've watched Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Louis Feuillade's Fantomas, Strand and Sheeler's Manhatta. I've watched the 40s propaganda masquerading as newsreels, and been awed by the fact that they were being serious. I've read Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Mervin Peake, Shakespeare. I have, very slowly, fumbling around with a dictionary, read Aristophanes in the original greek. I've even read Dickens, though he did strain my patience. I've watched television science fiction from the sixties on up, delighting in every era. I did a History of Art course and enjoyed it.
In every last one of those instances, there were things about it that I didn't understand. There were things that from a modern viewpoint were occasionally nothing short of horrifying, yet were glossed over for the time. There were jokes that I just didn't get, but I won't count that so much, because I don't get very many modern jokes either. There were problems with the language (I'm only counting the english texts here, because I honestly couldn't tell you if the things I read/saw in other languages had changed with the time, though I'm sure they had - I just lacked the experience to tell where and how). There were subplots highlighted that had lost all meaning by the time they made it up to modern viewing. There were entire chapters/episodes devoting to saying something that I could say in ten words or less. There were monstrous, cumbersome passages, clunky sequences onscreen, hideously overblown melodrama and subtlties that every last person in the audience missed because it just wasn't something they were trained to see.
But you know what? I enjoyed every last one, too. And not even in spite of all those things, but because of them. I loved those quirks, all the things that would be flaws to modern viewing (and quite possibly flaws to their contemporaries, too - I cannot believe anyone could read Dickens without being awed by his long-winded-ness). Because they ... they fix the work in time and place. Stories are timeless. They really are. Any story ever told can be told again, a thousand years apart, and some piece of it will be recognised, some human chord that spans cultures will speak out again. People are people are people, after all. But the things beyond. The time, the place, the culture, the religion, the ideology, the language, the psychology ... all of that shows up in how the story is presented. All of that is there for the taking, once you let yourself enjoy the thing for what it is.
A person is a thing shaped and changed by the forces, both human and natural, around them. People change and grow, cultures change and grow. A work, of art, of literature, of industry, of anything, is a crystalisation of that person's view, that culture's view, at a specific point in time and space. It is an artefact. And when you touch it, the same as touching any object, any stone, any leaf, you can reach through it to touch what shaped it. You can lay your fingers in the marks scored by time, and understand what made them. And if you can't understand ... well, you must at least accept, because the marks are made and will not go away until the object itself is lost to time. They can distorted, yes, and you do have to be careful of that, but a thing is the essence of itself and that has to be acknowledged.
What I'm saying is ... what am I saying? The world is ... We are a point. A point in space and time and process and culture. We are an artefact unto ourselves, in a way. While we live in this moment, shaped by these forces, we don't always necessarily see what we are, what shapes us. We are part of it to a degree that it becomes invisible. But when we look at the past, when we hold an artefact in our hands, when we read words written at a point years and miles distant from this moment, shaped by forces that have gone or diverted or changed before they reached us ... we can see things. We can contrast what was to what is. We can touch the flow of time and trace it back. We can learn the layers beneath our feet and inside our minds, leading back to where we were before. We can see, not just what we were, but what we are. History, archeology, literature, art, science ... when we study, when we reach out and touch the world in an effort to understand why it is the way it is ... We look inside ourselves.
That's why ... that sounds ... Okay. I watched a movie, and watched other people watching a movie, and I get this? I know it sounds ... pretentious and weird, and taking life entirely too seriously. But. I watched ten minutes of silent movie, and saw a dream fossilised in celluloid. Other people watched ten minutes of silent movie, and saw some flickering black and white pictures about nothing. And that ... that seems such a bloody waste, to me. When all you have to do is understand that this thing you touch is not of this time, when it was shaped by forces different to what shapes you. You're not supposed to judge the thing, not for being what it is. You're supposed to accept it, to accept that it is different. Because accepting that is the only way to understand it. And understanding it, understanding what things are different and why, and how they came to be that way ... that is the only way to understand yourself.
We are each a point in time and space, each cradled by a flow of forces, each changed and shaped and marked by our place in the progression of time. These are forces we can't touch, not completely. Invisible, powerful, sometimes completely beyond our notice, beyond our comprehension. The only way, the only way we can understand them is by seeing how they change the things they touch. By laying our fingers in the marks they have scored. And the more we understand of the things that shape, the more we understand the things they shape. The more we understand ourselves.
And the thing of it is ... It's all beautiful. Horrifying and scarred and torn and wrong, to what we are now, to the way we see things now, maybe, when we look at things thrown up at us from another time, another place, made alien by distance, but ... it's beautiful. All of it. Read the stories. Shove aside the need to judge, to evalute, to fix this alien thing inside your own frame of reference. Ignore that urge. Just touch it, instead. Just look at it. Weigh it in your hand and understand the way it is and why. See it for what it is, and understand that it is beautiful in a way that needs no explanation. Values are of their time, too. They are not fit to hold what lies outside of that. Don't destroy something different, don't devalue it, not even just inside yourself, only for the sake of things that will change themselves before they're through.
*shakes head* People always want to fix things. Hold them down. Take them and break them and reshape them, until they fit this moment, this place, this culture, these values. And, yes, that's right in its own way too. That's the way things are, and time stops for no-one, and once starting the shaping cannot be stopped. But. But. When things survive, when they hold the first of their shapes that little longer, when remnants of those alien times come drifting up to us ... can't we hold them as they are, for a little while? Can't we see them and touch them, and through them the things that shaped them, and get to know them before we break them? Just for a little while? Enjoy the touch of an alien thing, that lets us see ourselves that little clearer?
*sighs* Oh, never mind. I've gone all maudlin. *waves hand* Work away, folks. Work away.
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Why? Because unless you take the work as part of its era, you cannot truly judge it for the -isms you, in the here and now, perceive. There is a reason that some authors (Kipling LEAPS to mind) were considered forward thinking, though now of course, he is condemned for cultural appropriation. Blast it and bebother, the man actually put the culture of those people into a form that made some other Britons frelling notice they were human too!
+sighs+ don't start me about modern interpretations of Twain.
There is a reason the Humanities teach that to learn the history of a people, you must also learn their art, their culture. In the cultural works, you see the shape of the people in their point of time; in the history you see both cause and effect of that timestamp in art.
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This.
In many of my history classes, not only are we given first person accounts and textbooks to read for our classes, but we are also given literature to read. One of my books for my Lesbian and Gay History class is a novel written in the 1920's.
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My Western Civ Prof was the same way.
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*grin* I've lost count of the times in various classes when some POV will be presented that will knock me sideways with the realisation that the way I've been looking at things has a bias, that I had never been aware of. And the more and more you do that, the more you let yourself learn, the more ... That's what I think Enlightenment means, you know? When you've lifted yourself above your own place in time and space, enough to look around and see the world, past, present and future, for what it really is. That's what I think they mean when they say you have to let go of self. Not become ... colorless, unmotivated, an automaton fit for recording and nothing else, but to become something that can see where it ends and the world begins, something with enough knowledge of self to see how it became what it is, and why.
We're a very long way off that, though. But getting closer. *smiles, bounces*
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