Beginnings

"The irritation of doubt causes a
struggle to attain a state of belief"
- C.S. Pierce

This is a way of establishing a history- no a mythology. A mythology that dehistoricizes.

What is history? Even that which we experience, we are forced to view through context. We must, in some manner, interpret the world in order to move through it physically and metaphysically. Context is the place from which this understanding is created, but context is a fluid thing. Redraw a memory, and you will find it continually existing through a new context, and a new conscious self. Furthermore, where is context created? From where do we draw our understanding of this notion? Is it, in part, an arbitrary thing?

We build histories for everything we encounter, not in the active linear sense necessarily, more often passively, through our minds pre-occupation with understanding, with believing. The mind has great need to make sense of the world, to believe in, to organize it, and so we impose structure on that which has no need and no wish to be structured. To constantly be awake to all things would render us useless; frozen; dead. We have need for forgetfulness, so we create memory that we may set things aside.

"...creating one path into the infinitely manifold path necessarily eradicates all other possible paths. In this way, remembering is also a creative forgetfulness, a necessary fiction that allows a person to carry on."
(Marks, Art Journal Summer 2007, 22)

What I am getting at is that we don't know, don't try to know, and actually are incapable of conceptualizing the histories of countries, people, or anything really. There is no history, only events viewed through context. Whether this context is drawn from an attempt at understanding or not is, at best, self-referential. We create these mythologies for that which we consider other (that from which our mind has not found rest). The ability of anything to forge its own identity is inconsequential, because we necessarily supplant these other identities with an image built on the abstract notions of rhetoric. In this way, our notions of memory, our histories, our beliefs are, for all intensive purposes, arbitrary assertions that create a fiction. Things that we replay for ourselves whenever nessicary, whenever belief meets doubt. There can be no difference between myth and memory, and no linear progression which is not an imposition.

Beginnings:
This is an attempt at creating a fiction and a myth. This is memory. This is willful forgetfulness. This is a history with no real purpose. This is empty rhetoric. This is exercise. We harmless pine, pine to believe so we may stop believing- and meanwhile, press on.

This is a proposition.