Bad History

A short meditation on living the past.

I’m peering over the edge of the sheer cliff, staring straight down at a gorge which has been carved out over the inching, slow centuries of geological time by the rapids of the waterfall. I think I can see, in the iridescent mist rising up from the turbulent waters, my own reflection, and perhaps the reflection of other people who have come before me and also peered down to the depths. My reflection and their reflections are distorted in the haze of water droplets. We are maybe melding together.

The waterfall is how I see history. The truth of what happened, the reality of what is really there, is almost in sight, but it throws up a thin, refracting veil when I try to look through it. When I pierce it with a finger or slash a hand through it in a fit of rage, the veil simply reforms while the waterfall thunders on furiously. Continuously.

I’ll admit, I’ve been trying to pierce the veil my entire life.

History to me is neither here nor there, fact nor fiction, past nor present. I’m obsessed with what exists between the arbitrary boundaries that we impose on upon our past. The appeal of the discipline does not lie in its rationality or logic, nor its pursuit of any kind of factual accuracy or any particular, singular truth. History is imagination, and by listening to the gentle whispers of past voices in poetry and feeling the caress of an artist’s hand through the laying of a mosaic tile, I can imagine almost anything, from anywhere.

Accepting the risk of sounding like a Tumblr post, I must confess I rarely exist entirely in the modern world. I’ve always got one foot stuck in the past. I was a daydreaming child, drifting off in lessons as I pictured events past, but with myself somehow written into them. I wanted something other than reality to be real, because reality was anxiety-inducing but also not quite enough. I became obsessed with time travel at age eight, not because I liked physics, but because I wanted to escape. I watched Outlander when I was seventeen, and, although I found it a bit intense, I related to the pull Claire felt between two worlds, between an imposed ‘present’ and ‘past,’ which she through her travelling both encapsulated and defied.

Getting older I found that in literature and in history I could make the escapes I had craved as a child. In the end my decision to pursue history over literature came down only to the fact that it challenged more urgently me to use my own imagination. I worried that in literature I was simply leaning on the vast imaginations of others.

I’m now ten years down the line of having made that decision. Three degrees done, a DPhil being undertaken. I think when I was eighteen I was probably a better historian, more committed to the craft of historical imagining and dedicated to writing with both form and function. The sources were my bread and butter, in my loneliest moments when being bullied or fighting with friends my constant companions, when I needed noise to drown out everything else they were disparate notes drawn together into a symphony. History stretched out before me, welcoming me with opening arms and all the possibilities of an academic career after my undergraduate years.

Now, approaching my twenty-eighth year, ostensibly qualified, I oscillate back and forth on whether I’m a good historian. On whether what I produce is, or ever will be, good history. I feel weighed down by the burdens of anachronism, stuck in my own head and restricted by the paradigms imposed on me by academic-institutional structures. I want to be in the heads of the subjects of my study more than ever, and yet I’m tethered to constructing history in a certain way, for certain audiences, to progress on a certain career path. What was once the open field of history is now a well-plodded path through a small town, where people stare a little warily as I pass.

I was recently told by my supervisor that I had written a piece of work in which I spoke for the sources, rather than letting them speak through me. I was horrified. He was right. I had indeed broken my cardinal rule. I had transposed my own pre-conceptions upon the evidence at hand, and instead of letting the whispers and caresses guide me I had blocked them out and brushed them off and told them to fit into the mould that I needed them to.

Bad history.

This isn’t to say that I have lost my passion for history, indeed, quite the opposite. I rejected a career outside of the field to return back to academia because I knew it was what I loved and what I was meant to do; as lame as that sounds. But it is to say that I feel disillusioned with the state of the discipline both as it exists internally, within institutions, and also externally; that is, in the public and political perception of the discipline. It is making me a bit lazy in my own practice, making me feel like I have the authority to speak over my beloved sources rather than letting them speak to me. I’ve been pushing my hand through the veil so forcefully that it’s actually making the vista below refract beyond comprehension. It’s because, generally, I think that history as a concept and a discipline is currently adrift and uncertain. It no longer feels like a craft passed down through generations. It has stopped being a shared endeavour that we all bear a duty to contribute to, connecting the human experience across eons. It feels like history is being used and abused by people who don’t care about truth or imagination, who feel no sense of responsibility to our past lives, and who prioritise the material gains they can collect through misuse of the past.

I’m also disillusioned with the fact that at the same time this is happening, institutions are doing less and less to protect the rights of their academic staff, leaving them open to vicious attacks from trolls and bad-faith political actors. They are censoring and silencing those who speak out about global injustices, and they are contradicting the very ideas propagated in classrooms and research seminars and the literal published work of their academics. Being an academic at the moment is genuinely like living in an Orwell novel. You receive more training than others to analyse, diagnose, and solve the problems society faces, in whatever your chosen field, and yet that training is discounted, devalued, ignored, and/or mocked for the purposes of pandering to the hysterical and poorly educated techno-fascist elite.

Bad history.

I don’t want to bang on about my gripes with the system or institutions or whatever else. I’ve got five thousand words of a sort-of manifesto already written down, which I’m hoping to publish eventually. This deals in more explicit detail with these themes. It also works towards identifying root causes and ultimate impacts (very good history of me, I know). But I do want to say that I’ve written out a version of this first essay about twenty-five times, trying to capture an intangible and impossible rightness in my words and message. Honestly I am very nervous about this being the final form of the piece. I skipped through numerous past versions a couple of times, just to make sure they were not the ones I wanted to actually put forwards.

Each iteration was a little different, perhaps focused on my intentions or my goals or tackling some specific historical issue that I pithily related to the present moment. But, ultimately, what my numerous failed iterations reveals most clearly is that I have held off on creating this platform and space for a really, really long time because I’m trying to model ‘good’ historical practice to the extent that it feels restrictive. I’m being ensnared by my own desire to be a good enough historian that I’ll be accepted by peers and non-peers alike reading my work. I’m also trapped by my pressing, overly-ambitious (arrogant?) desire to help fix the problems of the discipline. As a result, I’m setting boundaries up in my head about what is and is not appropriate for an historian to write about, about how much personal bias and influence I can reveal in my writing, about the vulnerability that I feel comfortable showing on the internet. In short, I’m returning to the institutional paradigms and problems that swirl around notions of good and bad history, and therefore I’m losing the imaginative capacity that drew me to history, the desire to pierce the veil. This was happening even though I had initally conceived of this platform as an antidote to exactly that.

Bad. Fucking. History.

So, instead, what I’ve decided to do going forwards is to be driven by the sense of responsibility that I feel towards the past and its people. In the same way that we need people to act as advocates for future generations, I think we need to advocate for those long-gone, too. It’s an extension of empathy that feels almost impossible to try and engender in this increasingly isolated, hostile, polarised world, but perhaps if we can extend empathy out to the past then we can exert a more forceful and assertive empathy for the present, too. As such, I’d like to use this space to write about a history that is subjective and fluid, which is constantly thrumming with unmitigated chaos. There is no inevitability or determinism here, there is no great man theory of history, nor will there be any driving of political agendas through misrepresentation of the past. Rather, I’m letting the sources to speak to me and tell me what to say for them, however good or bad that may be.

Obviously I do have an agenda, after all I’ve just told you I’ve got a manifesto, but I’m less interested in promoting that agenda than I am in reframing what history means to me and hopefully to other people as well. If you’re interested in my politics and ideology then that’s cool, and if not there will be other material for you to explore and read about.

Choosing Byzantium as my primary lens, fraught and contentious though it is, is deliberate, not only because it is what I love and what I’ve dedicated a decade of my life to studying, but also because it feels young and somewhat ahistorical enough to be a successful transmitter of my imaginative history. It is a good place to have a foot in the past, because you can kind of decide where that foot is going to land. Equally, though, it is rife with enough bad history to warrant challenge and reassessment. In fact, Byzantium necessitates that we question much of how the wider discipline functions. It asks that we challenge prevailing narratives both in history and in our own time about people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, the toleration of other religious faiths, the position of women. Byzantium pushes us to consider whether there is a clear distinction between factual and fictional accounts, whether artworks are alive or dead, whether politics can ever be separated from religion.

Byzantine studies’ youth has left it malleable; thus, early in the discipline’s formation it was subject to torrents of interpretation that viewed the empire as a degenerate, effeminate, post-Roman wasteland or as a final, masculine Western Christian outpost against marauders from further East. It runs the risk of letting its superstructure in academic departments be tainted by these legacies, especially when said departments carry on near-exclusively accepting graduates and early-career researchers of a specific kind of sex, ethnicity, sexuality, and set of research interests (I’ll let you have a guess what those are). But it also conversely has enough malleability to let the imaginative and experimental capacities of good historical practice define what it means to history, and why.

Anyway, I’ve returned to the waterfall again. I’ll lie on my stomach here for a while and squint my eyes into the mist, seeing undulating shapes created by a rolling breeze. I’ll run my hand delicately through the water and I’ll let it shatter and reform the reflections of the people I’m trying to be with, at long last. Their voices are hard to hear over the rushing water sometimes, but I know that they’re trying to speak and trying to guide us.

It’s a hallucination, obviously, but arguably so is the entirety of the human experience.

The Baptism of Christ.

5th century AD.

Arian Baptistery, Ravenna, Italy.

Photo my own.

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