The Weight of History

Themes: The weight of history leading to existential Thrownness and a search for individualized meaning. Acceptance and embrace of existing within the totality. Philosophy, art, history, mythology, and anthropology. Kind of autobiographical. A few weird detours but, hey, might as well enjoy the view.

Everyone tries to make a mark in their little microcosms of life. Growing up, my arena of self-assertion was the playground of my elementary school. I was infamously known as the 2nd-grade Indiana Jones impersonator; armed with a bandana to protect my jugulars, a hat to shield the harsh frontier sun, and a toy pistol. I was thrown into detention 14 times in one year. One charge against me was over-excavation, my crime was taking too many rocks home from the school garden beds. In my opinion, I was simply being thorough as an adventuring archeologist and treasure hunter. To me, there wasinfinite beauty and intrigue in the archaic. Beyond relics of natural history, I was drawn to the ideas and fantasies of those long gone. Nordic and Egyptian mythology was an early obsession but Greek and Roman mythology later became my primary focus, influenced by the cultural treasure, Percy Jackson. The epic sagas of the Illiad and the Odyssey told grand stories of the clashing of tyrannic rulers and heroically righteous but humanly faultful individuals chosen by divine dictum; and the confrontations of gargantuan sea beasts of arbitrary power from Scllya and Charybdis to Medusa and the Gorgons, cave dwellers that warp the very composition of chemistry and biology. My exposure to the world of mythology, love for ancient natural formations, and adrenaline rush for the undiscovered distant past inspired in me a reverence for history that continues to colour the theatre of my imagination.

The historical and cultural landscape that I chose to entrench myself formed my identity as much as the one that I was born into. Coming from a traditional Chinese immigrant family, there was an inherited burden of responsibility to wrestle with. There was a need for reconciling with our collective history; the Maoist cultural revolution which directly impacted my family by uprooting my grandparent’s way of life; and back to the three centuries of the Seven Warring States where daily life was stained with the blood of imperialism, the tears of famine and instability, and the cries for unity and peace. There was a necessity for the fluent navigation of cultural nuances in verbal and nonverbal language and rules of decorum in a rigid social hierarchy. The collective imagination of the Chinese is as rich and fantastical as that of the Mediterranean traditions, however, it does echo the preachings of a different set of principles. While the Greeks martyred the heroism in the individual and the conquering of unknowns, Chinese mythology told stories of filial children, honest neighbours, and stoic military generals. There was an emphasis on the punishing inescapability of fate. One ancient tale tells of a simple farmer who fell in love with a Heavenly servant, a forbidden affair. An entire galaxy, the Milky Way, was drawn up to separate them. Humans must remain in the mortal realm and Heaven’s gates locks its inhabitants within its gardens. On the other hand, there is no shortage of mortal and divine interaction ;) in Greek mythology. To say the least. The Chinese work ethic, concern for social harmony, and obligations to the collective continue to inform my worldview.

These two ancient traditions collided to create my world but where is my place in it? Where is that space that I, alone, created in this vast but suffocating world of antiquity? This existential longing like the origins of my identity is, again, not an idiosyncratic feature of my being. Martin Heidegger describes a universal human condition termed Thrownness which is the arbitrariness of our existence located in space and time. We can’t choose when and where we are born and many obstacles prevent us from freely determining where we will go. The reigns of destiny are eternally locked in a tug-of-war between me and all who came before. I can’t say that I’m winning. The matrix that we are planted in permeates through all that we are and will be, and we don’t have a choice in the matter. Every thought that passes through our heads once was the thesis of a philosopher’s book or the finding of a scientist’s research or simply something we’ve seen on our phones. Indeed, Oscar Wilde quoting Emerson in De Profundis states that “Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own… Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.

I embarked on an odyssey to Europe for a month during the summer of 2022 to London, Turkey, and Greece. In London, I spent my time wandering the museums. Three hours were spent admiring rocks in the Natural History Museum. My mother berated me to hurry up and focus on the “main” exhibits such as the vault of some of the world’s most precious gemstones. However, I was more interested in the projections of calcite overgrowth on a piece of “common” graphite which looked like miniature mega-cities, to me at least. The rhythm of life for London locals isn’t like the angsty and ego-driven scramble for achievement and identity here in Canada or the US. I could only see through the eyes of a tourist but their day-to-day itineraries seemed so balanced. The phenomenal breadth and depth of life can be attributed not only to London’s preservation (and monopolization) of world history but also to the neat compartmentalization of its various districts. There is the district that never dims, Soho, serving as the forefront of progressive yet edgy youth culture and nightlife. Soho bleeds into Chinatown which is jammed packed with traditional architecture where red, gold, and Chinese characters assault the vision from all fronts. The Chinese cuisine in London rivals that of Vancouver in my humble opinion because of the superior atmosphere and walkable convenience. Sure, we have Crystal Mall in Burnaby, strip malls full of culinary treasures in Richmond, and dim sum franchises splattered across the lower mainland but you have to trek through endless highways and fight obscene parking tickets just to get anywhere. The commercial district of Piccadilly and its economic centers make it a capitalist paradise. For creatures of culture and history, such as myself, museums of all sorts dot every block, I even encountered a dentistry museum. I spent an entire day at the National Gallery and British Museum gazing hypnotically at art. When intellectual activities begin wearing on my vitality, nature was just a step away. The parks and riverside strolls were well integrated into the city, so it had a more structured feel than the Vancouver parks in buttfuck nowhere. As a side comment on another observation I had about British life, I opened up the cable TV at my hotel and was shocked to see British Aljazeera airing a segment on the abortion debate. I was flabbergasted to see a representation of both sides on a heavily politicized and morally contested topic on corporate cable TV, no less. Such a segment would never air in North America when even curiosity about the perspective from across the aisle is political suicide. I’ve personally been subject to a very aggressive and emotionally charged confrontation at a coffee shop in Kitsilano for even entertaining a conversation with someone who has some conservative sympathies, all I did was listen. Anyway, I digress again. Parting with London was difficult, I want to live there in the near future. I hope that is a unique decision of my own.

My journey around western Turkey began in the former capital of the Roman Empire, modern-day Istanbul. During the temporary decline of the Roman Empire after a series of economic and political mishandlings following the conquering of much of Persia, Emperor Constantine repositioned the capital of Rome in the city of Byzantine and renamed it Constantinople. This was to be better geopolitically located to govern the expansive Roman territories. Constantinople was hailed as the capital of the world by the likes of Napolean and for good reason. The Mediterranean superpower had conquered Egypt and Persia and was engaged in regular high-volume trade with India which was a middleman for goods from China, Vietnam and other East Asian countries. Languages, art, culture, religion, capital, spices, and goods of all sorts were pumped through the arteries of Rome. Indeed, all roads did lead to Rome. The Hagia Sophia was initially constructed as a church by the Byzantine Empire and then was converted back and forth from an Islamic mosque to a Greek Orthodox Christian church to a museum. It is now a fusion between Christian iconography with mosaics made in the Byzantium style, Greco-Roman pagan pillars from the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, and Muslim religious inscriptions and minarets, together an emblem of the evolution of Turkey’s cultural landscape. We went around much of the major areas of the Western Anatolian region where civilization was birthed. Istanbul was beautiful but I regret how tourism has rotted the authenticity of its cultural practices, at least from the perspective of a tourist. Everything of cultural significance had a price tag associated with it, a salesperson nearby pestering tourists with insincere flatteries for capitalistic motivations or flocks of people spoiling the view like flies swarming a platter of fruit.

Anatolia was one of the regions in the Near East where village life began. It started during the Paleolithic era from 1 million to 11 thousand years ago when people were cave dwellers and used stone tools of increasing intricacy and size. You could find niche tools with specific functions which gave us a glimpse into the diets, fashion, technology, and lifestyle at the time. There were burins for splitting bones and making engravings, endscrapers for softening and peeling animal skin, denticulated tools for cutting and sawing, notched tools for sharpening, and awls for manipulating fabric and leather. One marker of our transition from the nomadic Paleolithic era to the sedentary life of the Neolithic period was the invention of pottery and personal ornaments. There seems to be a move towards symbolism and abstraction during this time. You can see it in the engravings of animals and geometric patterns found on pottery and personal ornaments which suggest the beginnings of an increasingly sophisticated collective imagination and artistic impulse. Urbanization, private property, and social stratification emerged in Anatolia during the Chalcolithic Age which was somehow reflected in the artistic pattern and weaving, I don’t remember how but I recall that there was a certain intertwining of art and politics from the dawn of civilization. Starting from the Early Bronze Age, village life evolved into city-states made up of an intricate system of local principalities. From there a series of increasingly advanced civilizations sprung up over the course of 14 centuries from the Assyrians who created the foundations for modern trade, the Hittites who were the first to form a central administrative system, the Phrygians who were renowned for their innovations with metal, wood, and zoomorphic religious ornaments, to the Urartu who revolutionized archaic architecture. If you go to the ruins of Ephesus and Troy, you can walk through the very same roads, arches, and doorways that were built, admired and protected by its inhabitants millenniums ago. The temple of Artemis and the library of Celsus in Ephesus, although worn down by the passage of time and the torrents of nature, still echo their former majesty. One can vividly imagine spirited banter and bartering in the bazaar; merchants living on the floors above their storefronts delicately balancing domestic and professional affairs; enchanting street performers and prostitutes simultaneously bewitching and calming the spirits of those who look; intellectuals exchanging ideas with fervour in the library; a schoolboy daydreaming about the grand amphitheatre on the other side of the city. Each person who ever walked these roads had dreams, regrets, humour, and a complex conscious like anyone living today.

Our lives are the result of an intricate sequence of impossibilities. An infinitely long chain of thoughts, decisions, actions, conversations, and interactions somehow all connected and lead us precisely to this moment today. We are so much more than our mortal passions and throws of despair in our isolated existences, we are an accumulation of history, and to understand history is to understand ourselves.

During the day, the blazing Mediterranean sun above Athens illuminates every surface with an energized vibrancy. The busy commercial districts and cultural sites brim with virgin tourist eyes. The architecture in the Athens city center has a distinctly Greek essence, you can often see stone engravings, pediments, and other Greek architectural accents even in newly constructed buildings. Whether it is a restaurant, bar, or fast-fashion outlet the architecture is a tribute to the city’s history. We spend our first-day sightseeing and indulging in local pleasantries as vacation-goers do and then retreated to our hotel for a quick nap before dinner. When we awake from our slumber at around 8, we’re transported into an entirely different world. Most storefronts have closed at this time but bars and restaurants are still bustling with people, signifying the lively nightlife scene. Each storefront had metal shutters that rolled down to secure the premises. At night, the city begins to dream. Every metal shutter served as a canvas for street art of all kinds from Rauschenberg-Esque mosaics to wildstyle and tag graffiti portraying visions of abstraction and hedonism in a kaleidoscopic fashion. I asked some locals why there was so much graffiti and the common response was that the Athenians were rebellious people. One particular piece caught my eye, it was a pair of huge cartoon eyes that gazed down at a book with an inscription below everybody is dead. That’s exactly right. In a figurative and metaphysical sense, it is the modern Athenian break away from their mass grave of a city, the iconoclastic painting over on facades of long-dead traditions. It’s a little footnote of proof that I am here too. Greece was at one point in history the pinnacle of law and order, art and literature, economic prosperity and military strength. Now it is a living memory soiled with economic recession and welfare decline. How does the Athenian spirit cope with the burdens of their past and the conditions of their present? Well, I think analyzing street art is the closest answer. It’s the purest channel of release for rebellious exuberance and expression of dissent. It’s the collective unconscious manifesting its repressed reactionary images of nihilism and hedonism. It’s like a child revolting against the all-domineering iron hand of their well-meaning but tyrannical parents. That adolescent voice cries to hell with it all, I lay anarchy in my wake to pave a path forwards of my own. Indeed, the anarchist symbol can quite literally be found graffitied everywhere. Oscar Wilde once said that “Art begins where Imitation ends” but is it possible to create if we aren’t doing so against the backdrop of something else? Is art an escape, not an action, but a reaction?

On my second night in Athens, I met two musicians who invited me to join them for a drink. They sang ancient Greek love songs, one played the guitar and the other harmonized with a bouzouki, which sounded sharp like a banjo but was fretted and versatile. They didn’t verbally or physically communicate with each other to begin or to decide who was playing what part. They just fell into the music at their own pace and with their own interpretations of the song but both versions synthesize harmoniously. It was a truly phenomenal sight to see. After each piece, I would interrupt eagerly but politely with a question about their craft. The flamboyant guitar player said something that was very interesting, in fact, he was the only one who spoke at all, and he was a real verbal Gatling gun. I was chosen by God to do this he said. Indeed I think that artists lack a certain control over their identities. They are the faithful vessels of their craft but possessed by ego or complete lack thereof in the real world. I saw this duality present in the two musicians I met. One was stoic and quiet with eyes that glisten with an unfocused and dreamy quality. The other was boisterous, proud, excitable, and had an intensity of gaze which would be more piercing had it not been for his flickering attention span. His body was led by the strings of his ego while speaking but was fully possessed by the spirit of the music when performing. He was very sociable and spoke with his whole body while the quiet one communicated mostly in grunts of affirmation or disapproval. Interestingly enough, the stoic one was very popular with women. Charles Bukowski lamented how women would let their flights of imagination spin up a fantastical image of him while his simple and temperamental real self was but a surface for projection. Flamboyant individualism doesn’t leave much to the imagination. And imagination is the greatest seducer.

The guitar player would explain the meaning of each song after they finished. One song was about a man who was berated by his lover as a scumbag and punk. The man sings to her that she will regret leaving him but he had never hated her for what she said to him. Tears stream down the musician’s cheeks as he continues with his monologue. He laments to his audience about his strict wife and how he would leave if it weren’t for the baby. Great artists, unfortunately, usually aren’t great people. They are too tunnel-visioned with ideals, aesthetics, and their craft to concern themselves with reality. However, I don’t think he can leave her because I think he sings for her. He may not love her but he loves writing songs about her. Reaction and relation, not action and creation, are the central progenitors of life.

We can find solace not anxiety in the fact that we are part and parcel of an expansive matrix. We aren’t alone and incomprehensible. Gazing out into the Aegean Sea through the plexiglass window of a restaurant patio, I think to myself aren’t we all like whitecaps? We arise from the clashing of cosmic forces that give us a momentary individuality and fleeting existence. We leap for the sky above in a hopeless attempt to escape our inevitable fate of being pulled down under. We create waves and ripples that waver the surface of the grand matrix from which we arise as proof that we were here. Soon, we dissipate as quickly as we frothed up but we are never gone, are we? We simply just pass along the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Energy is transferred, not created. Each life form is part of this ancient tradition of passing the baton of self-determination and consciousness on to the next. We are the microcosmic manifestations of the macrocosm’s solipsism.