FIGURES OF HISTORY
Figures of History:
08/07/01 8:51:13 PM
I
Everything is facing everything else. This shape stands next to that one: creates a particularity.
Differences. Variances. Discoveries. A knock is heard at the door. Open the door. Units. Time.
Squares propped up one beside the other. Access square number one. Return to first projection. Chance.
Reach into the hat, pick a number. Duration, lack of motives, frustration. Narrow horizons: contemplate.
Discover the next level. Prop yourself on the edge. Visit new lands, use new codes. Sleep and start again.
Lately things don’t seem the same. Try again. Another shelf completed. Return to square one: timeless.
Latch onto the back of the tractor. Follow lines, formulate, construct. High-rise number seven. Door two.
Circulate through city streets. Stop at the lights. Look outside the window. Light a cigarette. Uncover.
Open. Close. New days are for followers, not quitters. Follow up. Climb the stairs. Close the shop.
II
There is an informational plane. On it, historical figures pop up, are rendered visible, fade, are analyzed, and come back to representational life. The history of visual culture. Foucault spoke of discursive formations as Benjamin spoke of traces; history definitely has its own shapes, formulas, equations. For us to find them.
I call upon the form Allegory! because it is the most historical of its species of rhetorical figures. There you have it. The figures of history become a meta-rhetoric; a picture of a picture of a picture. Gazing backwards, we see 3 figures of history: a) the figure of actuality, b) the figure of able rendering, c) the figure of lost time.
There are more. The ones I actually meant were a) rhetoric used in real life, b) rhetoric used by the historiographer, c) rhetorical differences [dialectic, + or — percentages]. Furthermore, we have a picture of a picture of a picture in this fashion: figures of history are representational of a representation. Pointing back.
III
Shield up to not gaze at the fiery sun. Puzzles, skirmishes. Fractal geometry. Everything sits on a grid.
There’s a darkness from which the clarity of shapes are elected. Images and concepts come out of the depths. A play of light, a play of appearances; history has become the act of staring at a screen.
Misled by information. Retract phrases. Find constitutive elements. Record data. Complete worksheet.
History includes heavy research into actualities. The historian must surrender to time, cannot escape time present with its purposive movement. That very purposiveness is what the historian seeks in all things.
People and places allegorizing history. Active ingredients that make an historical account viable.
Open the third door on the right. Take a glance inside, the room will soothe you. It is a tabulation of the goriest of moments in history: the moment of receptivity of a light being shed on a historical fact.
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