Documenting Winners and Whiners.

I missed out on the last prompt despite it being on for two weeks.

As I write the post the feeling is that of running along the platform to get on to the moving train. Unfortunately it is not Dharma Productions, so no Kajol…Ranbir Kapoor or whoever it is, will pop up. Coming to think of one could dedicate an entire post on this.

Tomichan wants to know the take of the world and her husband on ‘history is the lies of victors… also the self delusions of the defeated’ maybe I needed to look at defeated. But the word history plays a major role in my life. like… patient history, history of the disease, history of culture and heritage history. My patients might just experience a cardiac arrest if the documentation of the journey of their disease was called a tale; let’s not even go to the delusion part of it.

Yet my old faithful Merriam-Webster tells me that history is a chronologic record o significant event often including an explanation of their causes. It could be a treatise presenting systematically related natural phenomena. Of course it could be the one I’m used to the account of a patient’s medical background. It could be a record of a previous occurrence like history of violence.

Tomichan is obviously referring to the branch of knowledge that explains the past events.

History is also the documented events of a subject. Reference to the past events. Or something that is done or finished. Even previous treatment, handling or experience is also history.

Is it delusional… maybe for delusion is a belief that s not true, it is a false idea, and interestingly could be caused by mental illness.

Though as a healer I would say let go of your past. I know that the more important part is make peace with your history both personal and social.

 In essence history is a collective memory and the one with the loudest voice gets heard. If I were to be totally honest then there is different authenticity to memory it need not be an inferior one. For memory sorts and shifts to suit the demands made on it by the person who remembers.

Winston Churchill mentioned that ‘history is going to be kind to him for he is going to write it” which he indeed did, while Napoleon Bonaparte insisted that ‘history is lie that everyone agreed upon, and it was always written by the winner’ how many of the war mongers actually look at the mirror and tell themselves, ‘that person I see is savage monster’; instead they will come up with a constructive cause that justifies what they do. I remember a play which we had long ago when we were at school, where a scientist had created a bomb. He boasts of it to his sister telling her it could annihilate huge masses of soldiers. The sister wonders that her son would kill a German boy probably 19yr old just like her own not because they have a personal animosity but because someone created a bomb! At that moment she picks up a golf club and hacks her brother. The brother would have been looking into the mirror and seeing an amazing rescuer of the British sovereignty from the German invader.

History is that certainty produced at the point where imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. These always patterns, patterns layered on patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns that are enclosed within patterns, patterns that are encased in patterns, if you watch carefully history does nothing but repeating itself, human reactions have no innovations.

Chaos is patterns that we don’t recognize, when we cannot decipher a pattern we call it random, when cannot understand the pattern its labelled nonsense… there is neither free will nor variables.

written for Indispire Edition #385

We do constantly change facts calling, rewriting to make things more palatable to our understanding and fit into our version of the events. It so spontaneous, we invent memories even without thinking.  We tell ourselves something happened so often we begin to believe it; we then recollect the false memory. Frankly past or history is like foreign country they do things differently there. Like Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world historic facts and personages occur as it were twice…. however what he omitted that the first time it’s a tragedy and second time a farce.

Coming back to the combination of victors, looser, narrations and delusions-My take is that history is both the story and delusion-of both the winner and looser in their own space and as they see the other.