Living on the Edge of History
Joanie and I spent four days driving from Columbus to the Olympic Peninsula, where I would begin my journey of a million pedal strokes to the Atlantic Ocean. Four days of watching the broken whites and solid yellows on the highway flow underneath provided ample time for reflection. We were driving through lands I had never visited, and I attempted to grasp the natural and human history that was sliding by.
I can’t remember the source (and believe it or not, my AI assistant couldn’t locate it either), but I once read an essay or news article where the author described the human predicament of “living on the edge of history.” They warned that being hyper-focused on the present has made us “temporally myopic,” in that we do not have the benefit of seeing ourselves and our present actions in the larger historical context. This phrase was one of the thoughts I was mulling after we crossed the Mississippi River and passed through the treeless northern high plains of southern Minnesota and then into South Dakota.
To me the phrase “living on the edge of history” elicits the image of riding a wave. I don’t surf, but I have spent many joyful hours body surfing, so I am able to relate from experience what it feels like taking a wave and riding its edge as the foam curls and crashes around you. Like life, the ride is way too short, and there is always the danger that you will wipe out. But in that powerful intense moment¸ everything else disappears and you are completely and absolutely focused on catching the swell, riding the turbulence, and being safely deposited on the sandy shore.
As individuals and society, we are forever locked in our individual turbulent moments. Using a grammar metaphor, one could say our attention is completely dedicated to the present progressive.
As we traveled west, I was cognizant of that present progressive moment and pondered the double-edged sword of living at the edge of history. The shiny, bright side of the blade endows us with the ability to observe the present moment and form judgements about it (which are often required for survival). This power of observation is also the blade’s dark side – we see the present as immutably fixed and are therefore blind to events that have left a trail of stories along time’s straight arrow.
Staring out the window, I wondered what the land we were crossing looked like hundreds of years ago. We were driving on Interstate 90 through the Prairie Passage, a band of tallgrass that serves as a transitional biome between the deciduous forests to the east and the mixed grass prairie to the west. When we stopped for a break in the Adrian West Rest Area in Minnesota, I learned from the informational markers that this band once covered one hundred and fifty million acres, stretching from Saskatchewan in Canada all the way south to Mexico but now is an endangered and highly fragmented ecosystem, occupying anywhere between 1% to 18% of its former distribution. A once borderless panorama of grass is now broken into homesteads, farms, ranches, and granges divided by inorganic lines. And mile after mile of fences, the face of private property and commerce. Living on the edge of history, we do not have the capacity to examine this change. We passively accept it as a fait accompli.
View of the prairie from the Adrian West Rest Area in Southwest Minnesota.
Living on the edge of history also blinds us to the part our present-day actions play in the larger context of things. When I drove away from the Prairie Passage informational signs in the Adrian West Rest Area in Minnesota, while I was not personally responsible for the destruction of the grasslands, at that moment I too was playing a role in the slow progression of history that was helping drive changes and the steady environmental ruin of the planet. For there I was, driving in our rented internal combustion-powered motor home, polluting the air with burned hydrocarbons and leaving a vaporous trail of greenhouse gas and dispersing a cloud of microplastics from the van’s four tires which were carried away by the wind and into the water and soil.
I had the same thought later in the day when we visited the Dignity statue I wrote about in my July 20 post, Imposing Irony. For the most part, White America has swept the tragedy of what befell the continent’s Indigenous population into the drawer of history. While White Americans today are not personally complicit in the physical and cultural violence inflicted on Native American tribes, we are, for the most part, beneficiaries of the violence, which can be a sobering thought. There are policies we can enact to improve the quality of life of these marginalized people, but that requires publicly acknowledging our collective transgressions. Unfortunately, individually and collectively, we are not prone to delving into the past and reflecting on the errors of our ways.
If we do reflect, it is usually selective. Naturally, we are more likely to keep the memory alive of some tragedy, event, or person that holds meaning for us and ignore past events that don’t impact our respective class, religion, or category of society. For example, there is still a great deal of emotion and identity tied up with the events of the Texas Revolution in 1836 (if you visit the old mission there is a sign or plaque that refers to the place as “hallowed ground” and we are encouraged to “remember the Alamo.”) At the same time, Black Americans have been told that slavery is in the past, and that they should focus on the present. Michael Che, of SNL fame, in a standup several years ago, wondered why he was told not to dwell on slavery, but that we should all never forget the events of 9/11. Che’s cynical response was, “All buildings matter.”
When we live on the edge of history we succumb to historical amnesia -- the dark side of the double-edged sword -- which leads us collectively to repeat the past’s mistakes. The Spanish philosopher and essayist George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I think the issue is not our ability to remember the past but rather to find a way to make it relevant to the present day.
I quoted American writer William Faulkner in my Imposing Irony blog post (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) He goes on to write “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.” I found that to be true for myself when I crossed the country and witnessed Native American poverty in the west, or the depressed steel-belt communities in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, struggling on the downhill slope of the economic cycle. As an American, riding across the country made me question my place and role in the still-burning embers of this country’s past.
Returning to the grammar metaphor, I think we would all be better served if we could expand our frame of reference with how we engage with the world by shifting from a present progressive dominant viewpoint to one that includes a present perfect progressive viewpoint – so we can better understand how the events from the past continue to influence the present moment. I would love to see the day when this approach to history – which Faulkner so eloquently described as webs we labor in – is not just a niche academic field (see the longue durée, for example) but an influential tool that enters the public discourse as we debate social and economic policies.
Sure, it would require a radical transformation of our existing societal power structures, particularly the political and economic. Currently, this present perfect progressive approach simply isn’t practical because it requires unpacking and understanding the complexity of the historical currents, the institutions involved, and the role knowledge systems and power structures play.
But we have to start the conversation or at least ask the right questions. Because what seems so stubbornly unyielding now will not always be so. As Ursula K. LeGuin said in a speech not too long before her death, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”