Stars Over Dordogne by Sylvia Plath and the Art of Ddrowning by Billy Collins

Testify of things not seen

xv March 2019 –

Where I am at domicile, only the sparsest stars
Get in at twilight, and and then afterwards some try.
And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.
The smaller and more timid never arrive at all
But stay, sitting far out, in their ain dust.
They are orphans. I cannot come across them. They are lost.
Only this evening they have discovered this river with no trouble,
They are scrubbed and self-bodacious as the great planets.

Sylvia Plath, "Stars Over the Dordogne"

In that location was a burn down. The warmth a contrast with the absurd Montana air. As the sun dipped across the mountains and dusk passed its way into the deep inky blackness of nighttime, we glanced up to see a sight not often visible from my abode in the suburbs of Washington, DC. From my perch on my balcony, I tin frequently only spot ane or two sparks of starlight; whereas, on this night, a vast dream of glitter, obscured a picayune past forest burn smoke from the w, lay higher up us.

Montana sky (The haziness is due to a series of western wood fires in the summer of 2018.) Photograph credit: Priya Chhaya

This by summertime I had the opportunity to attend a strategic planning retreat at the West Creek Ranch in Montana, thanks to the generosity of the Arthur K. Bare Family Foundation. At ane of the opening events,  I was asked to choose a reading—something to set the stage—for the discussions to come. In order to lay out a narrative of contrasts, I chose iii readings (Plath's verse quoted above and two other pieces, which are excerpted beneath) that highlighted the challenges we face as purveyors and protectors of the past. These selections provided a throughline for our discussions nearly preservation in the metropolis, which took identify in a very united nations-metropolis-like environment.

Since that moment last July, I have wanted to extend my thoughts on these pieces farther. With the passage of fourth dimension, I've realized that the selections remind me of my own challenges, biases, and expectations. Collectively, they illustrate what I choose to acknowledge, understand, and learn near, and consequently what my limitations might exist and how I can work to push through them to be a more than effective public historian.

The second reading came from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History:

The materiality of [the moment of history cosmos] is and so obvious that some of us take information technology for granted. It does not imply that facts are meaningless objects waiting to exist discovered nether some timeless seal only rather, more modestly, that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings.

The bigger the textile mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us experience minor. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger than we that nosotros infuse with the reality of past lives, seam to speak of an immensity of which we know little except that we are a part of it. Too solid to exist unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the ability to touch it, just not that to hold it firmly in our hands—hence the mystery of their battered walls. We doubtable that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how practise we recognize the cease of a bottomless silence?

Trouillot had a profound bear upon on my understanding of historical practise. During graduate schoolhouse,Silencing the Past underscored that the history nosotros know is limited in telescopic. The by, as I understood it, was merely a slice of events and moments in time. In other words, the past nosotros know is equivalent to sitting on my balustrade and seeing only a fraction of the stars in the universe. Even though we know the stories are there, we lack the tools with which to see them with more clarity.

View of one of the structures that dotted the mural along a hiking trail at the West Creek Ranch. Photo credit: Priya Chhaya

In the passage higher up, Trouillot outlines this claiming by emphasizing the power of history's material culture. In my estimation, he reveals how in focusing on the bear witness that we can see—that we have already collected—we miss that which is hidden below.

But fifty-fifty that analysis requires a challenge.

The championship of this post comes from an episode of The West Wing (though it is besides the name of a James Baldwin essay collection, and is a Bible verse). In the show, the phrase ("testify of things not seen") has to do with continuing an egg on its head during the vernal equinox (or something similar that); for our purposes, it lends itself to a discussion of important work being done in the field.

For a long fourth dimension, the piece of work of practicing historians was tied to particular types of show: principal sources, including texts and textile culture, that told us about how people thought, acted, and behaved. These documents—that listed people equally belongings or only acknowledged important men at critical moments—limited our view and understanding of all of the actors in the past.

Mining and analyzing evidence of things not seen: That is the task of inclusion. Piecing together underrepresented histories. For some this task is a seeming impossibility, and provides encompass for not pushing for change, i.east. "The evidence does not exist, and therefore we cannot tell this story."

For others, this problem is an obfuscation. The evidence does exist, simply has been silenced due to a variety of bug, including the vagaries of the publishing industry, archival access, challenging societal circumstances, and the dominance of interpretations that were fabricated long before our electric current framework of understanding.

It is also a matter of embracing non-traditional types of evidence. Show that gives voice to those who did non have the ability of the pen or the ability that comes with owning property. It requires paying attention to other tools for carrying historical ideas and narratives, including oral tradition, intangible practices, and the arts.

Interior of a shack at the West Creek Ranch. You can see newspaper lining the walls—this ane from 1927. Photo credit: Priya Chhaya

Believing in the evidence of things not seen is only some other way of asking historians to observe how these stories are manifested in the cultural practices and behavior of people today.

And at present the third reading, from Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes equally Public History:

On the ways in which social history is embedded in urban landscapes:

This subject needs to exist grounded in both the aesthetics of experiencing places with all 5 senses and the politics of experiencing places equally contested territory [emphasis mine]. Much the same can be said for organizations of historians, preservationists, or environmentalists, or of individual artists and designers who wish to utilize the social history of places to make more than resonant connections to public retentiveness.

Places make memories cohere in complex ways. People's experiences of the urban landscape intertwine the sense of place and the politics of space. If people's attachments to places are material, social, and imaginative, and so these are necessary dimensions of new projects to extend public history into the urban mural as well as new histories of American cultural landscapes and the buildings within them.

If Plath is urging united states of america to see across our ain perspective, and Trouillot sought to pull forward that which had been silenced, then this excerpt from Hayden'southward The Ability of Identify asks usa to consider the role of politics and ability in building these new narratives.

Shadows at the entrance to the Due west Creek Ranch. Photo credit: Priya Chhaya

How much of what we need to tell the full story is limited past power? The power of governments and money; the power of quondam definitions of what is celebrated and worthy of being preserved? How practice we await at what Hayden calls contested territory and not merely side with those whose struggles take long since been pushed aside, just also acknowledge the way power has been used to farther diminish that very real past?

It is important to remember that in most cases this is not our history to tell. The evidence is at that place in the hearts, minds, and experiences of people living today. For public historians, it is important to find the balance between our role as professionals and our roles every bit stewards of the past.

And then, maybe, the do of history today is closer to Plath'south final lines in her poem:

What if the sky here is no different,

And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?

~ Priya Chhaya is the associate manager of publications and programs at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, You can learn more about her piece of work at www.priyachhaya.com or follow her on Twitter/IG @priyastoric.

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Source: https://ncph.org/history-at-work/evidence-of-things-not-seen/

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