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Nov. 11th, 2009 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetOn and off, this year, I've been reading about WWI and the effects of it into the 1920s: memoirs, letters, social histories, more theoretical and thesis-driven histories, poetry. Photographs. Mostly memoirs, which tell me with a more limited amount of self-censorship what people saw and thought and felt. I paid a visit to the War Museum a few weeks ago and stood in the room they've done up like a trench, eyes half-closed, ignoring everyone else in there and trying to soak it in down to the bone.
This is for a book. It won't even be about the First World War as it happened, not really. I'm reading for the emotions, and to find what I need to change to make my idea work.
Thing is, wading sleeves-rolled into a topic does things to how you think.
I have caught myself unaccountably angry this year when someone uses lightly the phrase "in the trenches"; as in, "for those strikers in the trenches, that's not good enough." I want to shake that person: Really? They're in the trenches? Are they eighteen years old, sleeping with the rats in churned up mud, and under consistent artillery assault? No? So shut your face. Yes, it's a colloquialism of our language as spoken. I know. I have caught myself passing my first pair of hand-knit socks over and over through my hands, thinking about how they took me three months to knit up, how women must have done it better and faster and with so much more practice to be able to send socks for entire navy ships. What it was like when they thought about where their socks went. What it would feel like if what I do for a hobby was one of my only mechanisms of control over something terrifying.
This year, I read the articles and hear the speeches and see the photographs and I cry. Yeah, it's a trite thing to say. But there you go. I cry.
I'm not even halfway into the kind of research I'll need to do to get this right. Tip of the iceberg, kids. Tip of the iceberg.
Today is strange. Today's a bit of a paradox for me right now. Sometimes you think you know what a thing means until you start doing your reading, and you realize the edges of what it means. We all know poppies. We all know In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row, mostly heard internally as the kind of singsong recitation kids do when they've been made to memorize. Remembrance Day is most definitely those things, and wreath-layings, and these kindly aging people, fewer and fewer of them each year, who come out in uniforms that seem so anachronistic on them. And I wonder what we're actually remembering. If those things haven't, in some ways, become not just the means but the ends of the whole affair.
The connections between symbols and referents inherently get loose, with time; it happens to words too. With words it's called semantic bleaching, when a thing stops meaning what it means and drifts toward a general good or bad. It's a human tendency: People's ideas of a thing, through repetition, start to spin and drift, and all symbols need to be redefined, be personalized, be ultimately co-opted in a million million little ways to stay at all socially relevant. It's the peril of traditions. After a while, you do a thing because you do, not because of whatever started it. Not because you don't care or are a bad person or something, but because that's the human tendency. That's semantic bleaching: that's what happens. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.
When I've started the research; when I've looked at the photographs and read the letters and tried to immerse myself in it, tried to think about what I'm not seeing and will never see, that upsets the hell out of me.
(And no, I am not expressing this right to get it clear across. I've rewritten in three times, and half the logic's still in my head and not on the page here. But I'm all dragged down in my own symbols and referents too, and it's unfortunately the best I can do.)
This is for a book. It won't even be about the First World War as it happened, not really. I'm reading for the emotions, and to find what I need to change to make my idea work.
Thing is, wading sleeves-rolled into a topic does things to how you think.
I have caught myself unaccountably angry this year when someone uses lightly the phrase "in the trenches"; as in, "for those strikers in the trenches, that's not good enough." I want to shake that person: Really? They're in the trenches? Are they eighteen years old, sleeping with the rats in churned up mud, and under consistent artillery assault? No? So shut your face. Yes, it's a colloquialism of our language as spoken. I know. I have caught myself passing my first pair of hand-knit socks over and over through my hands, thinking about how they took me three months to knit up, how women must have done it better and faster and with so much more practice to be able to send socks for entire navy ships. What it was like when they thought about where their socks went. What it would feel like if what I do for a hobby was one of my only mechanisms of control over something terrifying.
This year, I read the articles and hear the speeches and see the photographs and I cry. Yeah, it's a trite thing to say. But there you go. I cry.
I'm not even halfway into the kind of research I'll need to do to get this right. Tip of the iceberg, kids. Tip of the iceberg.
Today is strange. Today's a bit of a paradox for me right now. Sometimes you think you know what a thing means until you start doing your reading, and you realize the edges of what it means. We all know poppies. We all know In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row, mostly heard internally as the kind of singsong recitation kids do when they've been made to memorize. Remembrance Day is most definitely those things, and wreath-layings, and these kindly aging people, fewer and fewer of them each year, who come out in uniforms that seem so anachronistic on them. And I wonder what we're actually remembering. If those things haven't, in some ways, become not just the means but the ends of the whole affair.
The connections between symbols and referents inherently get loose, with time; it happens to words too. With words it's called semantic bleaching, when a thing stops meaning what it means and drifts toward a general good or bad. It's a human tendency: People's ideas of a thing, through repetition, start to spin and drift, and all symbols need to be redefined, be personalized, be ultimately co-opted in a million million little ways to stay at all socially relevant. It's the peril of traditions. After a while, you do a thing because you do, not because of whatever started it. Not because you don't care or are a bad person or something, but because that's the human tendency. That's semantic bleaching: that's what happens. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.
When I've started the research; when I've looked at the photographs and read the letters and tried to immerse myself in it, tried to think about what I'm not seeing and will never see, that upsets the hell out of me.
(And no, I am not expressing this right to get it clear across. I've rewritten in three times, and half the logic's still in my head and not on the page here. But I'm all dragged down in my own symbols and referents too, and it's unfortunately the best I can do.)
