the week of december 8, 2024
with a reflection on art as perspective in precedented times
Before we get into the week ahead, I’d like to offer a short meditation on how making art, and looking at historical artistic and literary movements, can offer us perspective on our present moment.
Specifically, I’d like to reflect on the tongue-in-cheek joke many (including myself) have made, that I’d like to live in precedented times.
We are living in precedented times.
Unprecedented within our lifetimes? Perhaps, depending on who you are and your positionality. But not unprecedented within history, both recent and long past.
I’ve mentioned that I’m working on a novel. This is not a non-sequiter. Beyond acknowledging its existence, I’ve not shared any details of the plot or characters here. Hell, I’ve barely shared that with my writers’ group, my sister, my best friend. Mostly, I write fiction with the door closed — I don’t want other people’s voices or reactions in my head.
But. As I’ve got back into the novel in recent weeks, it has been grounding (from post-election madness) in a profound way. And a significant reason for this is because I’m writing historical fiction. Old historical fiction, centuries past, that connects to events that are still rippling out today. For every 500 words I write, I’m off on some research deep dive — about the structure of nobility in different European countries, about who colonized what and where, about the history of the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation.
Spending so much time hip-deep in research on the enmeshment of European governments and the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, has soothed my nerves in a way the news headlines and social media rants have not. Because it has reminded me by showing me: women and queer people have survived theocratic despots before; some spent their entire lives resisting. And I believe that our bones remember.
Tyranny is the baseline norm of human history. To believe otherwise is to buy into the liberal myth that the history of humanity is “progressive” in a linear fashion, improving upon improvement. This is not so. Humans have made extraordinary leaps and achievements in civil rights before, and have then been devoured by fear of the Other, exploited by those in power who only sought to line their own pockets. This is the tale as old as time.
History is a cycle; it might less generously be called an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail/tale.
Rome was perhaps the most famous republic before the United States (we! are not! and have never been! a democracy! please stop saying that!), but I don’t think anyone here is under the illusion that Ancient Rome was a bastion of civil rights. Sure, queerness (among men) was more accepted. Sort of. And also: there was slavery. Rome fell, monarchies and empires continued to prevail, and we all know how that went.
There is no such thing as “precedented” times.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a deeply Saturnian Capricorn that I find this fact comforting. And listen, I’m not happy about what’s going on — far from it. But I do take heart that there is a predictability to tyranny. Despotism is not imaginative. It requires far more visionary capacity to imagine a more just, equitable world into being than it does to revert to the ways of the Roman Empire, China’s Ming Dynasty, France’s ancien regime.
Students of history have a playbook for this.
You don’t have to be writing historical fiction to do some historical reading, but I would encourage you, this week, to do some reading — and not just about recent history, but the old stuff, from hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
In history, there is hope.
In art, we find our capacity for resistance.
If you’d like to join other like-hearted artists! ICYMI, my soon-to-be wife Meg Jones Wall and I are co-creating, co-hosting, and co-holding a 6-month long creative container for spiritually-minded artists next year. The Grove: 6 Months of Collective Creative Devotion is officially open for Early Bird registration through December 31st. I would like to call out that we’ve priced Early Bird to be cheaper, with a significantly more generous payment plan (7 months of $111 ).
And now, for your regularly scheduled programming.
all times are Eastern