Nordic Eden

Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.

I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:

me: “i just want to respect their boundaries”

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

they referred to Native American rulers as “kings” and we know from reading eyewitness accounts that those who actually came to America saw Native American societies as having a high level of social sophistication by their own standards which is not to say they respected their culture but it is to say that even the colonizers recognized that the society they were seeing wasn’t “primitive.” Like we can’t even write it off as “people back then didn’t know better, they just Thought they were primitive from their Perspective” because that perspective wasn’t even the genuine response of the Europeans at the time.

Also “race” as a concept is only like, a few hundred years old at most. Like, the idea that you’re biologically one race and someone with a different skin color is another race literally didn’t exist back in say 1300. Even in the period of time I’m studying now, the mid 1600’s, it wasn’t fully A Thing. People hadn’t even really worked out that skin tone was hereditary they thought it was just a consequence of where you grew up. Then slave labor became super profitable in the American colonies and this idea kind of arose that being a certain “race” means you’re inherently supposed to be subjugated.

Like history books are like “oh he was so brave, sailing into the unknown when no one else would” when like (and this information is from my prof in a recent class lecture) the reason Portugal turned down the idea of his voyage wasn’t that they thought the earth was flat or some shit. it was that they KNEW THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH (because we’ve been able to calculate that shit since ancient times) and reasoned, correctly, that if you tried to sail nonstop to Asia from Europe across the Atlantic and there was nothing out there but water in between you’d just die.

The book is Indians and English by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. It is basically exploring the cultural clash between the English and the Native Americans they encountered in the Americas and it’s really interesting because one of the main prongs of her thesis revolves around breaking down the idea that Native Americans were passive victims of colonialism and especially that their “simple, primitive” lifestyle couldn’t compete with the colonizers. But it really delves deep into the contrasts in culture and goes off on tangents like “What does “naked” mean in its archaic form?” and “Here’s this anecdote about this random intersex person in the mid-1600’s who lived portions of their life as both a man and a woman,” and stuff like that. There are so many tiny details and quotes from writing from the time period about everything from men freaking out over women wearing makeup to how in English portraiture depictions of people meant to represent them and show who they were from clothing and other stuff instead of depict their features, and as a result portraits of people from this time don’t necessarily look like them.

This is a mix of stuff from the book and from class lectures, though. The cannibalism stuff in particular was from a lecture.

So the real history isn’t like “oh the colonizers were so much more powerful and just ran over the Primitive Native Peoples with their superior guns” the European colonies had to coexist and play political chess with these powerful nations for well over a century.

Like, as brutal as they were (I mean...de Soto fuckin hunted people for sport and threw his guides to his dogs when they pissed him off, and in general the atrocities committed by the Spanish are by far some of the most fucked up disturbing shit I’ve ever read in my life) the European colonizers weren’t ACTUALLY technologically superior? E.g. the reason the Spanish didn’t make it any farther north than Florida is that arrows go through armor.