Cultivating the Writerly “I”
“You know what I do when I have writer’s block?” Throw on some Beatles and write something completely unrelated. Just to free up my mind to start writing “for real” again.”
So says my friend, himself a pretty accomplished writer, I’d say. And I know I’ve heard similar advice before, but maybe I have to revisit this idea, of writing, not without a purpose or goal, but “just because.” So that’s what I’m doing. And y’know, I’ve never thought of writing to the Beatles before. Who can focus on fustration, anxiety, or deadlines when “Across the Universe” is playing in the background. That’s what I thought.
But instead of writing something unrelated, I’m going to try and get back to why I picked this subject matter. I’m writing for a history class. Okay. So why do I like history? I guess I’ve always been pretty inquisitive-I’ve always been interested in understanding the past. I can remember reading books about First Nations cultures in grade five, reading encyclopedias about China and Japan in grade six and seven, reading about paleolithic discoveries in Siberia and France even earilier. My interests were pretty eclectic back then-I would be learning something in class and spend hours of my free time searching for more books on the subject, and reading whatever I could find. I recall spending hours reading about ancient Egypt so I could come up with the best sarcophagus picture for my grade 7 art class. I played that Civilization video game whenever I went to visit my uncle (we didn’t have our own computer at the time). It just seems like history has always been a part of my life.
Perhaps I just had a drive to understand everything-even things I wasn’t being told in class. I needed to go beyond the subject matter (I guess I was bored?), and later this evolved into a more sophisticated need to understand, at least on some level, structures, processes and politics that shaped our world. I developed an urge to question what was common sense, I sensed I had at best, a partial knowlege of the world, and I started to reconsider (at least superficially) the sources of this knowlege (these were my punk rock years. 
) . I knew that there was so much going on in the world that I barely understood, and I wanted to know why we weren’t being told these things. Particularly, this translated into a curiosity about the media- I wanted to know what we weren’t being told in the news and why.
This feulled my “alternative media” phase -At this point I was reading Punk Planet to get a different perspective on the issues I kept hearing about, yet didn’t feel I entirely understood. In doing so I went beyond the Eurocentric focus of my classes and discovered political issues and struggles that were going on around the world. I joined social justice groups and started learning about women’s issues in Afghanistan (and this was before 9-11). Some combination of my environment, and my own curiosity, created this drive to know more about the issues shaping the world. At this point I was more concerned with present-day political conflict than past civilizations, but the underlying drive behind everything I was reading was this-in order to understand what’s going on now, you need to understand what lead up to it. (I was quite interested in the Middle Eastern conflict at the time, and this point was especially salient in this case-there was no way to understand what was going on with Iraq (a contentious issue, even before the 2003 invasion, due to the sanctions imposed on the country at the time), without understanding history behind the Amercan’s foreign policy, why the country was strategically important, etc.). And this urge to understand kept me looking back into the past.
Admittedly, until recently I was largely concerned with 19th and 20th century history (my child hood interests notwithstanding). It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve gone further back. Not that there’s a lockstep relationship between ancient and modern world history, I just wanted a broader approach. I realised I never fully understood, for example, why fuedalism took shape, why the Roman Empire fell, how Christianity expanded, and so on-these were formative aspects of western society, but in my urge to understand non-western cultures, I’d kind of passed over them in my studies. I started to get the sense that I wanted the full “liberal” education, that there was a reason some texts, ideas, etc, are “canoncial,” and I didn’t want to continue being functionally illiterate in important aspects of my cultural heritage. I’d also been studying modern european and particularly, colonial history, and realising I couldn’t really understand the 19th century European social structure unless I had a better understanding about how it took shape. There was an intellectual hole that needed plugging, and I’m trying to do it by studying the forerunners to the industrial captialist system that I’ve taken for granted.
So I guess, despite my frustration, I still love history, I still feel I *need* to understand these things. Now hopefully this motivation will get me through my paper…
