Can We Write About History While We Live Through It?
The number of times my partner has said how tired she is of living through history has been lost. There’s no way to accurately track the amount that phrase has been utter. Once we tried to keep a tally of each event, but we were too exhausted to continue by the end of the week.
This lifetime, these past four years in particular, has been exhausting—both mentally and physically. With each major event comes a subsequent burnout. One occurs and another soon follows. There is a compounding effect that cripples our capacity for empathy; in some cases it can be physically paralyzing. In times like these, solace can be difficult and futile to find.
Not long after Election Day, in the height of my anxiety over the future of the United States (it feels so odd to type that, like I’m trying to deceive anyone that the states were, or are, united) I started to read Elisa Gabbert’s collection of essays, The Unreality of Memory. From the first essay, which Gabbert looks at the Titanic disaster after becoming obsessed with it (and disasters in general), I was hooked.
When my partner asked me what the book was about, I explained that it’s about disasters in the world and how we view them as humans—directly involved or otherwise. “That seems grim,” she said. Perhaps it was.
After we step away from the television where news about COVID-19 and the rising number of deaths in America, Election Day and all the conspiracies that Trump and fellow Republicans peddled, after the California wildfires earlier in the year, Australia’s too, it was grim to turn to past disasters and tragedies as a means to escape the ones we we’ve lived through so far in a few months’ time.
But it helped soothe my anxieties about the world; it helped me make sense of why I felt the way I did.
Ask anyone and they’ll say another familiar phrase about how 2020 was the worst, and at least 2021 can only be better. This comes from the idea that we continue to perpetuate as a society that a new year resets everything. The bar is lowered. Expectations are cleared. But as we see now, after making it almost one month into 2021, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
In March, when COVID-19 began its spread, there was a shameful excitement I experienced in the prospect of having more time to write. Due to the stay-at-home orders, I could use whatever extra minutes and hours gained from the loss of social obligations and travel to finish projects I shelved away because “I didn’t have the necessary time” to commit to them. So long as COVID was around, I did. World events wouldn’t stop me.
I was reluctant to believe that the stay-at-home orders could last longer than a month or two. Despite hearing how severe the situation could become due to the lack of effort from the Trump administration and their purposeful spread of misinformation, I couldn’t fathom the idea that the pandemic could stretch beyond that time limit. Despite reading about earlier plagues and pandemics in the world, there was disbelief that it could happen during my lifetime.
It’s a selfish sentiment. “This couldn’t happen in my lifetime,” as if my lifetime is above all others past and future—in every lifetime this happens. When I think back over the course of my lifetime, I’m reminded of the events that have played out since my birth that I can remember: the Columbine High School massacre, 9/11, the Iraq War, the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. And there’s so many other events that could be added from my twenty-eight-year lifetime.
Even almost a year since the start of the pandemic, even months after Election Day, weeks after the Capitol Siege, days after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration, the events that have transpired since—and even before, back to the 2016 election—still feel heavy. Each day I listen to the news, there is no shortage of fatigue by the end.
Only since reading Gabbert’s book have I found myself more able to move out of bed in the morning. I’m able to sit at my writing desk with relative ease, even if there is nothing being produced. It’s a step in a direction, any direction—that’s progress from being motionless.
I don’t dare to write about the events that have happened. It’s all too soon. Nothing has been appropriately processed. “In a way,” Gabbert writes, “time is memory—not clock-time, perhaps.” No matter the distance that clock-time places, there are events we experience in our lifetime that feel too close. Perhaps, the inhibition or reluctance to write about these events, to write about history as it's happening, are because the memory is still fresh, our proximity still too near. Perhaps, this is why we struggle to write about our personal tragedies, too.
To write accurately—and not just historically but emotionally as well—about the events we’ve lived through this past year and long before, we must allow it to become a memory. Let it calm and fade into the recesses of our minds until we’re ready to dredge it up again.
I volunteer as the associate editor of creative nonfiction for Mud Season Review. As part of my tasks, I read through the submissions we receive. Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been a higher number of submissions. Most of which, at first, tried to tackle the human experience of COVID-19, of the isolation it imbued. Even now, we still receive submissions about individual experiences about the pandemic. It’s pressing and current. But it’s too close to write about, and too close to read about. Not enough time has passed.
It was rare for an essay to capture the gravity of the emotions felt, and the few that did weren’t focused on the pandemic. The pandemic became a backdrop for some issue they were dealing with either before March or throughout. The writers used a different memory—another time—to drive their narrative.
”Human memory is human time,” Gabbert writes in her final essay. Once history becomes a memory, then we can effectively write about it.
About Coty Poynter
Coty Poynter is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants.
