True stories don’t end. They don’t have a beginning, middle and end. No logical progression or growth or moral or even much of a plot. Stories about life are amorphous and constant quivering flux.
People end. Characters end. People have a beginning, middle and end. So we tell peoples not stories. We narrate people. That’s why we have such a problem with history. Why it is littered with great men. History is a story. We can tell small bits of it, but it doesn’t have a plot. No point or arc or meaning to history. So we’ve peopled it…
Only people don’t have plots or meaning or moral or point either. They just have beginnings, middles and ends.
We force these narrative devices to fit the chosen few peoples and then we equate history with these chosen few. We force history to have a plot, ignoring the vast stretches of pointless, plotless life outside the few beginnings, middles and ends… and really, we ignore the beginnings, or at least we conveniently forget that our characters don’t invent themselves.
And we flat out deny the end…
to the peacocks
go learn the full history
of the work that went into your origin story
then and only then may you prattle on
about the valour of your ancestry
and the superior efficiency of the will of man
because only then will you understand
that forefathers had little to do with it…
and colonizers least of all
How would you write history? What portion would you include? What would be neglected? It feels so impossible to tell a true story about the past.
How much more difficult is it to tell the future? How much is left out? How much is unknown? And how do you know when that tiny change changes the whole story?
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
You bring up pertinent issues: since my children have scattered over the world, I have been writing down snippets from my life. I am conscious, for example, that my grandchildren do not know what LPs and Seven Singles are – nor are they familiar with landlines and cannot imagine a world sans television and cell phones. A quip on my calendar reads: My life is based on a true story 🙂 You rightly ask “What portion would you include? What would be neglected?” This is as true of a personal history as it is of political history. Definitely a lot of food for thought here!
LikeLike
Wonderful ♥️
LikeLike
Families have histories too. Perhaps the greatest of the many gifts my father gave to me, was the interviews he did with my grandparents. Most families have some sort of oral histories passed down from generation to generation, but people grow old, and too often these oral histories are forgotten and lost. The great thing my dad did was write the interviews down, something which changed my life and gave me the precious gift of better understanding who I am and where I came from.
The stories of my grandparents were what led me to one of the most important experiences in my life, visiting the villages where they came from. Connecting to the places that my ancestors came from, small peasant villages in the Carpathian Mountains of southeastern Poland and far western Ukraine, allowed me to make some sense of why I became the person I am.
My wife’s family history couldn’t have been more different. Her ancestors came to America shortly after the Mayflower. The mansion of one of her relatives is now a state park in Rhode Island. But, apart from the family patriarch, Captain George Robinson, much of her family history is now lost. If you have the opportunity, I would encourage you to interview your parents and especially to write their stories down. Before it is too late.
LikeLike
And how do you know when that tiny change changes the whole story?
It’s a very good question that we can only know the answer to afterwards, sometimes not for decades or lifetimes, which makes it hard for everyone who works to make positive change. How do I know if I am making a difference? I might never know but I keep at it anyway.
LikeLike