History

As I look upon a scattered array of leaflets, letters, textbooks, novels, and philosophy books and recall precisely the innumerable conversations about Marxism, I am suddenly presented with extraordinary recognition; that I have spent the past seven years working on this dissertation, or at least those entire seven years are being folded into its pages, woven into its sentences. The truth is that for a question to be answered, truthfully answered, it takes a great deal of time. Especially considering how complex things have been made for us in this moment, how complex things naturally are. And were someone to suggest to be that reading Nietzsche`s Beyond Good and Evil on the lawn when I was seventeen and reacting how profound indignation was enormously important in leading me to this particular moment I would not have believed it. And Twilight of the Idols lies hidden in the corner somewhere because I have simply exhausted myself and its backbiting, acerbic tone simply reminds me of what gave me motion in the first instance. Benedict Spinoza huddles close to the text, nursing its overwhelming outrage with its consolation.

There is no country that I pity more than Russia, and it is from the bottom of my heart that I make this admission. I would not have spent so long and in such isolation trying to make sense out of its tragedy. The loss of a culture. Is there anything which resounds with greater sadness than the loss of a culture. I remember looking at a photograph of the suffering that took place following the Revolution (if we really need to call it that) and it struck me to my very depths. It was such a picture that it made me wonder if people truly are awake to see that we are all very much the same, and that goes away when we take life from people. And it is the same with culture. If people are given no choice but to live in a world that they could not choose then why would culture remain? Culture resembles a lofe of life and a sense of compassion, whether drawn from a happy life or a life of misery in which a small fragment of joy has found its way through. 

The truth is that I have found answers to almost every one of my questions and they all thunder and heave upon this moment senselessly and without rhythm. As I discover more about the loss that I have tried to make sense of I find that it is a loss to humanity itself, and one that is rarely made sense of by many people. Rather than discover it, we create new lives and travel forwards, not understanding that life moves in a very circular motion.

There is no present without the past, and the past may as well be called the present for what it is. Everything is relevant, and everything must be carried, and nursed from whatever suffering it has passed through. The sadness of a world that cannot learn from its present and so looks towards the future. That is what I recognise in these pages in front of me, and in the dissertation which expands overwhelmingly in front of me at this moment. My fingers seem to know what they are doing; is seems that the muscles retain a sense of the passages I mean to write.

And, about Marxism. It isn`t quite understood in the general. Marxism, at least derived from Das Kapital, is a recognition that everything is related and that even the diversity found in ecological survey etc. is pivotal for life to continue and make more sense. If Marxism suggested anything, it was that the human species needs to be varied at the same time as being aware of itself, and aware that complexity is needed. We have only found our useful explanations by allowing complexity to thrive. Look at the internet and the procession of ideas and culture which has accompanied it. It is not the organisation or the structure which matters but the substance and the variety of substance. The tragedy is that difference is not understood. Until humanity is capable of understanding difference and the limitations of knowledge it will not understand that knowing is not understanding. Knowledge expands, contracts, changes. That is the nature of knowledge. Understanding (or imagination, as Einstein says) circles the universe.

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