Essay:
A Short History of a Long TimeHow to make sense of the past.
( 1 ) Technically, it was Magellan’s expedition that first circumnavigated the globe rather than Magellan himself, who was killed in the Philippines in 1521. Some historians have hypothesized that the first person to travel around the world was Magellan’s enslaved interpreter, Enrique of Malacca, who had been taken from present-day Malaysia a decade earlier.
( 2 ) Neither “Dreaming” nor “Dreamtime” offers a perfect translation, as there are many words across different Aboriginal languages that refer to the idea, only a few of which translate directly as “dreaming.” The English terms, Morphy writes, “should not be understood in their ordinary English sense but, rather, as terms for a unique and complex religious concept.”
( 3 ) There are conceptions of time in Western thought that resemble this notion of an “everywhen.” The medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas described God as existing in nunc stans, a kind of suspended “everywhen,” while Walter Benjamin coined the term Jetztzeit for, in the words of Ronald Beiner, the “now-time… in which the present and the past are drawn into a messianic relation.”
How do you warn future inhabitants of Earth of the presence of radioactive waste? This was the question that, in the 1980s, a group of physicists, sociologists, psychologists and semioticians attempted to answer in relation to a proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Their task was to design a system that would be capable of warning inhabitants ten thousand years into the future—a stretch of time which, in the other direction, reaches back to the Neolithic age, when humans were just beginning to develop agriculture. The Human Interference Task Force, as the group was known, could not assume that any contemporary language or writing system would be intelligible; it couldn’t even assume that the audience would be human.
In conceiving a way to communicate with a culture, civilization or even species distinct from our own, the task force had to consider how our conception of the world is informed by our vantage point in the present; how language, culture, knowledge and reason act as a lens through which we understand the world. Having stripped away nearly every convention we normally use to produce meaning, the task force was left with an array of increasingly eccentric solutions, ranging from a system of symbols and diagrams to hostile architecture, such as a field of giant granite spikes. Semiotician Thomas Sebeok suggested creating an “atomic priesthood,” which would transmit knowledge of the site through ritual and folklore; philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri proposed genetically engineering a cat that would change color in the presence of radiation.
None of the more radical proposals were considered feasible, but their creativity—and improbability—reveal the scale of the challenge: how to see beyond the limits of our own time. And just as those limits make it difficult to imagine communicating with the far-distant future, they also distort our view of the deep past, warping our understanding of history.
( 1 ) Technically, it was Magellan’s expedition that first circumnavigated the globe rather than Magellan himself, who was killed in the Philippines in 1521. Some historians have hypothesized that the first person to travel around the world was Magellan’s enslaved interpreter, Enrique of Malacca, who had been taken from present-day Malaysia a decade earlier.
( 2 ) Neither “Dreaming” nor “Dreamtime” offers a perfect translation, as there are many words across different Aboriginal languages that refer to the idea, only a few of which translate directly as “dreaming.” The English terms, Morphy writes, “should not be understood in their ordinary English sense but, rather, as terms for a unique and complex religious concept.”
( 3 ) There are conceptions of time in Western thought that resemble this notion of an “everywhen.” The medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas described God as existing in nunc stans, a kind of suspended “everywhen,” while Walter Benjamin coined the term Jetztzeit for, in the words of Ronald Beiner, the “now-time… in which the present and the past are drawn into a messianic relation.”
