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| The past speaks in incomprehensible voices, which only reveal the impossibility of being anywhere else except in the present. |
I have been working on this PhD for three years now. Five, if I take into account the time when the idea for this novel, ignited by a novel by Sir Walter Scott, was gestating into my head - two years before I submitted the PhD proposal. During this time, much happened and much didn't. I promised I would write about it and I did not, not really. No consistent updates of progress, no long harangues about how hard it all is, or gushing posts about how enjoyable it all is, or thoughtful, measured accounts about how much effort it all takes. Only hints, glimpses, the occasional crack in the taciturn mood. Silence seems to be the mode I have been adapting myself to, in empathy with the silent ones in my life, those who died, and those who will not utter words in comprehensible voices.
I wonder if this state of silence, which sometimes feels like a choice and sometimes a necessity, has anything at all to do with my engaging with the past for so long (a lustrum no less) that it has supplanted the present and has made it look irrelevant and distant. But no. This cannot be the case. I have been researching the First Crusade (it was not called that then, but the expedition, the pilgrimage, the liberation of the Holy Land, etc.) and its aftermath in my fiction, exploring the lives of three main characters (and a number of others) in the twelfth century in Europe, Byzantium (it was not called that then, but the Eastern Roman Empire), and the Middle East. In the course of this exploration I have filled a considerable number of notebooks with observations about the everyday life and experience of the people who lived then. But what I read when I go over the notes is perceptions of the past by a twenty-first century person. It is impossible to see the past with the eyes of the past.
The present is inescapable, even when PhD research is all about the past. Particularly this kind of present and this kind of past - that of the First Crusade and the situation in the Middle East today, inextricably linked in an uncanny chiasmus, in which the twelfth century reverts to the twenty first - 12 to 21 - in a way that would make hermetists prick up their ears and begin to sniff the air for more clues, more signs that this is not accidental, this is meant to be, planned, dictated. A huge reenactment operation, but one that takes itself so seriously that it is for real. And since history is the ultimate study of death, its reenactment can only be an exercise in
The lines above were written over a year ago. I had left my final phrase unfinished. What had I meant to say? What urgency stopped me from completing my final sentence? And where did the title of the post come from? Was it mine? Was it by something I was reading at the time? And what was it? I read a great deal during that time; about twenty pages of Bibliography in my completed PhD thesis. If even my own, recent past has the potential to become such a mystery to me, what are the chances of being able to access anyone else's?
And yet, this is precisely what had to be done, and it was done. My PhD was granted its happy ending, and it is now examined, passed, amended, and at the printer's for the final, hardback-bound, gold-lettered copy for the depository - all in less than three weeks' time. After the long years of research and writing, it all felt too fast, too dizzy. Meanwhile, I am in that strange post-PhD limbo, pulled between past and future, still hanging around the haunts of the last five years, inhabiting the present like an uneasy ghost.
