That clash with history

Remembering too well engenders sadness, in which case the nearly two-year absence here ought to be lamentable. In fact I'm glad to see when, what, and how I last wrote here. For it represents a productive history, the beginning of something that can only be resumed, not undone, and it permits a brief meditation on  the feeling of seeing something of my own history unchanged in the knowledge that, while lives can be measured by the strictures of our formalisations of time (or our concessions to it), the multiplicity of my experiences and the evident continuation of my history in spite of the absence of a centralised discursive record of it frees us from over-organised perspectives on ourselves, what we've done, who we've been, and what that says about who we are.

This, then, is the collapsing of a twenty-or-so-month caesura, a reconciliation of an extraneously qualified shortfall. Gently does it nudge us, too, towards thinking about history and now, and about museums as storehouses of the past and enacted experience but playgrounds of the present for diversion of educative, edifying, and enjoyable sorts. I plan to chase this up with a response to Painting After Performance, which I visited at Tate Modern recently; a conversation with my co-spectator to Death: A Self-Portrait, seen the same day; and some preliminary thoughts on a trip to the museums of Grasse, planned for later this year.