I realize that my bad posture in writing and archival research, with my shoulders hunched up around my ears and my back bent forward, all tense, is a product of my desired to physically dive into the work. My body tries to follow my mind into the earlier centuries, into the lives of the subjects, into their world. My thoughts are already there, trying to piece it all together and walk around in it. My body wants to go along, but can't.
Oddly enough, I think that is the real reason that I went into history in the first place. My reasons for becoming a historian seldom had anything to do with whatever most other people say is their reason, which is always something inquisitive about answering big questions and so forth. I have confess that I don't really know what big questions I am trying to answer. I might, if I put my mind to it, but I think I've always been more of an intuitive sort of person who dives into something to learn about it by discovering what it feels like from the inside. Not exactly scientific.
I joke that I became a historian because I always wanted to be a novelist, but had a difficult time thinking up my own stories. The stories are already there for a historian. This is actually a joke on the square. I think I could -also joke that I like history because it is like detective work, except you don't have to handle dead bodies, or shoot guns, or deal with living bad guys who want to shoot you.
Well, maybe it does involve the first two, but only if you want to do either, and there are sometimes bad guys who want to do worse that shoot you, but that messes up my half-baked metaphor.
I wanted to write novels because I loved reading novels; and I developed a love for reading novels because they allowed me to escape from the wretched world in which I lived in a way that kept me from being beaten and in a way that gave the illusion that I was more intelligent than I actually was. Not that I was stupid, but a kid or teenager who reads is automatically assumed to have a very high I.Q. and mine was merely average. That, sadly, led to more situations from which I had to escape through the stories in books.
Being a novelist seemed to be a way to create my own world in which to escape, and to make a living at it. Except for that whole part about creating my own world. That seemed to be a stumbling point. So, I thought about becoming a literature professor, then I could escape into other people's worlds and make a living. I finally settled on historian because I knew that my life as a literature professor would involve mostly grading freshman essays every night, and I could pretend to be a novelist by writing about the stories that already existed. In fact, I could have even more fun by uncovering those stories in the archives.
Thus was the way that my 22-year-old, extremely naive mind worked. A whole lot of other stuff has happened in the ensuing half of a life time since, but this starting point still informs the way that I approach my work. I think in terms of stories, I think of how I can inhabit that other place in time, I'm drawn to the private lives of people and the way that they interact with other people, and I try to figure out why they did what they did and the consequences. If I can't get into their heads -- and the most intriguing people won't allow you there -- I try to metaphorically walk beside them and see what they saw. Thus, my attraction for going to the sites and the graves of my subjects, and of going to living history museums, not just to see but to understand another era and how the material world might shape what that person did or thought, how they perceived that place in time in which they lived.
I sometimes wonder if this involves more imagination that is scholarly acceptable or, conversely, if there is a way to do this more methodically, armed with more theory. In any case, I do know that this method, such as it is, is wreaking havoc on my back.
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