Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 7.1,2

Ch. 7.1,2. The Conflicts Constitutive of Historical Inquiry

Rytius’s body woolens were damp and he was therefore chilled from his visit with his brother and his sojourn through the park, outside, in the rain, too lightly dressed. Water ran down his chest, stomach, neck, and back. He disrobed, there, just inside his door, drying himself with the thick undershirt. He walked himself and his damp clothes to the hearth in the family room. Last night’s fire was long since out, ash-covered embers merely warm, and he did not have time to start another fire before he had to leave again. He draped his drawers across the cook crane, hung his undershirt on the pot hook, and padded into the dining room, where last night’s dishes remained. He always cleaned his plate, but he didn’t always clean his plates. The important thing was that last night’s liquor bottle remained as well. He took a deep swig to warm his bones, thinking blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup so that the outside might also be clean. He stood, waiting for the chemical warmth to spread throughout his belly, up his throat, the back of his neck, across the top of his skull, around his ears. He took fuzzy steps to get the gifts for the gathering, which is to say a full case of cider for the grown folks and an alphaphonics primer for the girl, because today was a very special day. His goddaughter was ready to choose her name.

7.1. Fila Green, the First Recordkeeper

St. Mark’s remained a church. In 2108, the deacons, seeking protection from Prince Appall’s tax collectors, leased the annex, in perpetuity, for a nominal rent, to one Polo Green, chaplain to the prince, who pleaded their case, pledged the nextborn male Green to the prince’s service, and established the policy whereby churches may register their deeds to pay less tax. Polo died with one daughter, Prittiess, and when he came of age, her eldest son Fila inherited both the lease and the church registry concession. Pastor Snap Arnold, Polo’s post-retirement appointee, took a liking to him immediately and practically adopted the boy, inviting him to family functions and introducing him as his son. He encouraged Fila to read widely, hoping eventually to guide him toward the ministry, like he did his nephew-in-law Erron, but Fila was a preternaturally independent young man with little care for his obligations either to the churches or to the prince, and he spent most of his time with friends from home seeking out, trading, and appraising the works of olden musicians when he should have been studying accounting or learning to plumb. He was released from the prince’s guardianship and sent home, where he devoted himself more entirely to his passion, or according to lore and most of Fila’s fellows, succumbed more thoroughly to his dissolution.

His collection consisted mostly of black and silver music albums, but soon also papers, books, and magazines of various languages, larger and smaller magnetic videotapes of myriad forgotten illegible formats, newspapers and clippings, reproductions, prints, and paintings of all media and any style, negatives, canisters, and albums of photographs both personal and journalistic, diaries, logbooks, daily planners, letters public and private, video silvers, comedy blacks, audiotapes of all sizes and systems, and assorted petit objets d’art soon overflowed the ample space available in the annex, and he busied himself with cataloguing and indexing them, and crafting synopses and commentaries.

He and his fellows had established a new sort of competition among themselves, not quite the game as it came to be, but finding and sharing the most stunning olden texts and artifacts, and the rivalry between Fila and his friend Tellem was particularly controversial. Whereas Fila was almost exclusively concerned with artistic and literary records, just as a matter of personal interest, Tellem became more interested in technological and economic records after discovering an old business and technology library while exploring the subway tunnels in midtown Manhattan.

Things were such that science in general—collective endeavor in pursuit of knowledge—had been on hold since before the North Atlantic Wars, given the harshness of New York’s occupation, and it was the first time in years that anyone felt safe being in the tunnels for extended periods. Tellem’s idea was that they should focus their efforts on these social sciences, which might provide helpful insights into what happened, how and why. In those days, when the game had barely taken shape and when what came to be known as recordkeeping was only just beginning, Fila had no argument. He had only his own personal inclination, whereas Tellem had a mission and a purpose. Absolutely everyone agreed in principle with Tellem, even enthusiastically, but it turned out not to be a simple matter.

7.2. Methodenstreit

The first controversy was over whether Fila and Tellem were engaged in the same activity. It was clear to all that the activity was identical, only the object being different. Colloquially speaking, different subjects were investigated by different recordkeepers, but they were still keeping records.

The second controversy was more subtle, and it was whether the subject, philosophically speaking—i.e., the investigator—was changed by the material investigated. And secondarily, whether this change might meaningfully change the perception of the material, and thereby the function of the subject’s methodology, so that two differently engaged subjects may eventually be said no longer to be engaged in the same activity.

It was Fila’s insight that, where recordkeeping is concerned, the only activity is thought and the only object is knowledge. Surely, if those two concepts are useful at all, thought and knowledge must be universal. The various activities of minds engaged in the creation of knowledge ultimately cannot be different, because mind and knowledge are universal in their ambition, even if they proceed by contradiction and conflict, and even if this object demands that particular method.

Tellem’s position was and has been no less compelling, perhaps because it is so familiar, particularly to those with his particular pragmatic bent: there is no use thinking or talking about universals before even approaching the object. One can never know whether one is ultimately right, and one will waste one’s life in interminable arguments over finer and ever more abstruse debates over how one should approach. Meanwhile, so many particular concrete things can and have happened in human experience. There may be certain matters of something like abstract principle when it comes to things like basic human decency, as in the evil of murder, for instance, but trying to draw fundamental principles of scientific investigation from something like the dynamics of human thought cannot be reasonable, because the vast numbers of different humans think differently about different objects. Knowledge has nothing to do with conflict or controversy, but must prove itself adequate—as insight, revelation, advice, know-how, something that looks like recognition—to the real needs of our real existing lives, and we must be able to grasp it with our real existing understanding. All that we can say is the same as all that we can do: develop our principles from observing what works and our knowledge from knowledge that works.