Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“It’s been submitted, I take it,” Kames said. “The dissertation.”

“I’ve had my viva, actually, though I haven’t gotten the official results yet. There’ll be the usual corrections, I’m sure, the examiners always ask for some, but I assume I’m basically done. It went well.”

“Good. You know, your supervisor, James Hade, is an old friend of mine,” he said. “I hadn’t talked to him in years, until your application came in. He thinks well of you, all in all.” Kames smiled. “Anyway, we don’t always see eye to eye. He’s a very good teacher, though.” The next words came haltingly from his mouth: “So, this proposal. Imperial history. The first thought — actually, the first thought I had, I have to say, is what’s this got to do with philosophy?”

“Not very much, really. But then, philosophy is never very far away from anything, so—”

“But how would you bring your learning to bear?”

“There’s a history of ideas in play. Just in a different way.”

Kames ran his thumb up the edge of the papers. “Not much discussion of intellectuals, or ideas as such, though. It’s not very clear, anyway, from what you’ve given me. These drafts.” Kames set the papers on the table at his side, beneath a darkened lamp.

“There is some of that, actually. I can show that to you soon. But it’s about the intellectuals of another culture, the monks, their methods, their ideas of history and interpretation. As far as the West, though, that’s true.

“But that’s what I think is interesting,” Stagg continued. “The intellectual history here works in another way. It’s a break with the classical sort, which is closer to history of philosophy, but with a wider range of thinkers. The ideas I’m interested in tracing here, and they’re mostly political and moral, they were first formed not just, or even mostly, by intellectuals, but by explorers, traders, soldiers. Marco Polo is the obvious example. Their impressions are like ideas in embryo.

“The European sources I’m drawing on most heavily are from a Dutch soldier and two English traders, their journals and letters and, in the case of one, his published chronicle. Mostly I’m trying to see how ideas can develop in a totally concrete way, not as some broad current in a culture, but down through the generations of a single family.”

“Yes, and of some political and intellectual influence. Your family.”

“Well, the pieces would also form part of my genealogy. Literally. But given the specifics of this family, I think the genealogy doubles as a history of ideas. And that would be the interest.”

Kames riffled through the pages and found the brass marker he’d laid. “Carl Rutland Stagg.”

“My mother’s side.”

“And Haas, the warrior.”

“On the other side. A slightly less direct relation, but yes. The Dutch-German part. My father’s family.”

“And how far back are you planning to go with all this?”

“To the time of Rutland’s stranding in Sri Lanka, 1660. But with some mentions of Rutland’s grandfather. And Haas’s. So maybe 1600.”

“The civil war in England too, then, or do you consider that distinct? Perhaps the Rutland role in it.”

“Cavaliers, defeated in the end. That’s about it for their role, I think.”

“That was the pejorative, for a Royalist. Cavalier.”

“Right. But it doesn’t strike me that way now, not so simply.”

Kames looked past Stagg to the windows behind him with eyes that seemed to have gone bluer. “Nor I. But most people still balk. The dictionary does.” He put one hand on the sides of the knot around his neck. “So, these lectures are personal.”

“That and something more.”

“Your motivations, I mean.”

“I do think you can recover something of yourself like this, through genealogy. Sure. But once you get started, blood’s never the end of it. The Buddhist monk, Darasa, there are things he’s doing with history that speak to me. He’s the main non-European source I’m using.”

Kames raised his other hand, put it at the back of the hourglass-shaped knot, and stretched it slightly. The weave of the silk caught the light. “Well I’m certainly intrigued by what you’ve said, and by what you’ve given me. Still, I can’t really say I grasp the meaning of these drafts. They read like scenes from a novel. Not essays, really. The richness of the details—”

“That’s the other break. But the details are actually all in the letters and journals. There are drawings as well, full of information.”

“You’ve supplemented them in some way, though.”

“By other texts of the time, yes. The clerical record, Knox’s chronicle, Dutch and Portuguese documents.”

“More than that. The perspective is so deeply integrated, and the language, it’s not the historian’s. Not the modern historian’s anyway. Maybe Herodotus, who was almost a novelist.”

“Well, there is something ancient going on, you’re right. Herodotus matters. He wrote first of all to be heard, to be experienced by a gathered audience. And these pieces are meant to be heard too. Thucydides, say, he wrote more to be read, studied. It’s very smart but also clinical, as he would have it. He wanted a certain sort of ‘scientific’ history.”

“So then how much of this is, well, reconstruction, imagination?”

“Well, the prose, the diction, the point of view are mine, however close I come to occupying their standpoints at times. It’s the binder, the frame. I haven’t tried to recreate the past, only represent it, in my terms. That’s all Herodotus. He is a master of form, I think. And it also means I haven’t attempted the kind of philosophical history Hegel wanted. I don’t know if that’s possible, to go native in the distant past.

“But I’ve followed Herodotus only so far. There’s something right in wanting a properly scientific history. Certainly we can’t go back now to the older, more poetic form. So, the details, I haven’t taken the liberties he did. They’re all strictly culled from the sources. So it’s not an imaginative act at all, if that’s what you mean by ‘reconstruction.’ I haven’t filled anything in. Whatever gaps there are in the sources are still there in the presentation. That’s why they’re fragments.”

“I noticed that.”

“That’s because I’ve stuck with the known facts, as far as they can be known, anyway. I’ve looked for convergences, checked one voice, one account, against another. Any details that ended up in dispute I’ve left out or signaled. But for a lot of the material — most of the psychological details — there just aren’t multiple sources. The records are spotty.

“But unless I had a reason to suspect error or deceit, I’ve let them stand. If I’d stripped out every detail that couldn’t be corroborated, there’d be no texture left. And the texture isn’t really incidental, for me. It is the history. To thin it out in the name of some sort of definitive history would be a mistake, I think, when there are so few conclusive facts. It would reduce it all to this trivial nub of truth. I’d rather let some of the impurities remain.”

Kames stared into him. “I’m not asking you to change them. I’m trying to get a handle on what you’re doing. It doesn’t sound like you’re imagining things in the ordinary sense. But there’s a kind of precariousness to it, don’t you think?”

“‘Precarious’ is just right. It’s history out on a limb, at least some of the time. But there is always a limb, at least. Nothing’s being included just because. For all the elements, and their selection and arrangement, narratively, there’s something in the documents that lends them support. That sounds impossible, given the level of detail, but that’s what’s so odd about the evidence, especially what I have from Rutland, and also from the monk. They’re so rich in sense details, internal and external, it’s made a scenic style possible — without having to imagine anything.