Achilles, Zoroaster, Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas, Gaius Iulius Caesar, Yeshua the Nazarene, Karl I of the Carolingians (Charlemagne), Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert E. Lee, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Pepe Mujica, Francis I (maximum pontiff among the Catholic): some of my “hysterically historical … sort of “friends”, or at least I’ve hope they would have been among my friends if I’d enjoyed the privilege of having known them. They are perhaps portrayed bit hyperbolically by their biographers, at least as initially depicted to me, but I really identify with them. On some level. Or, … well, … with how they were been presented to me by our weird communicative media complex (you know, teachers, journalists, historians and best of all, novelists), mainly since that’s how they seemed when I sort of first “met” them. Virtually of course. That changed in time. They changed when, through my own research, it seemed to me that I’d gotten to know them better, more accurately, more profoundly. When, as a historian of sorts, I’d somehow been able to grasp their more complex realities, but then, that’s only what I perceived and reality was (and probably is) different, perhaps much different.
Maybe. …. But even so, … first impressions tend to stick notwithstanding subsequent evidence, whether involving reactive affection or disdain.
We humans are like that. Well, except perhaps for my late and sainted mother. Once our minds are made up about just about anything; once we’ve decided what to believe our minds are very, very, very hard to change. That, to some extent, explains sports fans, and political perspectives, and, unfortunately, history as well. And long lost loves, and simmering enmities. And loyalties. All “for better or for worse”, as expressed in aspirational traditional marital vows; although, perhaps, more frequently, much more frequently, for the worse.
We tend to calcify our beliefs, although we prefer to refer to the process as crystallization. Crystals seem more attractive than calcium. We clearly have wonderful powers of self-aggrandizement through delusion and rationalization. The concept of American Exceptionalism, a variant of the Hebrew concept of the Chosen People and the Nazi concept of the superiority of the Aryan peoples are prime examples. As is the European concept of the “White Man’s Burden”. Or our democratic delusion that if enough of us are wrong, everything will turn out right.
It seems amazing that we ever accepted “reflections” as accurately portraying anything, preferring not to see ourselves as we are but as we wish we were. Which of course explains, to an extent, the popularity of plastic surgery and girdles, and well, clothing (as well as the nudity taboo), and, on an emotive sense, the popularity of psychotherapy and perhaps, although it would seem oxymoronic, of purportedly self-reflective psychoanalysis. It’s a wonder we have no taboo concerning mirrors.
All of the foregoing, during strangely lucid intervals (or at least intervals which, for some reason or other I perceive as lucid), makes me wonder what I’m really like, what I really look like, who I really am and just how close to accurate what I perceive of as reality really is. Then I wonder just how lucid I’ve been as a write this, and whether it’s something I’ll ever re-read, or, for that matter, whether anyone else will ever read it.
Then I picture alien anthropologists from deep in the future, perhaps just short of the instant when entropy finally wrestles gravity to a draw, finding and, after long and usually fruitless efforts, finally deciphering what I’ve written, and wondering, perplexed, just who and what we were.
Something we probably need to do ourselves, while we still can.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 