What Is It I Cannot See?

I have been contemplating and writing about the question, "What Is It I Cannot See?" Specifically, I have been asking this question in terms of historiography. I am trying to access ideas and thoughts that dominant discourses occlude from our sight as we look back to the past. Why is this important? This is important because every one of us draws from the past in some way, shape, or form to create our identity. I was born in Dallas. My family once lived in Italy. My kindergarden teacher told me not to run with scissors and for some reason I have always followed that rule. My parents divorced when I was a child and today I struggle to perceive intimacy as something productive instead of something dangerous. My past makes me who I am. Why else is it important to address and attempt to answer the question, "What is it I cannot see?" It is important because each of us, you and me, are individuals, but we live with thousands of other individuals. We must interact with the world around us. These interactions span the spectrum from enjoyable to detestible, some people we love and some people we hate. For some, hatred manifests itself in violence. In some instances, certain people of like identities try to exterminate entire races of people. My point here is that since we learn from the past, and that we learn by reading the accounts people have left for us, it is incredibly important that we rigorously perturb the accounts we have. If we do not, then the history of the winners, as the saying goes, is all we ever know. Voices are left unheard. Certain sights are left unseen.

A member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Dipesh Chakrabarty, writes about this concept of perturbing our way of thinking about the past in his book titled "Provincializing Europe." The Subaltern Studies group is, in a way, a branch of historiography, but they specifically attempt to recover unseen sights and unheard voices from India's past. Specifically, from India's colonized past. In his epilogue he writes about the phenomenon of magic and offers accounts of magical acts that raise the question "Do I believe this?" His point is not to convince the reader that magic is real, but rather that to discredit magic as a whole, to label it as superstition or religious ritual, is to cut down an entire way of seeing. In relation to the stories he tells about magic, he says:

They refer us to the plurality that inheres in the "now," the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one's present.

I believe that is one of the more important things I have heard in my life. It ties directly to the question, "What is it I cannot see?" In what way am I exchanging a singular occurance where there was in fact a plurality? In what way is the way in which I see my current self and my current time blinding my view of the past?

If this seems totally incoherent and you think I have gone crazy or lost the ability to speak like a normal person, I submit this painting by Rene Magritte, which, for me, sums everything I just wrote up into one picture.