Musical Improvisation

The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to ‘scorn delights and live laborious days’ is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past. To peer into that magic mirror and see fresh figures there every day is a burning desire that consumes and satisfies him all his life, that carries him each morning, eager as a lover, to the library and the muniment room. It haunts him like a passion of terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more, and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them … The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

The British historian A. J. P. Taylor used to delight in provoking more sober historians by positing tiny causes for vast events. The First World War, for instance, in his view was caused by railway timetables, because this locked the belligerent powers into a sequence of troop mobilisations and war declarations from which they could not escape. Even in his autobiographical writings he liked to emphasise the element of chance in his life…. But it is less than certain that he intended to be taken entirely seriously in this kind of thing, and more likely that he intended to irritate his more pedestrian colleagues, an activity at which he was generally very successful

and sometimes i think maybe what we need is to tell people that this is here because somehow in this plasticized world they have the automatic reflex that if something is labeled one way then that is all there is in it and we are always finding out to our surprise that there is more to blake or more to ginsberg or more to ‘trane or more to stravinsky than whatever it was we thought was there in the first place