Friday 30 September 2016

Ghosts and memory

Daily Draw, Wizards Tarot, The Wheel of Fortune


This card with it's ghostly figures in the background triggered my theory brain (good thing it is still working). Whether or not you agree with Marx's politics he could turn a word or two. Twenty years on from my history degree I still have almost total recall for this memorable form of words. 


'Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. 

And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language'. 

Karl Marx, 1818-1883 




3 comments:

  1. one of the pleasures of growing older is and sense of comfort I get when something old gets invented again. The world keeps spinning, around.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One thing that makes me smile is young people wearing 90s style clothes just as I wore 60s style as a student (and still now sometimes).

      Delete
    2. My husband calls those kids "hempsters" :D. Powerful quote from Marx; thanks for sharing that one.

      Delete