Text by Morrigan Fogarty
Image by Alžbeta Szabová
Get on the train from Amsterdam in the direction of Hilversum. Once there, walk northeastward and stop when the city meets the fields. Search for the hills. Stand and listen. You will find the dead. Buried at the Zuiderheide in mounds of stone and dirt sit 4000-year-old bronze age bodies, unnamed and unremembered but found again through history. Your feet will stand in dirt that has been ploughed and seeded, burned and razed, untold histories exist all around you, that you will not know. Around them, you’ll see people walking their dogs.
The persisting myth of the Library of Alexandria takes itself on in a variety of forms, some emphasizing the destruction of knowledge by Christian mobs, some as a tyrannical excursion into knowledge production and an undermining of free thought, but ultimately the myth is concerned with one thing:
We were going somewhere, and then we weren’t.
Do you know how to make Greek fire? Do you know what Greek fire is? It is, allegedly, a type of weaponized fire that no water can quench, that would destroy all in its path. It’s not the only mystery of antiquity. There are images of a giant glass pane that could manipulate light in such a way as to produce a beam of pure destruction, cutting ships in half and charring corpses in its wake. Knowledge that has now been lost. The idea posited by those who believe in the myth of the Library of Alexandria is that at some point in history, we lost a beacon of knowledge so great and wonderful that we still today are unable to recreate fanciful contraptions and devices. This is then of course followed by fanciful graphs and charts showcasing that if the Library had not been destroyed the linear line of human history would have at this point skyrocketed us into the HYPER MEGA FUTURE. This is of course absurd if you think about it for five minutes. Art depictions of fire and laser beams could simply just be art, but regardless the Library stands to represent the very fascist idea of what we had and lost. A callback to a forgotten time, a sort of academic revanchism.
Our engagement with the Library of Alexandria is also markedly impacted by recent history. And by recent I mean the Victorian era, a time in which to differentiate themselves from the “barbarians” of the past, a great effort was undertaken to highlight the European Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”, a notion that still damages our conceptions of history to this day. Shoe stretchers are made into torture devices and the very humanity of Middle Age peoples is shunned for the idea that in the fall of the Roman Empire, they all lived at each other's throats in complete disgust and squalor. Ignore the fact of course, that at this time the European continent was experiencing a blossoming of religious thought and cross-cultural connections with growing Islamic empires that valued knowledge so much that they also held libraries as large as the destroyed one in Alexandria - no - the Europeans were ignorant stinking masses with no ability to rationalize the world around them. This was the goal of the Victorians, and it was done so that essentially they would look better. It's of course absurd and untrue, but when a lot of us today look at the Library of Alexandria we engage in this same practice. We act as though the destruction of one very large building would lead to some kind of societal collapse, as if that knowledge held their sprung out of the ground and only existed in the library. The real library was a temple, a museum in that it was dedicated to the muses. You would find scroll depositories certainly (no books), but most important would be the passages of living scholars, people coming to teach and discuss. What was lost when the building was destroyed was a space in time for ideas and discussion to flourish, but this did not directly mean a loss. Knowledge production is fluid and moving, as the library fell countless other monasteries continued their scribing of Plato and Aristotle, and new knowledge came into being each day.
The underpinning of the Myth of the Library also relies on the false notion that history is a linear process, things are either getting better or worse, when in reality history is not a real thing. We can not point to the past as much as we can see its echoes in the present, but these echoes are always false simulacra of reality, marching forward not towards some incline or decline but aimless wandering, bumping into walls and falling into holes. I don’t want to suggest some meaningless reading of the past, there is value in understanding how we used to be, mainly in that it can reflect how we are now. The past is valuable, but the study of it is failable, and too much emphasis on how things used to be and how much better they were is just simple fascism. You may walk your dog along the graves of the greatest scholar who ever was, but because the production of history didn’t pick up on it you will never know. This is nothing to lose sleep over, the world is still out there right now in all its glory and folly for us to make new again.
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