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| Dr Fincham - Ready for the off |
In social science there is a research technique called 'phenomenology'. I trained as an archaeologist, long, long ago, and phenomenology, simply the attempt to understand how others may have experienced particular phenomenon, led to all sorts of oddities in that field in its time. Using your senses to 'enter the landscape you were studying' was a way of getting an 'ancestor's eye view' of the space they had once inhabited, and might well involve hauling a door frame to the location of a long vanished hut and sitting staring at what they may have stared at. In the process you might gain a little more understanding, if not actual enlightenment.
So what about chronomonology? As with space, I suspect it is with time. If it takes physically working your way down the invasion beaches to understand the spatial scale, how is it possible to understand how the unfolding of the events of WW2 felt through time? How long was it from start to end? How long between the crushing defeat at Dunkirk through The Blitz, and on to the first signs of victory in North Africa? It is easy to read these things, even plot them on a calendar, but that drive along the Normandy coast convinced me that the only way to really know was to chart it in real time. Not to 'live it', but at least to log it - to phenomenologically experience the passage of time through the events of World War 2 over their full length.
Why World War 2? I am 48 at time of writing, a generation brought up on airfix aircraft models, 1/75 scale soldiers, too many black and white war films still showing on BBC 2, grandparents reticent about how they had felt, what they had done and seen. It interests me in the way that only something that had shaped many of the adults around me when I was a child, but which I had only 'story book' knowledge of, could possibly do. Also, it is the biggest, most well documented, but relatively concentrated (chronologically speaking) event of human history, and so the very best subject possible for the first experiment that I am aware of in chronomonological research. If we throw in broadcast media too, music, films made during the war, recordings or radio broadcasts and the better immediate post war war films too (the ones that will have been watched by an audience who will have recognised if the events portrayed were reasonably accurate) there is a lot of rich material. We have to establish a specific view, we need to choose somewhere to watch from. The focus will thus be on the British experience, which I am best placed to understand and research. Specifically, I am sitting in the quiet back roads of Norfolk - but at one time home to a large US airforce presence - so a not uninteresting vantage point, but that perspective need to be more specific. I have created a backstory for the 'me of 1939' to help filter and shape my perceptions.
Finally, the inevitable thoughts about contemporary politics. We live in a time of an international order under great pressure from the rise of isolationism and rightwing popularism, driven by austerity in the wake of the financial crash. At least some of that popularism is being framed as a return to 'the good old days'. If the lessons of the past seem to be slipping away, perhaps the time of chronomonology is now. At the very least the eerie similarities between the 1930's and now will underline the fallacies of current developments. Are we as helpless in the face of unfolding history as we were? We shall see.
This blog, then, is my 'temporal door frame', and I will watch the view though it, looking 80 years back, until 2025. The date at the time of writing is the 30th of June, 2019.
Or, chronomonologically speaking, 30th of June, 1939. And counting.
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