I Feel You. Maybe.

I am a historian. I write and teach about emotions in history, and about religion, mass violence, and space. Not outer space. Rather, the spaces we all make and inhabit, every day.

It can be tricky business being a historian. One can feel impossibly distant at times from what one is studying. When I write about colonial America, I am of course hundreds of years past it. And when I write about Europe, I am geographically distant as well. But the historian wants to be there. To think one’s way into a setting in order to understand it.

Less often, we try to feel our way into the past. That is a more daunting venture. Because how can we know what people so far from us feel, how they live in a certain kind of emotional world? A world that is so profoundly unknown to us that the best we might do is to heedlessly imagine the feelings of those who inhabit it. We try to think of them like we think of us and then build a world for them out of the materials of our own lives. We think of them as people who feel as we do. So much can go wrong with that. And especially so in a project such as this, where the voice of the colonized is missing.

But emotions are fundamental to life. If we do not dig into peoples’ emotional lives, we do them injustice as historians. We limit them. We harm our subjects by neglecting to register the core of their humanity.

Writing music about the experience of being a colonist in a spectacular imperial setting has been my way, these past months, to try to deepen my sense of what it felt like to be such a person. And what, in turn, colonization was and is about. One thing that comes with that enterprise: it all gets very messy. And that is good. Because people are messy, full of contradictions and paradoxes.

Songs are emotional. Music is emotional. I practiced a new mode, for me, of feeling my way into the past, and into a world very different from mine, as I imagine both of those. Music, as it is often said, brings people together. I think that has been the case for me and Emily and George.

JC December, 2021