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193 Murray Pomerance Who Was Buddy Love? Screen Performance and Jewish Experience Time Travels Two chronologies, two histories, and thus two forms of life run in tandem through our conception of time. One of these, which we may think of as a relative history, positions events in a linear order that is more or less agreed upon by members of a culture who share a language for interaction and system of reference for orientation. This relative abstraction is the “History” we read about in history books. It is a scheme that permits each of us to identify the boundaries of experience in relation to some shared discourse and map that transcend us, a scheme that we take to have been there before we were born and that we presume will outlive us and, outliving , either mark us for posterity or consign us to oblivion. This is the history that makes comprehensible such questions as, “Where were you on December 7, 1941?” (when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) or “Where were you on November 22, 1963?” (when John F. Kennedy was shot) or “Where were you on August 9, 1974” (when Richard M. Nixon resigned) or “Where were you on September 11, 2001?”—comprehensible exactly because these dates are widely accepted and acknowledged as dramatic and significant; and because we have already succeeded in placing them relative to one another in a “picture” of our contemporary world. I call this history relative because in any culture its method of ordering depends largely on the prevailing forces that are shaping public memory and anticipation. (All four dates above focus on nationalism.) We tend to reify this history as fixed and unchangeable, but its constitution is based on a negotiated agreement about temporality, measurement, recordkeeping, and social memory. 194 Murray Pomerance The “agents” we most often put in charge of shaping and recording this history tend to be the press, the media, the universities, publishing, and “established” artists. The second history, what I would call absolute history, is embodied through experience and personal memory, personal memory understood as a perduring trace of feeling, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility .” In absolute terms, time begins wholly and entirely as we experience its beginning. Example: for me, born in August 1946, motion pictures began with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), not Edison’s peep shows (c. 1895) or that little-train-that-could chugging in La Ciotat (1896), all of which I have learned about but that in a crucial way I do not recognize. Dorothy Lamour riding on an elephant in a glittering parade thus “absolutely” predated the Barbara Stanwyck of Stella Dallas (1937) and the Ingrid Bergman of Casablanca (1942), in my view. Each of these two histories, the cultural history and my own, is a historyas -I-know-it, since I feel and remember absoluteness (in patches) and take pains to recognize the relativity of culturally assigned and valorized information , but these two histories I must articulate in different ways as I try to make my historical consciousness sensible to others. Relative cultural history , being shared by you, must continually reflect this collective ownership in my expression; this is like giving directions by making reference to a set of landmarks other people know and agree upon just in the way that I do: history as language. There is a historical canon, according to which Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon and Theodore Herzl come before Emma Goldman, who comes before Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler. But surely there are young people today, born in the mid-to late 1980s, for whom, thanks to Steven Spielberg, Schindler takes precedence over those others. And speaking of my own—entirely uncanonical—history: it is something I can make intelligible only through a more poetic process, a process that begins with my feeling of truth and then outs itself through my struggle to chisel and refashion language so that, far from merely rigidly containing the common code (as Paul Goodman refers to meaning and capacity for meaning that are generated through the system [Speaking]), it works to facilitate actual speaking. Actual speaking is not language. Speaking is to language as absolute is to relative history. Absolute history begins with my need, in this case my first memories: that is, what seem to me, as I move in darkness backward to the source I will never discern, the earliest discernible moments. For instance, Christopher Walken recently revealed that he could still...

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