What you cannot touch

Robert Lowell's last major volume, in 1973, was called simply History. There, in its opening, title poem, he wrote that ‘History has to live with what was here, / clutching and close to fumbling all we had’, for, ‘unlike writing, life never finishes’ (p. 24). In this, he was reworking what he had written in his previous volume, Notebook (1970), which speaks of an even more elusive concept: ‘I am learning to live in history. / What is history? What you cannot touch’ (p. 103).

Ambiguity pervades and links both versions, for ‘what was here’ is by definition not here now, and therefore discernible only in its traces. Yet this ubiquitous absence, in its effects, is also an all-determining, intangible presence, the ineluctable medium within which our personal presents live themselves out as they become the past, departing from us as history. Finished, history is beyond our power to alter, yet as the context of all our acts and omissions, it shapes and instructs them, constructing the patterns within which they will return to us as alien, other. History thus constitutes the deep structure of our lives at the very moment that we mistakenly imagine those lives to be somehow beyond, outside or above history. In the very instant of our actions and decisions we are dispossessed of them, as they are subsumed into a process that appropriates them to its collective alterity. History, that is, displaces us from ourselves, constructs us as other, not only to those who come after us, but also to ourselves. That is why we have to learn to live in it. We think we inhabit it naturally, but that is the very illusion in which we are rendered desolate, reduced to that state of exception which Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’ (see Introduction).

The title poem of the Irish poet Eavan Boland's 1975 volume The War Horse spoke of experiencing an anxious ‘unformed fear / Of fierce commitment’ at a crucial moment in the eruption of civil strife in Northern Ireland.