And This is Our History: Steven Spielberg's histories and My Histories
One of the guiding lights to my career is Steven Spielberg.
Not the Steven Spielberg of Schindler's List.
The Steven Spielberg of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Once Steven Spielberg made these amazing movies.
E.T. Jurassic Park. Indiana Jones.
Then...
Then he'd done it all.
His alien movies. Both of them.
The dinosaur movies.
The Indiana Jones- style movies.
What do you do when you've already done everything?
You do history.
You can never run out of stories from history.
Steven Spielberg also did the kind of serious movies that the Oscars respects.
The kind that they told him were serious films when he was in school.
And there, he did stories from history.
Now we come into something else.
The rest of this little thing will not be about Steven Spielberg.
It will be about history.
There's the history that we all know here in the West.
The history Steven Spielberg is aware of.
You start with this beautiful dream, this odd mysterious thing way back in the misty depths of time called ancient Egypt.
Then on to Athens and Rome.
Classical Greece.
Ceasar. Pompey.
Alexandria.
Then, Boom! Rome falls.
The Dark Ages.
We rise out of the Dark Ages into a mysterious beautiful dream world of Knights and cathedrals and princesses.
The High Middle Ages.
It ends. Comes crasing down.
Then!- Light! The Rennaissance!
The modern world begins!
Europeans invade the Americas.
European Imperialism.
The American Revolution.
World Wars.
The 20th Century and the modern world.
And we look at it, and we see...
At the beginning, Ancient Egypt at the start of history is a total non sequitor.
It does not fit.
It is like seeing an alien world in the middle of it all.
A beautiful alien dream world.
Then, the real history.
The history that makes sense with the rest of it.
Athens and Rome.
Greece.
A beautiful distant classical world, like a distant picture on a distant wall.
Complete, total disconnect from our own experience.
But a beautiful mythic Golden Age.
Then, the Fall.
The Dark Ages.
They're, well... Dark.
Then, the High Middle Ages.
Part almost-fantasy dream, part a mess.
Okay, that makes sense a little.
The beautiful part is like Athens and Rome. Distant. A disconnect from our experience.
The mess... well, that's easy.
That's just the Dark Ages continuing, still going on.
Then, the Road to Modernity.
The Road to the Modern World.
Where we finally start feeling something that matters to many of us.
Not counting ancient Egypt, of course, which is this oddball fantasy dream out of an alien world that just does not fit with the rest of the story.
This is the history most of us know in the West.
The history Steven Spielberg knows.
And so, of course, what does he do?
He does the modern world.
And what is the most important parts of the modern world?
Saving the world from race problems and World Wars. Of course.
Then we have our world's real history.
The history I discovered after a lifetime of searching.
Ancient Egypt.
The non sequitor.
The part that doesn't fit.
That beautiful alien dream out of a fantasy movie that doesn't fit in with the rest of the narrative.
That's our world's real history.
You can see how the classical Golden Age of Athens and Rome can fit in with that, even as it makes sense as a lead-in to the rest of the story we all know.
Rome did not fall.
Rome did not fall!
It fell in the west!
It did not fall in the East!
The whole narrative we know here in the west, from this point on, is just the local narrative of western Europe on the far edge of the world.
The history of Africa, Asia, Russia and Greece, until the European colonialists and 19th Century Industry, was more like ancient Egypt!
Only better!
More deep and wise!
Just as beautiful!
Ancient Egypt was just the beginning!
And by the time of Periclean Athens, it thrived from Spain to India!
And was in the process of awakening in China!
By the time of the Ceasars, it was in a great Golden Age from China to India to Persia to Ethiopia to Athens and Rome themselves!
And at that time, ancient Egypt was still alive!
And when Rome fell in the west, it remained in the East!
To become Cairo and Istanbul in the 18th Century!
Where when George Washington was alive, it was still intact!
And for much of this time, great beautiful history was being played out in the Americas, in the world of the Mayas and the Incas, in a world of beauty and dreamlike fantasy that ancient Egypt would have appreciated!
And north of Mexico, that was still alive in George Washington's day, from the Tennessee of the Cherokee to the Pacific coast!
And that is our world's real history!
And that is the history that I have devoted the rest of my life to
As Steven Spielberg has devoted the rest of his life to the history he knows!
For more, look up my main site, which is my Deviantart page, and look at any of the histories!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson