 
                         20051119.02

     History is a story which is told, and fate is the comple-
ment to history.  In history, it is the account which provides
the rationalization, the content of what happens, and the
framework of events.  Considered logically and realistically
history doesn't make much sense.  It is riddled with lacunae,
and the presumption that any discipline of history should be
able to bridge the gap between the telling of the story and
the inaccessible experience, or for that matter, between the
description and the inaccessible events themselves, or the
inaccessible objects referenced, makes no sense at all as
soon as it is articulated.  Yet history does make sense, and
that sense derives from its being told.  The validity of the
story is in the telling of it.

     It is where the story fizzles or evaporates, where the
historian or the story teller loses track of meaning, that we
resort to fate as a filler.  Where we are unable to discern
any purpose plan or pattern, where we can invent no chain of
causality, we invoke fate, destiny, we invoke God's reason,
God's purpose or plan, to supplement our understanding and to
preserve the intelligibility of the world.

     So far as our account is provided with rational
explanations, there is no fate; fate is like the stars which
become visible when the light of (story-telling) reason
disappears.  Rilkes notion in his Requiem, "dass Schicksal in
die Verse eingeht und nicht wiederkehrt," that fate enters
into verse, not to return, refers to an account of a sequence
of suicidal events for which our rationalization, if it
exists at all, is too painful or obscure. So we say, that's
how God willed it, we call it fate.

     Fate, in other words, is the chain, the pattern of
events for which we can find no reason, no rationalization,
no other language.  It is inconceivable to us that events
should have no logical, rational structure.  As a last
resort, we attribute what we cannot explain, to fate, to the
will of the gods, to the will of God.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
