In her book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea credits Van Wyck Brooks with coining the term usable past. Brooks wrote, “The present is a void and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”
O’Shea goes on to point out that, for young people in particular, the past can feel like a dead weight, there to hold us back from creating our future. But she warns us not to ignore the past. If we do, it survives “…as a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant.”
That term default genealogy struck me as much as the concept of a usable past.
Default means our choice is already filled in for us. That’s why the vast majority of documents generated on MS Word all look alike, Calibri font, 1 inch margins, single spaced. Default also means failure to fulfill an obligation or a debt. By choosing the default history, we are defaulting on our obligation to create and harness a usable past.
