Concretely Visible and Other Historical Methods

One of the things I'm struggling with in my work -- perhaps grappling might be a more optimistic term, but struggling is likely more honest -- is how to build the scattered scraps of paper I come across into something more meaningful. A friend forwarded along Teju Cole's essay about the recently published poems of W.G. Sebald and I stumbled across a helpful passage:

The material ranges widely, and among the most memorable poems it contains are those based on small incidents from the lives of historical personages. Some of these poems begin (as he began all four of his novels) with a precise date stamp. “On 9 June 1904…” opens the one about Chekhov’s last days, in which a small circle of mourners, likened to a “black velvet caterpillar,” meet Chekhov’s coffin at a train station and are overshadowed by the band assembled there to meet the coffin of a now forgotten general.

So one idea would be to simply write poems about the names that pass under my eyes; but a second -- and probably more productive -- approach would be to follow Sebald in insisting on the dignity of these small details. Sebald's insistence on the small details of places -- things more broadly? -- that, in Cole's phrasing, "have been reduced to their smallest units by the forces of nature and history," reminded me in turn of a Carlo Ginzburg essay I read once and only half-understood. In "Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible," Ginzburg closes with this passage:

In the social sciences, theory is often tacitly identified with a broad approach à la Max Weber, and microhistory with a narrowly focused attempt to rescue from oblivion the lives of marginal, defeated people. If one accepts these definitions, microhistory would be confined to a peripheral and basically atheoretical role that leaves the dominant theories unchallenged. The case of Jean‐Pierre Purry, that early prophet of the capitalist conquest of the world, stands a chance of knocking down some of the barriers thought to divide microhistory and theory. A life chosen at random can make concretely visible the attempt to unify the world, as well as some of its implications.

There's an echo between the two -- Sebald's poetry of things at their most basic and Ginzburg's interest in the ways that individual lives might make the world "concretely visible." I'm not sure it gives me a guide as I head back to the archives this morning, but there's at least a reason for optimism.