Pride and Prejudice

Pride and disappointment.

“Iterative” or “Bealinda’s flow charts” turns 1 year next month. And to be honest, I don’t know how I feel.

Pride at starting- Disappointment at how far I have gotten.

I have Kee kee’d it with Tacitus, my “gossip guy” I have “done Shegeh lifestyle” with Livy (And boo I am still in those trenches) I have done beautiful work with Black history month (which I belatedly did in March not the American February or the British October.) I threw out Simon Scharma for trying to tell me about things he couldn’t prove. I have woken up at 5am for a good number of Saturday’s hauled my ass to the British Library and sat with my demons (Titus Livy I’m looking at you) for weeks.

At the end of every Livy book I quote Snoop Dogg. “And last but not least…I want to thank me, I want to thank me for doing all this hard work, I want to thank me for having no days off. I want to thank me for being a giver” And every time. I feel it in my soul, because Livy seems to want to drag me by my hair through the “shegeh trenches” I made something unique and something I always want to go back to… I have changed my career trajectory so I can spend more time with it…Life has gotten in the way. I started a new job and it has been kicking me in the ass repeatedly. Microsoft Word is also misbehaving and I am scared of it.

The thing is “Iterative” or Bealinda’s flow charts currently weighs in at 171 pages. And that doesn’t include my Tacitus writing, or Simon Scharma which I threw out for being useless. So lets be kind to me and call it 200.

Here I start at the beginning of Rome, (I always want to start with the Illyad but I am so royally not there yet.) Livy is kicking my ass, do I really want to “rumble in the jungle with Homer? “ I think the f*** not. I also tried “Beowulf” one time. Epic poems are exactly that. Epic. Epically hard to read.

But anyway, I started at the beginning of Rome, (then when I get there I will loop in Tacitus, because Livy and Tacitus are more or less contemporaries.) I am now on book 6… of 40 known books. Livy has been, and I cannot stress this enough, beating me on the regular. So in this time when I have gotten what I wanted out of the process I can tell you why I am scared.

So in this document which was originally called “Bealinda’s flow charts” technically has 3 parts. because I wanted to do a flowchart through history. I want every King, duke, dictator and Military tribune one, after the other after the other until I get to Italy 1980. I want to see every Alderman, Every King every archbishop until the 1970’s over 5 countries. Yes I am doing the “great man theory of history...” but mind your business I am an amateur autodidact who is basically refusing to go to university and be told yet another story. How will I know if they are great or not, worth the hype or not if I can’t judge for myself.

Anyway, I have done it. Every Roman King, Consul and Military Tribune is documented in the word document.

The second part has a PowerPoint backup document which I will tidy up at some point, which even though is the backup document to the word document actually can tell the story in its own right. The third part is “Bealinda’s new word’s repository” which is essentially my own private dictionary where I record all the new big words Simon Schama and Titus Livius (Livy) beat me over the head with. I store them, and whenever someone annoys me I cuss them out with these new obscure words and it means I don’t just lose the knowledge.

“Iterative” is the name it got on October 12th when my old laptop decided to play with me, I ditched it expeditiously after that, I think I was 70 pages in by that time. I told my mum “history is Iterative and this is a collection of all the iterations.” Hence the name. I am sat exactly where I was when I realised all my work was gone. Devastated wasn’t even the word.

But here’s where I am scared. Word messes up the formatting like nothing you have ever seen before. And I forgot to copy and paste in the 53rd-57th Consuls diagram… You’d think “Just copy and paste them in right? “ or add a page and do it?”  Wrong. Hours of labour. I’m not kidding. Because this document is picture heavy, I have added maps galore, because I’m awful at geography. How do you know an army came north or south if you have no reference point? Sometimes its crucial to the story, e.g. “the Rape of Lucretia,” her husband was in a camp at the time, the distance from the camp to Rome tells you how long it took him to get to her, providing a messenger was sent immediately, on a fast horse. It either adds drama to the story or completely removes it.  It also tells me how far the Roman colonisation is going. Because I have to physically look at the map and watch “the boys” go further and further to their enemies. Rome, who used to fight with the Sabines, now has 25 tribes. It colonises and makes treaties. Treaties with friends, colonies of former enemies.

Then I have the church history. Reading part of one book doesn’t make me an expert, but damn, when Jesus died he would have been embarrassed to see what people believed. Pre Nicene treaty it was the wild west out there. Probably still is.

Black history, has been humbling, the history of my ancestors is a hero arc, because I know we win. But those trenches, were trenches. I have read “Le code Noir” i.e. the black code on how French colonists must treat their slaves. I have read “Somerset vs Stevenson” which was a cliff hanger. I read the “Missouri compromise” which was a land treaty with a backhand about slavery ditto the “Capitulation of Montreal” there were so, so many more articles about a duke’s ship and who pays than the entirety of black and indigenous people in Canada. There are more articles in an INTERNATIONAL TREATY about a commisiary and his debts than the entirety of my people. And that tells you something. 57 articles. Only 1 about black people but a solid 20 about who is paying for the ships to return the French back to France, That tells you something. Then there was the first confederate President who because black people were nice to him and he showed basic humanity to people he knew he owed everything and was taking advantage of, he is lauded as a good man.

They said it out loud almost immediately, he bought 300 acres of land and couldn’t afford white labourers, so bought I think 17 slaves. He bought an elderly black man and because he knew the man was elderly and had rheumatism he treated would ask after him. They said he cried when Unionist soldiers burnt the houses of the slaves down… Because that was his property. The slaves didn’t own those houses, it may have been their possessions that got burnt but it was their human trafficker that was legally responsible to find them shelter, to repair/replace the houses and to make sure they were clothed and fed. He was crying for himself, not the slaves. He was about to spend bank on replacing those assets. Black people saved his life on several occasions. And black people went to his funeral. We don’t know if he raped any of his slaves, but he was comfortable with a system that kept women raped and men “buck broken” i.e. sexual and physical violence with the intent on breaking the spirit of the black man in front of his family. All because he personally didn’t do it and had his slaves tried and punished by their peers. He was painted with the air of “benevolent patriarch” but the system he supported was a violent and cruel one and he was willing to go to war for it. Have others’ sons die for his right to own another human being, but he bowed to a black man and said hi because a “negro won’t beat him at courtesy” so he’s a good guy right?

I have all this, and yet I can say honestly, I haven’t read enough, I don’t have enough. Iterative isn’t going to be 200 pages it needs to be 10,000 or maybe 100,000. I have wrestled with motivation, with selling the idea to friends and family. The lack of response has been deafening.

I would say, honestly the pain in my heart from trying to talk to my mother, about this has been yet another new experience. My father, is dead. And I am his child. Undeniably, in face and in trait. And academia is something that is inextricably tied to his personality. The Teacher, the lecturer, it wasn’t just his occupation or as the poem says “his vocation” its his “avocation” as well. To quote the poem Two tramps in the mud time by Robert Frost

“My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one” That was him. That is seen as masculine. The professor, the sage archetype. In a woman it is seen as the crone. The old woman, bitter and alone. So what is seen as a positive thing in him is seen as a negative in me. It has been exhausting. I have all these fantastic stories. "the triplet wars.” The Roman king who had a foreign leader drowned because the guy told him off for being 12 hours late for a meeting.  My completely uncelebrated guy Lucius Camelius, (all I do is win, win, win no matter what) my completely over celebrated guy Cincinnatus (the guy who the city Cincinnati is named after.) (he is basically famous because he’s a crap father who raised a thug, got broke because of that thug, and so when he was called to serve his country, he was humbled because he was broke, not because he was a good person, and Camelius beats him every time for number of victories on the battlefield the way the sun outshines the moon)  The absolute cliff hanger of Somerset vs Stephenson. The heart-rendering cries of Chloe, a slave woman in Canada who was being taken against her will to America who screamed so loud they passed a law for her in Canada. And the heroics of the black man who even though he couldn’t save her in the moment, made sure she and thousands like her would never suffer again… and my man did so expeditiously. She screamed in June. The law was passed in July. Because of a black man’s will. How he did that I need to do some more research into, because the way they tell it, it sounds like he basically walked into the Canadian Parliament and said. “this woman screamed as she was being trafficked and this will never happen again…” and they passed the law. Despite him not being a Parliamentarian. But it’s a beautiful story of a black man advocating for black women, and one that doesn’t get told enough.

All these things I have, but yet not enough. The reason being is whilst I have no shade to those who create on Instagram or Tic Tok, I am not cussing you, but I don’t want history to be in bite size portions. I don’t want that for myself. I want to sit one day and talk for 24 hours and get from the Illyad to the 1980’s. And I want you to hang on every word. Not just because I am brilliant, and because I am funny, but because history is stranger than fiction.

But now we get to the crux of it. The cons.  My reading speed is simply not it. I do this in my spare time and of that I have little. I am trying to improve myself in so many ways, and its working, I wanted Iterative to change me, and I guess it has, has it made me smarter? Yes. Has it made me better? Yes. But it has also created an isolation, a loneliness. Because my mother especially, but all of my family really, aren’t interested in hearing even the most casual of facts. My mum’s older sister was named after a Latin princess who is in King Romulus’ direct line, the only woman so far in 6 books who has been mentioned but not raped. But is that interesting to the aunt? No. I mentioned this to my mum on my birthday, and let me tell you. Never again. Worst birthday ever. Basically a lambasting of “you will never marry because what man would want to hear of such things” (I obviously didn’t mention the rape part, only the Latin princess part) and “I am training you for your husband who isn’t going to want to hear about all this history” Why would I marry a man who isn’t supporting my dreams? When I would be supporting his? What kind of weirdness is that? Then there is no point in a relationship if you can’t trust a man with something as basic as the tiniest titbit of knowledge? If his dick is that small I shouldn’t be marrying him. I have been very clear from the start, I do not want a “food and sex” husband, Otherwise I could be married in a week.  They think ignorance will get them somewhere. It will, it’s a first-class ticket to poverty. Of mind and of body and I refuse to join you on that struggle bus. I want whimsy, I want to discover. I want to hear my heart beating in my chest as I read on “Somerset vs Stuart” where at the last ½ a page they say “yeah despite all this we actually don’t like slavery and we’re making it illegal. Release Mr Somerset.” I want to ask the obvious question which is.

Somerset vs Stuart was in 1772, Britain owned America at this point. Why oh why wasn’t slavery outlawed there too? Because America was a colony, the declaration of Independence was July 4th 1776, it was subject to the king’s taxes but why not the King’s laws? One of the legit arguments was that Slavery wasn’t even technically legal in America, it was a custom, not a law. So why the hell didn’t we get mass manumission in 1772? Why did my ancestors suffer until the 1800’s? 

Quantifying Iterative is also hard. I want to tell the stories. I have basically spent too much of my life being lied to. I want to see first hand sources. Show me what the people who were there said, or as close as. I don’ t want a modern interpretation, I want to meet them where they are. Understand how we got from St Peter to Pope Leo. And judge each man (and woman) by his merits and demerits. I want to re-write history and stop calling them “slave owners” and start calling them “human traffickers, paedophiles and rapists.” Rather than allow the “benevolent patriarchy” of slavery argument to stick. I believe the truth is often in the middle, and so its not just “white bad, black good” or “black bad, white good  I just don’t buy it. I read the Maughan report and it broke my heart. The issues of the black American and Black British were first accurately recorded in the 60’s… Its 2025 and we have exactly the same problems.

I saw an Instagram post the other day of a Nigerian ceremony to honor a woman, they rode on horses to the traditional building, in traditional dress and masks, and I thought to myself.

“You have no idea of history. How did you get those horses? They’re not native to Nigeria, your ancestors sold 15 of mine for that horse’s ancestors. Buying it from a European, and when times got tight for the Europeans and inflation really started to hit, you sold 6 of my ancestors for that damn horse. Now you get on the internet and show off the horses that to you were worth killing, kidnapping and starting unjust wars to get prisoners of war for a damn horse. Thank you, thank you so much.”

I will be taking a week off work to “celebrate Iterative, it has taught me so much and yet so what is awful is that I still know so little. I can’t market it because I want the whole story told, the point is a direct line of history, a complete narrative including just deciding who is full of it or not.  I want to ask questions like, 1.How bad are my ancestors? 2.How hard was the push for independence and when did it begin?  3.Was “Sir Loyal heart really that loyal? (The answer to question 3 is No, “Sir Loyal Heart is Henry the eighth’s name for himself when he was married to Catherine of Aragon, but let’s talk about Bessie Blount (Henry Fitzroy’s mum) or Mary Boleyn or even more famously, Anne Boleyn? Sir Loyal Heart slept with over 100 women, and put that same woman, Catherine of Aragon away to die of cancer alone and separated from her daughter. But when he was younger and his wife turned a blind eye he could entertain himself with the title “Sir Loyal Heart” even though God and his conscious new better.)

As I sit here, in the British Library, 11 months on, terrified by the scale of the books I have not yet read, and the stories I haven’t grasped I still am no better at quantifying what will happen when I “win” this one. All I know is the scale of the task is massive and many people spend their whole lives on it. I’m 33, started at 32 and I need to get a move on. I have done almost 500 years of history I am not even in AD yet (Ano Domini (Year of Our Lord) which marks after the birth of Christ.

On that note, I’d probably better go back to it.

Wish me luck.

Grace and Courage.