let's begin with a hypothesis:
People want to be Known.
we could get all existential about it;
if no one else recognizes or acknowledges your presence, your experience, how do you know you exist?
(for that matter, even if they do, they could all just be figments of your imagination, but i'm really not an existentialist because that philosophy annoys me. cogito ergo sum and all that. i'm satisfied to let it lie. we all need one or two solid underlying assumptions that we don't have to question, and if they're untrue, we're probably better off not knowing. i find the assumption that i do, in fact, exist, to be one of those. if i'm not real, it doesn't matter whether i think i am anyway!)
i think it goes beyond that, however. i believe that part of what makes us human--part of what makes us persons (and we could debate that distinction as well; feel free to leave comments)--is a drive to seek interpersonal connection. part of this might also stem from my spirituality: i believe that humans have an instinctual drive to seek the divine, and i believe that the divine is present in every person, so it makes sense that each human would seek meaningful interaction with other persons.
every time i take up this subject, i end up writing something i didn't expect!
one of my major motivations is to help people become known. it's why i chose my profession (speech-language pathology, for those of you reading the cliffs notes version), it's why i write, it's why i like listening to people. the first, because i want to enable others to express themselves more effectively; the second, because i want to make myself known, hopefully beyond the place & time i'm present to speak for myself; the last, because i want to be able to tell others' stories so that they may reach more people than they could alone--and to help them know themselves. [because we know that the storyteller often learns as much from a good telling as the listener.]
it is my hope to eventually be able to tell the stories of many other people. there are so many good stories out there just waiting for an audience! this may be part of the reason why i so enjoy making up stories about people when i can't figure them out--i know there's a story there, even if it's inaccessible to me, and i know it's a good story. None of us are stock characters (i.e., sometimes all of our pieces don't belong to the same puzzle). Everyone is dynamic and multifaceted and fascinating.
there is a man i see almost every day, somewhere in my neighborhood, with an umbrella and a newspaper and a cigar. he must be at least 70 years old, and i want to ask him to tell me his story. we've never spoken, but when i smiled at him the other morning, he smiled back. maybe someday. if i ever get to ask, and he asks me "what story?", i will answer, "whichever one you think is most important."
3 comments:
I'll play the game because I want to lol
If you were born and immediately sent away to isolation (forget for a moment that human infants can't physically nourish themselves), you'd still exist. You'd never have been conscious of others around you. However, you'll never really be conscious. I take the case of Genie as my example. Raised in almost total isolation and discovered at the age of 14 or so, she emerged inhuman, unable to relate to her world in the way that beings of our species do--essentially, an animal. Sooo, I'm going to say that you will not exist as a "person" without other people, though you may exist in the physical sense.
moving on from that, you've definitely helped me get to know myself, and i had always thought i had everything figured out. i think the things you've mentioned fit quite well together. the people who are the best storytellers are not only those who have lived the best stories, but they are also those who have absorbed the best stories.
but maybe there's more to it than that. i think that everything is a story just waiting for the right person to tell it. and since everything is eventually connected to everything else by some association, you have to figure that all those little stories are really part of one big story. so anyone that tells even the shortest of stories is telling a part of the one story that connects all of us. The interpersonal connection that you and so many others seek, myself included, is inevitably achieved when any sort of story is told. i could read words written hundreds of years ago and experience a connection to an author long deceased whose thoughts and feelings may match mine for the briefest of moments. now that's spiritual.
At this instant, I'm wondering a few things. How do you want your story to be told? How do you want it to relate to all of those other stories? And if you could have influence the story of one other person in any way that you wanted, how would that be?
I think an absolutely fantastic writing project would be to collect the stories of homeless people, either in one city or many. Buy them lunch or dinner and just listen for a while. publish it or dont.
post hoc to part 3:
if i could have influence on the story of one other person in any way, i would make sure that they are comfortable with the one they have to tell.
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