storytelling, part 5

it came up in conversation last night that perhaps the reason for telling a story is not what i have previously posited: you tell a story not to get the point across, but for the sheer joy of the telling. the experience of relating the story is at least as important as the story itself.

think of all the people who tell stories to audiences that already know them. no new information is gained by any party, but the storyteller takes such pleasure in relating the tale that the redundance of it doesn't matter. sometimes, the listener is as enthusiastic about the retelling, but often they are not: how many of us know all our parents' stories already, and don't think they're likely to gain any new ones? it doesn't seem to matter to the storyteller, and maybe that's not a bad thing.

or--and i think this was my favorite example that came up--think of the old couples who don't need to tell their stories to each other anymore, but they do anyway, for the sake of reminding each other and reminiscing together. they get to a point where the performance is practiced, well-rehearsed. (and) each has their own part to tell, but both know all the lines, and they tell it the same way anyway. [i look forward to having someone to tell stories like that with. i imagine there is no deeper joy than building your life with someone you know fits you just right, to the point where even improvisation feels natural and well-rehearsed.]

storytelling, part 4

in the course of conversation the other night, i was faced with the reality that although storytelling is crucially important to our knowledge of ourselves and others (see parts 1 and 2), we may at times be reticent to tell our own stories, or pieces of them. afterwards, i started thinking about the reason for this.

on its face, it is obvious. there are stories i don't want to tell because they reveal a side of myself that i may not be proud of, or comfortable with, or expect other people to be comfortable with. but, returning to the original hypothesis (People want to be Known), this potentially creates two conflicts: 1) people may not want to be completely Known, for any number of reasons, and 2) people may be afraid of being misunderstood, i.e., someone believes that they know them, but their knowledge is incomplete or inaccurate.

or perhaps, if the goal of telling one's story is to make that sacred connection with another person, maybe the hesitance to tell a story stems from a motivation towards efficiency. if one fears or even anticipates that the connection might not be made, why waste the energy telling the story? that effort could be better spent relating a part of the story that would be more likely to build the connection, to make oneself better Known.

[this installment is not cohering the way i want it to.]

storytelling, part 3

(as a response to comments in part 2.)

on Genie: what if, instead of experiencing other people as a criterion for personhood, we posit that in order to exist as a person, a human must possess language? or, if it makes you feel better in the case of the very young, the potential to learn language?
[interesting: this debate keeps making me think back to morality & medicine class, where a substantial portion of the semester was spent talking about what makes someone a person (specifically with regard to arguments on abortion, euthanasia, and life support). none of the solutions we came up with seemed quite right.]

the depth of connection that can be achieved when reading something written across a potentially vast span of time or distance is, yes, profoundly spiritual.

How do i want my story to be told?
for years, i've had an agreement with a friend that whichever of us dies second will edit the journals of the first for publication. the problem with this is that both of us have been keeping journals for so long (and have plans to continue doing so for many more years before that time), so really what it will amount to is one person finally reading the other's journals, becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them, and remembering that no one would be interested in publishing them anyway.

i feel like there's a simple, sound-bite answer to this question, and i think it is, "in bits and pieces."

How do i want my story to relate to all of the others?
to the universal story that we each tell a part of?
tenuously. i want to make sure that when a fly hits my part of the web, the spider, waiting elsewhere, will know.

as for the influence i wish to have on one other person's story, i'll take that question as rhetorical, at least for now. but, in order to decide whether it will remain so, i will ask for clarification: am i choosing the person as well as the way in which i influence their story, or is it any given person?

and to Alex: me too. let's go.

storytelling, part 2

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."

storytelling, part 1

like everyone else, i've been tagged about four million times for the Facebook "25 random things" meme. (the main reason i haven't done it is that shortly before that fad started, i wrote a "50 random things" meme, so i figure it would be redundant.) i got to thinking about this last night, and coincidentally stumbled across a link (in somebody's Facebook status, no less) to a New York Times blog post on the same phenomenon, which linked to several other articles, and then....well, it was like Wikipedia-hopping, but with online news media. this post has nothing to do with any of those articles; i just thought it was kinda funny that as soon as i started thinking "wow, i should write about this," i found out that everybody else already had.

why is it that so many people have jumped on this meme, been so quick to reveal the intimate--often unnecessarily so--details of their lives to anyone within their privacy settings (which are so often frightfully unspecific)? one theory, and the one i'm most inclined to agree with, is that people recognize and leap at the opportunity to present themselves the way they want to be presented. as a corollary to this: People want to be Known.

this is where it grabs me.
i realized (and subsequently wrote down) over Creating Change:
"my journey this year is focused on the telling of tales."
and perhaps my whole journey is. (why write?)

several of the workshops i went to over that conference were about the use of personal stories to effect change. personal stories can be so powerful, for so many reasons, which i may discuss in another post, but not here.

i also scribbled somewhere recently, unfortunately undated and in an uncertain frame of mind, "The ability to tell our stories is crucial to our development as persons," later revised to "our development of a personal identity." think about it: if you can't tell your own story, how do you know who you are? we are nothing if not the sum of our experiences, external and internal. each person not only has stories, but is a story, or a series of them.

i have a hard time thinking of my life as a novel. it's more like a collection of short stories. maybe that speaks to my attention span, or maybe it speaks to the fact that i have a really hard time putting together one cohesive Story. (i wrote about this a little at the New Year.) or, maybe, it speaks to the fact that things don't always flow together that neatly.

either way, people need to be able to tell their stories--at least to themselves. whether it is oral or manual or written, narrative or poem or song, storytelling is an important way of making ideas, memories, experiences concrete and crystallized. i frequently say that i can't remember anything unless i write it down--which is why i knew when i stopped writing anything for a month in high school that i couldn't go on like that: there was no story. the best of my stories are the ones that are well-rehearsed: i wrote them down somewhere and i've told them many times, and they are inevitably the ones that figure most prominently in my sense of identity.

so how does it come back to people wanting to be Known?....
(why write? because i fear impermanence.)
this seems like a good place to break, and remark that "part 1" in the title implies the eventual existence of a part 2.