Storytelling

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND STORYTELLING

 My grandfather didn’t speak often of the war.  The few times he’d reference it there would be this sentence attached:  “A dozen guys could march through the same jungle and when they come out the other side, there’d be a dozen different versions of what happened in that there jungle.” 

Because I enjoy seeing the world a certain way, I saw it as a sign, of course.  Two people brought this subject to the forefront this week; one a very good friend and the other my cousin.  Both are very intelligent men, who I have great respect for.  My cousin is the smartest guy I know, and I’ve known a lot of smart people.  He suggested we recreate our past to justify our reality or our present version of it. 

With that in mind; how reliable is any autobiography or supposed true story?  It’s always going to be skewed and one dimensional.  So what is reality and how dependable are we to discern it?

We only see a small portion of the light spectrum and can only hear a set frequency of sound waves.  That means there’s a lot we’re missing.  It’s for this reason I don’t like to rule anything out as being impossible; unless of course it has been proven.  We’re so arrogant to think we have all the answers.

I remember being on a baseball team as a child and the pitcher was the coach’s son.  He was an awful pitcher.   I remember one game he walked several runs in before a kid hit one over the fence for a grand slam.  After the game the coach yelled at us.  “Johnny can’t do it all himself.”  I remember being outraged.  He just did.  The experience stood out to me.  That guy really believed that his son wasn’t to blame for the game being stopped by the ten run rule.  He walked the entire team in.  How was it any one else’s fault but Johnny’s?

People see the world subjectively.  They see it how they want to see it, or expect to see it.  They recreate the past to fit the present.  What really happened?  How many factors are you missing in describing a situation from the past?  Every story, myth, legend, historical account that’s ever been told has been subject to this fact.  How can we take anything as being the truth?  It’s only the truth to us if we think it is.   These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me distracted. 

Even our memories aren’t the originals.   We are remembering the memory of the memory of the event as lastly stored in our long term memories, not the actual event.  Each time we remember something, we only remember certain details and we imagine the rest.  The imagined parts become part of the greater narrative that is the memory.  So the next time we tell it, we won’t even remember what parts we made up and what parts really happened.  Each time we retell a story, tiny details shift and alter and the emphasis on one theme or another gains importance.  A story can one time be a funny yarn about how wild and crazy you were as a young man and later that story could be a cautionary tale.  Every time you hear or read a story you should take this into account.  Did Johnny really give up a grand slam to end the game?  I don’t know.  I remember the coach yelling at us.  I remember us all taking a knee behind the dug out.  Then I remember a snow cone.  That’s it.  The story has become my focal point of why you can’t rely on people’s account of events.  I saw it first hand and made that connection at that moment.  Or did I?  Who knows?

It makes me think of the double slit experiment in quantum physics.  It suggests reality acts one way when no one’s observing it and another way when there is an observer.  Google it if you’re not familiar with it.  May I suggest there’s a lot more going on than we know at this point.  The more we learn the less we know.  Now to clarify that, it should be, the more we learn the more questions we give birth to.  The danger is trying to act like we know anything at all.  We just have theories.  That’s all.  Now, I know that terrifies a lot of people.  They gain great comfort in thinking that what they believe is the actual truth and they’ve found it and it’s all going to be okay.  They leave all those looming questions to someone else.  But deep inside, we all should know that stories aren’t one hundred percent reliable, especially ones from the ancient past.  Could there be ancient, divine magic woven into sacred tales?  I won’t rule it out, of course, that’s not my style.  That comes down to faith.  I respect people of faith.  But as far as being historically one hundred percent accurate, of course they are not.  They are subjective tales told by humans who were victims of the imagined memories they’d come to believe.

My cousin suggested how we see a moment from the past will depend on how good the future is to us.  People blame their horrible childhood for how bad their present is.

Throughout history we’ve always relied on people’s subjective view of the past.  But in the future we’ll be able to pull up any moment and examine it for how it really transpired.  Of course, as we’ve seen with “Reality TV” the records can be edited in such a way as to paint a different reality as well.   If everything is recorded in the future, they still won’t be able to read the minds of the people involved.  Oh, wait.  They’re working on programs to read thoughts as we speak.  What happens when the robots can read our minds, man?  We’re totally screwed then, bro.  Everyone’s going to have ocular implants that will display information at all times while recording what they see and hear every second of the day.  So if you wanted to remember something, you’d simply replay it.   Our brains will shift.  We won’t need to use our memories for the same reasons.  We won’t need to learn things the same way.  I wonder if we’ll lose something fundamentally human in the process.  Is it that filling in of the gaps that we all do when attempting to recall the past that makes us who we are?

I think there’s something to be said for this.  There’s the art of storytelling.  We should then take all storytelling as being a subjective form of art and enjoy the metaphors.  We, as subjective storytellers, weave patterns into our tales to give them meaning.  We aren’t reporting on exactly what happened, because that’s impossible without technology.  So here’s to the art of storytelling!  Here’s to the human experience.  And damn those mind-reading robots!