Useful Stories

It appears to be something of a psychological truism – unduly obvious, self-evident, trivial – to say that when we tell stories about ourselves and our world, we tell stories that will be “useful” to us.  We tell stories that are interested in something.  They are invested in the outcome.  Perhaps not overtly, even consciously, but nonetheless, when we tell stories about the past, we put the past to work: on us, on those around us.  It is a kind of self and world-fashioning that we do everyday.

Let me underline that this does not mean that everybody floats around in a bubble, not touching other people, other groups or communities, each living in isolation from th other.  Our stories are fashioned in and by communities.  And communities are fashioned in and by their relation with still other communities.  The words we use are common.  Our stories are negotiated.  One could say, cautiously, that they are democratic.

Take, for example, the family photograph album.  Typically, more than one photographer must contribute.  If a mother takes photo’s of her children, then another, perhaps the father, must take photographs of the mother in order for her to appear.  Or perhaps a stranger.

Later, gathered around the family album, a conversation takes place: who is this?  What was happening then?  Who took this photo?  The story is pieced together again, and again, over and over.  It is retold, perhaps embellished, perhaps reduced in size, significance and extravigance.  New events, new photo’s change the rhythm, and topography of the story.  But it is still a real story – see the photo’s?  We were there, it happened, you and I can remember.  Memory becomes inescapably intertwined with photographs, viewed on dozens of different occasions.

But notice: what happens when you stop making photograph albums?  Or, your photograph “albums”, are actually files uploaded to Facebook, or Flickr, or a blog?  The community has changed, the format has changed, the conversation has changed.  The stories we tell are going to change, and the uses to which they are put, and their effects will change too.

It leaves me wondering what kind of stories I tell.  It makes me think that it is worth making the time to remember, and to create albums, journals, records.  What I’m talking about here is really tradition. Not in a negative or positive sense, but in a necessary sense.  We will make traditions, for better or worse.  The question is whether they are deliberate, or ad hoc.

Filed under: Family, Historiography, experiences, history, memory, technology , community narrative, family photo albums, family tradition, self-narrative, social structure of memory

Intercepting the post

Dear Epiphenomenos,

Forgive my intrusion, but your friend, Eraunetes had left your letter lying open open his table while I was visiting.  Ever the rude one, I couldn’t help but be caught by the subject of your letter.  And so, while Eraunetes was off searching for some references to help with an answer, I read it.  Terribly rude of me, I know, but that’s the thing with letters, one never really knows where they might end up.

I will not take up too much of your time with such a presumptuous letter, but I wanted to ask a question of you.  Or, in truth, reply to one of your questions.  Perhaps it is because I may be something of a pagan, but it seemed to me that your questioning of the relation between theology and philosophy is the very gesture of philosophy, second only to questioning the role and purpose of philosophy itself, which follows fast upon the heels of your first query.

Perhaps you are right.  There is too much recollection of former glories, as you say.  If the Queen and her Handmaiden, (but which is which, or are we dealing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern here?) both only manifest themselves as memory of past days, this hardly extricates us from the problem.  For we can no more enquire into the purpose of those two tasks – separable or not – than enquire into the purpose of our purposive remembering of them.

Perhaps a dose of forgetfulness is required.  We remember too much.  But can we choose what we forget?

Forgive the ridiculous temerity of this letter.

Your friendly correspondent,

Grammates

Filed under: Philosophy, memory , Letters, Philosophy

Communication and generation

A father speaks with his son, recounting a vivid memory, an event that has marked his life. In the crinkles about his eyes, the folds about his mouth–a look that gives his skin a papery appearance, as if too much of this memory might tear his face apart.

In the gaps between the broken words, the breathy syllables, even between the letters, dozens of barely audible feelings and thoughts are heard. Not owning the words to articulate them – are there such words? – he speaks the gaps even louder. His son, absorbing, like the sponge that a son is, more than he will ever be wary of, drinks them, sucks them into his lungs and eyes and brain. The son’s vicarious experience, which is his experience, of the retelling, revisiting, remembering, completes his understanding of his father.

Years pass; his father has died. The son himself is a father. He sits with his own son, and shares with him the sharing that his father gave him – just as the original experience formed the father, the sharing of the experience formed the son, and now the son seeks to impart this same secret knowledge to his own progeny.

But he was never there. He only read the marks, the creases and folds. Interpreted the gaps that his father had no words for. And so he tries to imitate this same performance that his father gave for him. He attempts to pass on the memory, but the telling has erased the event. And yet, how else could it be passed on? To leave it blank?

What is the difference between a silence that has its own voice, and a silence that says nothing? If we do not attempt to give such a thing form of our own – wisely, lovingly, respectully – will the next generation simply imitate the silence, and the next generation take such a silence to mean that nothing, in actual fact, is there?

Filed under: experiences, memory , experience, fatherhood, handing down, memory, representation, tradition