Thinking back to the conversation about Carlos Castaneda, I realise that, although it would have been more meaningful if the experiences Castaneda wrote about were true, or at least really perceived, nonetheless, the hidden world he hypothesises is worthwhile as a hypothesis. The second reality. A network that underpins our reality, but which we can glimpse given the right circumstances. Many shamanistic accounts are like that. Read texts about pre-Christian Celtic beliefs and there it is, a hidden world, out of phase with ours. The spiritual world may be like this too.
I was talking to Alex about the notion that we construct a narrative of our lives. We have to of course, to be able to make sense of what goes on around us, and of our own actions.
Narrative of course isn't always fiction, but then it may not be reality either and that is, as mentioned before, if we even buy into the idea of reality being outside of our own construction.
The book 'The Time Traveller's Wife' was an exquisite way of re-working that narrative, or how we experience it. The time traveller seemingly had no control over the narrative of his life, nor did he live it in a linear fashion. And we, like his wife, were only able to piece his story together in shards.
The fascination as it unfolds, as in the film '21 Grams'.
The narrative of a single human existence. The poetry of it, the myth that surrounds it. The phases of development. The different perceptions of that life or of an event, as in 'Crash', not the David Cronenberg one, the more recent Paul Haggis one.
We look and we interpret. Let me construct.
An imaginary celebrity called Dusty Book gets up one day and realises s/he has no milk in the fridge. S/he throws on a pair of dark glasses and a long coat and goes down to the store. The store doesn't have any 1% that morning, so Dusty asks if they have any out the back. They don't, so s/he takes a carton of 2%, pays and goes home, but stops in the middle of the road and sits there for five minutes.
Because Dusty is a celeb, by midday the local rag has a story involving the shabby appearance, an altercation with the shop assistant over not having the correct milk and a theory of why s/he stopped in the road. The following day a national tabloid has a different interpretation of the same observed behaviour. Only Dusty knows the real story and even s/he isn't sure.
Three days later, Dusty disappears and there the narrative becomes even more confused. Myths and legends abound, all of Dusty's work to date is dissected and analysed. Sightings begin, but somewhere, someone knows the real story. Or do they? Society has taken over the narrative.
What is our narrative? Is it what we do or how we perceive our life? And is there just one story?
How does memory play a part? Because memory itself alters. If we lost our memory right now, the future narrative might be different from that based on previous experience.
And what if we could go back and edit our life?
2 comments:
Now, you're talking my language, because I believe our narratives (though continuous, interminable and inscrutable), follow none of the norms of the transcribed forms. Even the free associative stream-of-consciousness novel is an artifice at most, a contrivance somewhat tailored to the exigencies of narrative expectations. The reality is otherwise, and the hero wears the form like a suit of clothes, always changing, always reversing, always the same and always new again, and different. The true narrative persona is a changeling: who was it said you can never step in the same river once? Identity's like that.
The American Indians had a saying that went something like, 'We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our grandchildren.' Or something like that. All we need to know about how to be is already inside us; actually, it was all there in the Sermon on the Mount, but that was a tall order indeed.
Great post.
I like that writers and film-makers do experiment though Lenten.
One of the narrative forms that I found very interesting was the French nouveau roman where the author is not all seeing, but only records what one person could actually experience.
I like the multitude of voices, the freedom of internet publishing, another reality, another underlying net.
And thanks for your comment Lenten, I never expect anyone to even continue reading, let alone comment when I go off on one of my wanderings.
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