Here’s an idle theory I came up with awhile ago and have only recently started telling other people. I think it’s a fun game to play when you’re alone too.
The basic notion is that human minds create explanations to the events they encounter. Our minds are information understanders. When we were struggling to survive on the savanna everything was meaningful. The color of the sun, the chill of the wind, the tracks in the dirt, the smell of our clan, the distant sky bubbling with light, everything mattered.
We come from animals that needed to understand, to understand they had to make connections between events and causes and when human beings do that they tell a story.
Since we need to explain our experiences and the universe, there is no escaping that, we create stories that make sense of our times and place. The explanations, the understandings, the stories become who we are.
The object of the game then is to try to figure out what that story is. And you win if you can rewrite the story.
Sounds simple enough but the stories are information and that’s all that living creature are. They are information acting on information to build more information. Stories fight like life fights to stay alive. Try to rewrite that story and it may make you uncomfortable, angsty, and pained. Try to erase it and it may just try to kill you.
What are your stories? Are they you or are you them? Do they sum up you are, are you so very much more? Why do they fight so hard to resist revision? Are they true? Do they make sense? Are they fiction or are they biography? Are they horror or fantasy? Are they real or are they poor copies of some other story you heard once?
My homework assignment, should there actually be anyone reading this, is to figure out your story, write it down and tear it apart. Set the fucker on fire, pee on it to put it out, then flush the whole mess down the toilet because whatever it is it’s surely wrong.
A related theory I have is that everyone gets stuck at a specific age. For most people that age is when they were their happiest usually high school or college. Some people get stuck at a traumatic time in their lives.
I’ve been stuck for the longest time at at 10-12 which was a tumultuous time of feelings of abandonment, despair and split loyalties in my little child’s life. Some part of me is kind of stuck at age 30 when I was in spectacular physical shape, free, confident about my prospects and wandering the highways and wastelands of America.
This past week the glue seems to have weakened and I may not be as stuck as I thought I was.
The second part of the homework assignment is to figure out what age you got stuck. Apply some nail polish remover to your mind and get yourself unstuck. You aren’t living if you’re stuck in some distance past.
“. . . and so on first opening a book or looking into a manuscript I listen for the sound of a human voice. I think of all writing—whether cast in the form of the historical essay, the scientific treatise, or the minimalist poem—as an attmpt to tell a story. Some stories are more complicated or beautiful than others. Some stories are immortal; many are false or incoherent. Homer told a story and so did Einstein; so do General Motors and Donald Duck. But no matter how well or how poorly we manage the narrative, we are all engaged in the same enterprise, all of us caught up in the making of metaphors, all of us seeking evocations or representations of what we can recognize as appropriately human.”
- Lewis H. Lapham, 150th anniversary Harpers
So I echo the words of people smarter than I without knowing it.
One day I’d like to have an original thought. It’s nice to have a good thought that countless others have had. It would be really cool to have one that no one else has ever had. Kind of like exploring an uncharted world would be.
To be the first…that is simple grail.