I think that in reading and writing I'm often seeking to deny or affirm or otherwise manage two broad principles. Or maybe it's only one, but it has a dialectic arrangement. The question can be boiled down to the notion of whether someone is making it or if they're not making it. This has something to do with the general momentum of telling someone about something, I guess. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the utility of storytelling per se, but it has something to do with the human condition, or the situation we find ourselves in while we're alive, etc. One can make a narrative summary of hours or days in this way, and it seems like something that people often do.
–How was your day?
–It was bad/good for reasons X and Y.
A story one tells to another is meant to sophisticate or employ interesting reasons according to this summarizable principle. After being delivered to the end of a story one typically gets the sense that things are fucked up or they're okay, or maybe they're fucked up for the moment but in due time they'll be okay, or okay for the moment in spite of things having been fucked up, etc. Usually, when one is not making it, it's because something fucked up has happened, or a series of fucked up things have happened. According to this dual principle of making it/not making it, which can be derived from the frequency and severity of fucked-upness in total (that is, particular fucked up events described, beheld, and otherwise understood intersubjectively), we can forthwith determine, generally, whether "it's over" for someone or if they're back.
To say that one is back is not necessarily a moral assertion, although it does somewhat depend on subjective assessments of the relative fucked-upness of illustrated circumstances. To be back does not require that one return to the state of things as they were "before" certain complications arose. It may very well be the case that "being back" involves no return to the state of things as they once were. It is a sort of equilibrium reached between the internal and the external, a moment in which one's values are accepted, denied, or revised in an efficacious manner so as to produce some effective change, or unchange, or reversion, depending on the circumstances.
These are all merely examples of what I mean to say when someone is back. If I am back, I am revived, in a sense, by some force that sought once to destroy me. I've overcome something, if only momentarily. This is a truth about telling a story: the ending is but a moment that culminates from a succession of other moments. This is apparently complicated because a story is required to end in a way that an actual life does not, yet we should like to discover something about life from the telling or reading of a story. Maybe this is not always the case. A story has the right to be inert. Nevertheless, I can't see how a story would avoid bearing some relation to the situation of human existence. That's something I'd like to see: a story with no human component. Totally absent.
But a story reaches its end in a manner that is somehow organized. Or, at the very least, some organization can be critically impressed upon it from without. A story is always approached from without to some degree. I don't get the impression that "true life" or "subjective life" can be organized in this way. Or at least it doesn't need to be. We seem to make organized narratives out of our lives for the sake of convenience or some like pragmatic reason. For example, I'm not certain that I can describe my internal personality in exact terms. I have some concept of myself that I've constructed from my outward gestures and the translation of conceptual thoughts into language, but this doesn't seem to penetrate the core of "what I am." All of this is a process of translating oneself into words for oneself or for others, and in some sense we could say that we are translating ourselves to someone else even when we are in a state of internal reflection or whatever.
I suppose this all seems very much like a kind of dissociation, but I have a feeling that if each person evaluated their way of translating their personality or their actions, they'd find that there is not merely one way to make sense of it. There may be a "best way," colloquially, for one person to do this, and I guess that this is what one tries to discover in the process of revision or in translating in the first place.
So this is ostensibly what one is working with when one constructs a narrative for oneself or for others. I suppose it has to be both, inevitably. And this narrative can act as a vehicle for this principle of making it/not making it. A demonstration of a real principle.
It is not always immediately clear whether someone is back or if it's over for them, or how these two conclusions might interact in the form of narrative. In a similar sense, it is not always clear how a given event or complication stands to affect those who are involved. This is where the seeking of such broad and evident principles takes on a complex and insurmountable character. This process is very much like beating the dead horse, throwing the piece of shit against a wall until it sticks, etc.
Suppose I'm delivering a narrative in which hardly anyone is back, hardly anyone is able to make it. This entails that given such and such complicated circumstances, it would be near impossible to be back for the subjective personalities involved; in this case, for many, it would necessarily be over. But this dichotomy is liable to take on an incredible number of complications in its own right, for in life one is hardly ever merely back, and it is hardly ever the case that things are simply over. It is often some very specific combination of the two, wavering and vacillating constantly. When I say that I had a bad day, am I saying that the sum of all good things was less than the sum of all bad things? I'm not so sure that this arithmetic model is appropriate. At times these translated narratives are simply intuited.
Most stories purport to illustrate the complex reasons for their conclusions, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment