Anger in Personal Stories

I've been thinking of Alice's Restaurant lately, partly because of Thanksgiving. For a while now I've also been thinking about storytelling as a form of activism, kind of like folk music can be. Reading books about folk singers, pondering the messages I have to share and the ones the world needs to hear. And I've been thinking of how broken the world seems right now and wondering how I could possibly make a difference. It seems like your best chance of making a difference is by doing what you do. So I keep doing it.

I tell a lot of personal stories. The main challenge of personal stories is that if you haven't processed the story yourself, if you haven't come out the other side of it, you can't perform it. You can tell people about it, but it won't be a performance.

Stories about things that hurt are difficult. The good thing about performing them, though, is that making them into a performance helps you heal. It forces you to process the pain and see yourself as someone full of agency who has survived and can move on.

Alice's Restaurant has helped me with stories that make me angry. You can't perform a story purely from a place of anger. It sounds like a rant. You have to process. You have to come out the other side. You have to sing and find the humor. This way of dealing with stories that make me angry has helped me to create two of the stories I'm proudest of.

One is the story I call "John's LLM," about getting a certificate of good conduct before moving to England. I have to say that now I am not nearly as angry about everything I went through to get that certificate. With time, it has actually become funny. But I started creating the story as the situation was unfolding. It was clear at the time that it was completely absurd and I didn't want to lose any of the details. But I was angry. I was frustrated by the lack of information about how to undertake this process and about the incompetence and ignorance of multiple state employees I interacted with to get it done. It sounded like a rant when I first wrote it down. Until I remembered Alice's Restaurant. With a little humor and a song (the song is mostly for me because I've never performed it for anyone) it became a story.

The other is a work in progress: "The Ballad of the Birth Certificate." I am still angry that we were kicked out of the courthouse and threatened with physical violence while trying get Virginia's birth certificate, but I think it is an important story. It is important enough that I will find some way to be brave enough to perform it with all the musical components some day. (Performing music for people makes me much more nervous than speaking in front of people.) I don't think it's a good story without the music though. I don't think it's a good story without the fantastic and farcical suggestion that Virginia went on this adventure by herself. These things make it more than just an angry rant.

I think it is clear that the anger is still present in both stories. I'm not saying anger has to be edited out. It has to be processed, like pain. You have to come out the other side. For me, this is how I do it.

There are a lot of things that make me feel angry these days. And sad and afraid and, sometimes, like giving up on the whole human race and starting that Martian colony after all. But I think I'll stay here and sing and tell it all like it's a joke.

Living in Reality

In Orality and Literacy Walter Ong says:

The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

Orality ties cultures together. The written word causes more introspective thinking, increasing individuality. Ong claims that although this is dividing it is uniting as well. Perhaps an extension of his argument that oral language awakens the self and then allows us to interact with others?

Marshal McLuhan, drawing on the work on Henri Bergson, sees even orality as a little more divisive.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech. (Understanding Media)

This collective unconscious sounds almost idyllic. How cruel of language to have separated us from it. 

I've recently discovered the Radiolab podcasts. When I was listening to "Lucy" I got a glimpse of what McLuhan is talking about. At one point a man talks about a Bonobos making amends with him after biting him. The animal cried into his mouth. This image is so powerful. Clearly their interaction went far beyond words. Near the end of the show one of the women who works with the Bonobos says she thinks they do have a deeper connection, one that we have lost. 

I've been chasing this idea that the spoken word is closer to meaning. Both Ong and McLuhan might agree with that. Both see communication technologies as slowly separating us from each other although they make different value judgements about those separations. But maybe real meaning can't be reached through language at all. 

I've been thinking about how communication technologies distract us from the reality around us. And not just when we are using them. Our minds have been conditioned by constant exposure to communication media. We are introspective - often living in an interior world. We create elaborate daily and yearly schedules, the maintaining of which occupies a significant portion of our time. Think about that. We ignore the current reality to make sure that we'll be in the right spot at the right time at some point in the near or distant future. We don't know our way around our physical spaces thanks to sat nav (I'm sooooo guilty of this). And this is all not to mention the very obvious escapes from reality through books, television, and the Internet. 

What would it be like to live an unmediated existence? An existence in which there is nothing to take the mind away from reality?

I am a hopeless cyborg, my identity almost inextricably intertwined with technology. The loss I would experience with the collapse of google docs alone would be akin to a lobotomy. But even so, I have been trying to be aware of reality. Not reality as shown to me by my media. Not the reality inside my mind. The actual reality all around me. This is challenging, since, as a graduate student, I spend hours a day on the computer, reading and writing. Sometimes that is my reality. And I stop and tell myself: This is reality. Me, in my workspace, in front of a computer. (The computer is part of reality, not a window into it.) And then there is the reality of walking outside. A human being, breathing the air, admiring the trees, and not thinking of anything else. 

A Cautionary Tale

I heard loud (happy) noises coming from the kids' room the other day. When I went to investigate I saw blankets and pillows all over the floor. Horatio was standing on a little pink safe (piggy bank) that doubles as a door stop and it was about to fall over.

"That doesn't look like a good place to stand, Horatio." I told him.

He took one foot off, "I just stand on it little bit. Little bit, okay Momma?"

"No, not a little bit. No standing on the safe."

Then Virginia explained the game. "The blankets are poison. We can't step on the poison."

And I had this storyteller-parent moment where I knew that I had the perfect story for this situation.

"Come over here, guys. Let me tell you a story..."

One time when I was a kid, maybe a little older than Virginia, my sister, Aunt 'Manda and I were playing "alligators." That is a game where there are alligators on the floor so you can't touch it. We were in my bedroom, moving from the bed, to some pillows, to my desk, to the back of the desk chair, and then we would reach back and climb to the bed again.
Somehow we both ended up on the desk chair at the same time. We weren't in the seat of the chair. In order to reach the bed we had to put our feet on the rolling feet of the chair and hold on to the back. One person at a time on the chair had been fine, but with both of us on the back of the chair and both of us leaning to reach the bed, the chair fell over on us.
BOOM! At first we were both stunned just to be under the heavy desk chair. But then I realized that my hand was hurt. My right hand was holding onto the outside of the chair and it had been pinned between the chair and the wall. The molding at the bottom of the wall had scraped off all the skin from inside one of my fingers, which was also swollen and bruised.
Now I had a dilemma. I was hurt and I wanted my parents to comfort me. But I also had been doing something I wasn't supposed to do. To admit my injury was to admit wrongdoing.
Well, I tried to get away with it anyway. I went and told my dad, "My desk chair fell on me...somehow. And now my finger is hurt."
My dad said, "I know what you were doing and I bet it hurt."
I didn't exactly get in trouble, but I didn't get sympathy either. No kisses, no bandaid from Dad.
I sadly got my own bandaid and found something else to play.

Then I looked at my kids. "Do you understand?"

"Yes!" they said.

I left the room feeling pretty satisfied. A few minutes later they were both on the bed. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"We're playing alligators!"

Is this the reason I played "alligators" instead of "hot lava" or "poison"? 

A Child's Reality

I haven't even attended all my classes yet, but already my mind is a flurry of activity from the start of the new semester.

Yesterday I had both the first session of my Theory Development class and the Children's Lit class I'm TA-ing with my advisor (he's doing most of the teaching).

For Theory Development some of our readings talked about the nature of reality. Is there an objective reality that exists independent of observation, or is reality constructed by observers?

Then in Children's Lit we had a discussion about what makes a book children's literature, and one of the ideas thrown around was that it represents a child's reality. None of the things listed could have applied to all children's literature, so this wasn't an absolute either. But Dr. Seuss was brought up as a counter-example. Are those a child's reality? Outrageous situations and nonsense words?

Challenge accepted.

In Knucklehead, Jon Scieszka's autobiography, Mr. Scieszka has a chapter on children's books. As a child, he thought that Dr. Seuss books were much more like his life than Dick and Jane books. Dick and Jane were weirdos who talked funny and laughed at inappropriate times.

This isn't just Scieszka being silly. He's on to something.

Children, especially young children, see new, miraculous, previously-thought impossible things every day. My two and a half year old son, Horatio, saw me shuffle cards for the first time a couple weeks ago. The look on his face... I might as well have been a talking cat, standing on a ball, balancing toys, books, and fish on various appendages. Dr. Seuss's strange scenarios respect the fact that children encounter regularly things we take for granted as normal, but to them seem extraordinary.

There are also plenty of good reasons for the nonsense words, but one of them could be that they also represent a child's reality. Think of all the words kids hear all the time that they don't yet know. To them large chunks of what adults say must sound like nonsense. But we keep on using all those words anyway, whether children understand them or not. Eventually they learn them from context. And they know what Dr. Seuss's words mean, too.

Dr. Seuss books better represent children's reality than "realistic" books do. They also tell kids that this astounding world they live in is fun. It is meant to be played with. If only adults could live in that reality as well.