Narrative Addicts Anonymous

We went to a comedy show with a real live comedian, Amy Schumer, for the first time this weekend.  Well, it was my first time.  Nels had been to comedy shows, and I had been to a few comedy clubs, but it’s not something I normally do.  When we saw David Sedaris, he was reading from his own work, and when we saw Steve Martin, he was being interviewed.  Both made me laugh, but if I ever attend a live recording of a comedy show, they will cut the footage when it comes to me.  I am just not that into it. 

I enjoyed Amy Schumer’s show to some extent, and I appreciated that she did what felt like a mix of extemporaneous work and rehearsed, well-timed jokes.  I am sure there’s a fine line there.  However, appreciating somebody’s talent and laughing so hard I pee a little are two different things. 

The next day, I realized it wasn’t her, it was me.

You see, I am addicted to narrative.  I need stories in my newspaper, comics, poems, conversations, songs, and everything else I read and hear.  The narrative doesn’t even have to be clear, like they taught us in middle school English.  I never could pick out the rising and falling action and the denouement.  I also don’t need a happy ending, or even much of an ending at all—but there has to be a thread to follow.  This is from “The Way It Is” by William Stafford:

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

One of the problems is that, at least for me, I am not always sure what I am holding onto.  That’s why the yogis and Buddhists teach practitioners to let go of the stories in our heads:  the stories about our identities, in which we say to ourselves variations of “I am a good teacher/a lousy runner/impatient/hate sour cream/live in my head.” 

But I must have story.  If I do not, what’s left?  The yogis and Buddhists say, “pure Being.”  That sounds pretty boring to me.  Sure, I have a series of unreliable narrators inside my mind, but it is certainly fascinating to see who is telling the truth and how that truth evolves, and how something seemed to be true at one stage of my life is most certainly not true at some other point.  Of course, this requires seeing the story as a witness, or reader, not as the protagonist.  If I am playing the protagonist, than I am merely, as my friend Chuck Holloway would say, “believing my own shit.” 

Philosopher Evan Thompson addresses this issue by critiquing the idea that the mind is merely inside the brain.  He says that the mind is relational and involves the body as well as outside concepts: “We inhabit a meaningful world because we bring forth or enact meaning.”   Mindfulness is “social, relational, and ethical.” 

However, I do get that there are cultural as well as personal stories that are dangerous.  We may have certain ideas about human beings based on social categories as opposed to who the person is as an individual.  Ian Hacking calls this the “looping effect” and says that when we categorize people, we change them by how we interact with them based on those categories, and how they think of themselves.  This is why so many issues about gender, race, and class continually get reinforced.  I have a lot of respect for people who provide a counter-narrative, breaking up the original story and creating a new one. 

I like to hear stories that offer me a new way of looking at the world, others, and even myself.  I remember when a professor told me that I wasn’t bad at math; I just hadn’t been taught it in a way that was meaningful to me.  I wanted to tell her to put down the crack pipe, as my students said to me when I said something outrageous, but now I wonder.  “Janet the math genius” offers a counter-narrative to my learned helplessness. 

Earlier this week, I dreamed that I lost my shoes at a ski resort when I traded them in for ski boots.  The shoe lady took me down to the basement, and there were lots and lots of shoes, but none of them were mine.  Shoes represent the identity, and the basement the subconscious.  Unlike in the dream, I am in no hurry to find my shoes.  I’ll just root around in the subconscious for a while, enjoying the threads and stories that emerge, and not wait for the “This Is a True Story” sign to pop up.  After all, it’s the reading that’s the best part, not the ending.