A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by a philosophy professor, Karen Simecek, who said that conceiving of our lives as narratives is a bad idea. She thinks it’s a bad idea because some narratives are negative or have a negative effect, presumably on the narrator.
She didn’t mention the brain in her article, which led me to wonder how she thinks these narratives come about. Maybe she believes humans all got together at some point in the past when there weren’t very many of us and took a vote on whether or not to conceive of our lives as narratives. The ayes won. Or maybe she thinks each of us comes up with this idea on our own or we pick it up from the zeitgeist.
In any case, this narrative process is not optional. It’s what brains do. Ask a neuroscientist. Or read The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.
As to bad narratives or those that have a negative effect, that is content, and content can be modified. I would imagine that a philosopher who can’t make a distinction between concept and content might develop some odd perspectives. She doesn’t disappoint.
It’s true that there is no such thing as a true story, something I’ve been pointing out for the past 11, almost 12 years. But that is a fact, not an indictment of narrative. It’s also true that our narratives exert a powerful influence over us that can get in the way of our ability to create transformational (positive, intentional, significant, and sustained) change. So I laud her effort to look for a way to deal with this dilemma. But our narratives are crafted by the unconscious part of the brain and reflect who we’ve been up till now. They provide the brain with a way to determine how to process the sensory data it encounters. As such, neither can our narratives be easily dismissed nor is it even a good idea to try to dismiss them.
Existential Poetry
Our philosopher prefers poetry to narrative, so she suggests we replace our autobiographical narratives with poems.
I mentioned this in a group meeting where everyone present is wise to the already existing difficulties we have communicating with one another. A participant looked up poetic forms on the internet (one of the benefits of Zoom meetings) and found a site that said there were 28 different forms. Writer’s Digest beats that by a mile, however, listing 168 different forms. WD isn’t overly serious about describing this (I hope) exhaustive list. For example:
Chant: if it works once, run it into the ground
Some other forms are haiku, villanelle, sonnet, madrigal, roundelay, epic, and sestina. There are many forms attributed to the Welsh, the French, and the Japanese, and a surprising number are named for how many lines or stanzas they contain. We (in the group) entertained the notion of communicating in poetry and how doing so would compound our communication issues, in multiple ways, since we don’t just have a narrative about ourselves, of course; we communicate with each other via narrative.
I like poetry. I’ve read quite a lot of it. I’ve even written a fair share. I’m trying to imagine the possibility of substituting poetry for narrative—and I’m someone who isn’t particularly committed to my own narrative. My personality is such that my personal narrative is more episodic than continuous. But my unconscious doesn’t write poetry, so poetry is never going to replace my anecdotal narrativity.
A virtual acquaintance, Donald Fulmer, created an email course on learning to write haiku, which he found (I’m putting words in his mouth here aka interpreting) to be an agreeable form of self-expression. But no matter how familiar the form of haiku became to him, I doubt his brain ever got to the point of substituting haiku for narrative. (Perhaps he’ll read this and let us know.)
We Are A Work in Progress
We could develop our own poetic language. It’s not a bad idea. It’s another way—like art or music—to capture and/or express our experience. But it won’t replace our inner narrative.
In addition to the inherent difficulty of attempting to craft our experience into a poetic form, there’s another problem, which is that poems are finished things. I once wrote a poem about that. I said that writing poetry was like reconstructing myself on paper, that I was resetting the words in my sentences like the bones in my body. It can be laborious, but sometimes necessary.
Our narrative, however, is not finished until we die; and it is always changing and can always be changed.
Now if I could capture my life à la the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, I might reconsider my position. Here’s the first stanza of A Supermarket in California, free verse written in 1955 and published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
Later he asks:
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
I ask myself.
