Stop-motion life versus live art: linear thinking and my post modern story

An idea got planted in my head the other day, about stories, and how they create a person’s identity. There’s this theory that because our cells regenerate every seven years, and we’re left with a completely new body, the only thing that ties us together is our stories or our memories. It’s all we have that makes us human, the theory seems to say.

When I explicitly think about my own stories, I think of afternoons with my friends. Particularly the phrase, “good story!” and it’s connotations. It basically means, wow, please don’t tell another story because that one was really boring. And it’s true–a lot of times my stories are hard to follow when I relate them to my friends. They’re nonlinear. They make so much sense in my head but seem to become like iron and rust when exposed to the outside atmosphere.

If I could tell a story to a group of people, which one would I tell?

That’s probably one of the hardest questions for me to answer, because I feel like my whole life (my history, present, and future) is wrapped into one thing. Non-linear. Time and I are acquaintances that forget each other’s faces as soon as we look the other way. I am just one continuous story.

I really don’t know what to tell people to amuse them and to leave them pleasantly introspective. A complete story (beginning, middle, ending, usually a bit witty) will often do that to people. I feel like the only story I could tell would be more of a fleeting glimpse into my life; a moment. It would be without plot and without direction. It would just be; a photograph of a moving object, just barely discernible and rough and speckled with dust.

If those are the types of stories that I am made of, what does that say about me? I have no plot, no ending, no beginning. Almost like a Beckett play but longer, much longer. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead!” you tell me. In return I say, “I am just another pirate on the ship to your execution! Let him forge the documents and be done with it already!”

This none linear concept of which I’m jabbering about comes from a book that I just started reading, called “Dark Prophets of Hope: Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Faulkner.” I started with the Faulkner section, because I am in love with his words. It talks about the American linear consciousness: “the logical, rational, sequential, progress-oriented, and technological mode.” It’s a concept/theme that comes up in many of Faulkner’s stories. Jean Kellogg (the author of Dark Prophets of Hope) goes on to say that Faulkner certainly in his own mind didn’t impose linear succession upon human experience as if time were space and could be laid out along a measuring tape, but experienced time both as permeated by the past and as holding in embryo what is to be. To give an example, there is the mentally stunted childlike man, Benjy Compson. He’s seen as “grotesque,” an idiot. Like most grotesque figures in literature, it’s an exaggerated reflection of ourselves. For Benjy, past was completely undifferentiated from present. Any sensory signal could set off emotions like love rejected, longing unfulfilled, happiness inexplicably removed.

Benjy’s brother, Quentin (under the obligations of a linear time perception), is given a watch in his childhood. His father says, “Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…I give it to you not that you might remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

I try to conquer time, and I fail constantly. This morning I came late to my first class, because I slept in. It was rainy and voggy outside my window, and it felt like 5:00 am when it was actually 7:30. I stumbled out of bed, tugged some jeans and a t-shirt on, and ran out the door. I am always late. Sometimes I can bend with time, and I almost feel it drip slower through the hour glass. But it snaps back at me in retribution when I least expect it. It’s my perception of linear time that ties me down to the inconsequential nonsense that I can’t seem to escape no matter what I do. I said earlier that I perceive time nonlinearly–that’s true. But society doesn’t. My school doesn’t. The bus schedule doesn’t. The world as I know it is built upon linear perception.

It reminds me of Proust. You eat a cookie, you remember your past.

I am my past, even in my present. How can that be expressed in a story?

Edit: So I wrote this at 1:00 am this morning after drinking one too many cups of coffee post noon, and I just realized the stupidity of my last question. How can that be expressed in a story?? Well, um, correct me if I’m right, 1:00 am-writing-self, but isn’t that exactly what Faulkner did? *Sigh* Maybe I have yet to achieve the perfect story, not because it’s impossible, but because I am not a Nobel Prize Winning writer (yet).

Photo by Matthew McVickar