Talons', Illich/Sanders, Story, Self

I like some of the lyrics to this song by Talons' 'Moments'. 

 

"I made up all these moments that seem so profound
Little things I try to explain but it's impossible for anyone else to understand that this is why I am the way I am
But memory is fictional and I'm constantly rewriting it
to make sense of who I am and why
And the more I lose touch with everyone from my past, the more alone I am and the less chance there is that any of it was real
But what does it matter?
This is who I am now.
Nothing else."

 

I have been reminded of the complexity of the question of the self in recently reading Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders book ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. The book is a series of essays exploring the transition from oral to written culture. The first two essays deal with ancient literature: Homer, Plato, and the transition from poetic speech to poetic writing, with special emphasis on the meaning of history and memory.

The later chapters concern the role of writing and the alphabet in the transition from the middle ages to modernity. Many ways that we understand ourselves, they claim, depend on the existence of the alphabet and the written text. We, for example, think of memory and language through the image of the written text. 

Their chapter on 'The Self' concerns itself with the advent of the autobiography. They point to Henry Adams' autobiography, published after the author's death in 1918. They claim that it represents "a truly extraordinary development: The literary creation of the self has assumed enough life of its own to instruct and educate its creator." In writing an autobiography one regards oneself from the outside and seeks a type of continuity that is missing, for example, from Beowulf (they claim, I have not read it). Beowulf, they observe, possesses a variety of factual errors and narrative incoherence. That Beowulf is said to do contradictory things by different people is of no concern to the author, it appears. 

What is this coherence we seek in ourselves through story telling? Talons' seems to have some awareness of this. "Memory is fictional and I'm constantly rewriting it."

Loose threads. Messy events that cannot be told in story. 

The problem, in a sense, is the purpose of speech and its relationship to writing.

My work as a therapist makes it clear to me that some of the most powerful ways of speaking are not about coherent, linear, or comprehensive narratives. Therapeutic movement comes about, rather, through resonant images, through quasi-poetic phrases that move us in a physically palpable sense.

Speech is for moving the body forward in its process of understanding. Sometimes coherent or linear narratives can do this for us, but more often the body is moved by other kinds of speech, images, or sounds. 

I would rather a phrase or word or image make me cry than tell a coherent story.

Somehow autobiography can do this, I imagine. But not because it offers a coherent narrative.

There are domains of life in which resonant speech is more important than factual speech. 

It seems to be a real treat when speech can be both.

My sense is that the 'self' in a deep sense is what resonates or responds to certain ways of speaking. The self cannot simply be the external, factual narration. 

 

The self responds, but cannot show itself.