Telling stories

I just finished reading ‘The storytelling animal,’ by Jonathan Gottschall. A good enough book. It covered mostly familiar territory for me, but I assume many parts would be revealing for some people. ‘Story’ is a very good lens to use and by the end of the book I was convinced of what I already believed, and yet still these issues remain beyond the grasp I want. Of course, I want the impossible – which in this case is to understand the human mind. I suppose it doesn’t help that the primary tool I have to do that with is a single human mind. And I barely understand myself.

So let’s start with an illuminating quote from Gottschall:

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't.

And then back in Jeremiah it says: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Allrighty then.

So I am in good company when I say:

We want our illusions. We don't want to be fools, but we really do want to be fooled - again and again. And many times, we would prefer not to know that we are being fooled. There is real magic in our illusions, magic that is often stronger than empirical reality.

Once again, the pronouncements remind us of a general intuition, but our reach for understanding exceeds our grasp. Assuming Gottschall is generally correct, human beings want stories – in most cases, stories with setting and characters and actions particularly defined. And yet we will (even want to) be fooled.

Rationality is one illusion that must be faced. As we argue with each other personally, or in society, we want to believe that we are not lying to each other – at least, that we are not lying to ourselves. But going all the way back in recorded time we have been fooling ourselves. Why should now be different?

Of course, we also manage the truth now and then. So how do we tell which is which, knowing our penchant for deceit? Ay, there’s the rub. Shakespeare had his own revealing tales to tell.

The proof remains where it always has been – in a pudding, or rather, a reality outside our own minds. My mind will always be the lens through which I perceive the empirical world, but if I am paying attention, rocks and river water and sky are not easily manipulated by my mind.

I am indeed spinning a story when I begin: The sky is reflected in the river … but I think I have a pretty good grasp of the solid and liquid and gaseous matter I see and that the objective nature of reality remains somewhat separated from my subjective awareness. But I will prefer magic - again and again and again.

And so we go forth, with glimpses that astonish or terrify us - I could tell you stories. It’s what people do.

Animal world

Rita is a house cat. She’s not sharp in the way of cats and the outdoors.

But she asks to go outside as clear as anything – she accepts a harness and a leash. She only tends to take a few steps, then she crouches against the ground. The pupils within the irises of her eyes, which are the color of dark yellow mustard, narrow to vertical black slits in the sunshine.

She wanders a little – chews on grass.

Her fur, when I put my face into it, makes me think of Julie Christie in the movie, Dr. Zhivago -the scene in which her glowing ember of a face is enveloped in fur as the sleigh flies over the snow-covered landscape.

Rita’s fur is black and white, and she waddles, svelte in an overweight sort of way. But she touches her smudged nose against yours and for all of that she is not like other cats – she is a glowing ember.

Oshka was the cat I admired in his youth and into his maturity - he could come and go at will, leaping up onto the work bench in the basement, and then, up to the open pane in the basement window – usually covered with a flap of old pant leg to try to keep the wind out, and covered with a board at night to keep Oshka in and other animals out.

Oshka could catch mice and birds – not too often – but he didn’t really understand about not bringing them inside. The robin, fluttering from the molding over the doors and windows toward the light, must not have been the brightest of his species. He finally managed to find the door I opened for him and flew away, with Oshka surely listening to the whole thing from where he was locked in the bathroom.

And the dumb mice – smart enough to play dead long enough once they were caught, then when Oshka would set them down in the living room to survey the situation, they would dart off under the bookshelf or into some other crevasse where Oshka - and we - could not reach.

I am not pleased with how that all worked out on several occasions. Opening a door for the mice was not really an option, so it was them or us. The mice did not understand about not chewing through packaging to get at food or about flush toilets. I buried one not long ago next to where Oshka had been buried a couple of years ago. This mouse had found its own way in and had gotten a broken neck.

Robins have been playing in the gutter outside my window where I write. Rita is alternately dozing and looking at the birds outside the porch window. From where she sits her eyes are likely closed to slits. She likes to at least be close to the outside.

None of us creatures live forever. But it is something to be able to stick my face in Rita’s warm fur and also to think of just how perfectly soft the fur on that poor little mouse was beneath my finger before I laid him in the ground.

Life goes on for some of us a little while longer. 

God? talk

This talk was deliver with some responses at Peace Mennonite Church, June 16.

***

Where’s the beef?

Let me begin with two big ideas that I won’t finish with in this short time.

My beliefs, however much they matter to me, are less important to the relationship between you and me than whether we understand each other. That is, if we can listen to each other and respect each other as persons, we will find that we can live with each other, even while we continue to reject some of the other person’s ideas or practices. I won’t try to prove this point to you. In fact, feel free to disagree with aspects of this idea for yourself, while accepting that I believe it.

But I hope we are not too far apart in thinking that there is a distinction to be made between accepting a person and accepting an idea. The real differences can be tough enough. Without somehow understanding each other as people, they become impossible.

Second, to avoid misunderstandings, we need to remember that even when we’re speaking the same language, say English, for example, we are in fact not always speaking the same language. The words and the meanings of the words I use may not be the words and meanings you hear.

***

If I go into a café in Vietnam and ask for pho – I think they pronounce it ‘feh’ – I will likely get a bowl of beef noodle soup. In the circumstance, we would quickly recognize that there are language difficulties between us. Since we both want to understand each other, we will make allowances. Eventually, I will get soup. They will sell soup.

If I ask the person handing me the soup, Where’s the beef? he or she will point to my bowl.

One of the most incisive and articulate moments in my life occurred years ago at a sporting event. There was some kerfuffle on the court and the crowd had gotten relatively quiet and I yelled out, Where’s the beef?

So where is the problem? I think that much of it is in our language.  To repeat: a very large problem rests within our various languages – our languages within languages. We often fail to realize that words we use that appear to be the same can, in fact, mean very different things to other people. What I think I am saying may not be what you are hearing.

‘God’ has become a word like that word ‘beef’ for me. I grew up thinking ‘God’ meant certain very particular things. And I’ve learned that throughout much of human history that ‘word’ has meant countless things in countless different cultures. Now it takes me a million words just to try to define what I think that ‘word’ does not mean. And whatever the reality, the word, and the ways people use that word within an array of languages from Buddhist to Islamic to Mennonite to atheist and all the dialects therein – well, often just the use of the word ‘God’ leads to kerfuffles.

So I have come to avoid what I call ‘supernatural languages.’ I want to speak of my direct experience and to hear about yours. Of course, our sense of what life means to us and how we use languages to describe that meaning are so intertwined that it is impossible for human beings to entirely speak an unfiltered natural language. But I try to get as close to the ground as I can get. Here and now is where you and I have things in common. We can start with a bowl of soup and work our way up.

We can start our conversations by agreeing that each of our lives is important to us. And then, what are our immediate desires and needs? What does the world around you look like to you? We shouldn’t be afraid to just stop talking and just slurp some soup together if our words are getting in the way of our understanding. And perhaps that misunderstanding should be a sign that things aren’t as clear in our own heads as we might think that they are.

It can be useful or interesting or important to talk about profound things. But until we can talk about childish things without fighting - and we often don’t - I am inclined to avoid trying to talk about higher things. At the very least, when we do try to talk about ‘God,’ we should recognize and make allowances for our language differences. And when we no longer understand what the other person is saying - go back to the soup.

The fact that various languages, and not merely English or Vietnamese, serve us so well and so apparently easily much of the time, should not beguile us. Being misunderstood, and misunderstanding what the other person is saying, especially when ‘God’ is stirred into the soup, is remarkably easy.

So I’ve avoided saying much about God here this morning. Other’s will have their say. And when this is over, we’ll all shake hands and say ‘good game’ or other good words to each other. We were just talking here, after all. We still have our lives – real lives - to try to live with each other. No kerfuffles.

Let us begin by trying to understand each other, a little, even when we don’t understand everything the other person says.

Great writing

When I have just finished reading a portion of writing and found myself paused for a moment, thinking, ‘that was great writing,’ what I realize is that I wouldn't have wanted my mind to be anywhere else but reading those words in those moments.

Reading is a lot like everything else. We go through life, doing normal things, multiple things at once, not paying particular attention, and then at some point we pause and realize, ‘this is a really great beer,’ for example, and everything else recedes a little and we focus on our sensations and our appreciation of greatness.

Wendell Berry is my usual example of a great writer. He combines the ability to craft words and phrases so that they carry me nearly effortlessly, but with elegance and clarity - with grace - through what he is trying to say. And he says things that interest me. At first, I suppose I was surprised by what he was saying. Now that I know his writing better, he still holds my interest because I still care deeply about his themes. Truly, what he says matters more to me than how he says it, but it matters that he says it so well.

This is not complicated really, but we easily lose track of what we mean by greatness because of the subjective nature of these things. What I bring to the experience in question does matters a lot, but I am also willing to flirt with the idea that greatness exists outside of myself and my  perception.

Maybe I believe a little in Platonic ideals. The notion of roundness is easier to define than the idea of greatness, but it simplifies my thinking to imagine that there is something outside of me and also outside of everyone else’s thinking, an ideal that real things can be measured against.

But as is usual with these discussions, there are so many ways of saying these things that we trip ourselves up in our words. We break things down, suggest discrete definitions for all the aspects we find, and then we start to trot out examples. But then we quickly start finding contradictions in our definitions and counter-examples. It turns into a muddle.

What’s more satisfying is to say, ‘that was a great book,’ and have your friend say, ‘yes, that was a great book,’ and then finding ourselves with nothing more to say, we sit in silence, staring off into the night sky, sipping on a really good beer.