Saturday night I tore off pieces of a Post-It to mark passages in Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World
. As I reached the last lines of the last chapter, closed the book and set it on the bedside table, I continued to think about story and place and self and how they overlap and interweave. I wanted to wrap up the book and move on…perhaps to start writing more stories instead of simply talking about their importance.
But first, the wrap-up.
Sanders makes a case for story trumping data when he quotes Flannery O’Connor, who admitted feeling, she said, “a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as statistics…in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells” (157, 166).
“By what stories shall we be known?” Sanders muses (166).
What are we passing on? What content are we preserving on Facebook and blogs, in journals and memoirs? By what stories will this generation be known?
Sanders answers the question in part by telling his own stories. For example, he tells of returning to one of the places he lived when he was young. After revisiting old haunts, he ended up in a church, entering through an open back door. He observed the “squeaky pine boards of the floor,” child-sized tables used in Sunday school, and hooks where the choir would hang their robes. He continued:
Every few paces I halted, listening. The joints of the church cricked as the sun let it go. Birds fussed beyond the windows. But no one else was about; this relieved me, for here least of all was I prepared to explain myself. I had moved too long in circles where to confess an interest in religious things marked one as a charlatan, a sentimentalist, or a fool. No doubt I have all three qualities in my character. But I also have another quality, and that is an unshakable hunger to know who I am, where I am, and into what sort of cosmos I have been so briefly and astonishingly sprung. Whatever combination of shady motives might have led me here, the impulse that shook me right then was a craving to glimpse the very source of things. (190)
I always thought everyone shared that “unshakable hunger” to know who they are and where they are and from where they have been sprung.
But I have discovered that many people don’t relate to this. Perhaps they simply live in the moment without any desire to dig deeper into the soul or memory. Curious, they are not…at least, not about the past that makes the self. I, on the other hand, continually feel questions arise and want to find answers, seeking to know better who I am…and who I am becoming.
Aren’t we all becoming in the sense that we are always living yet another page in our story?
As we are busy living our stories, we aren’t necessarily telling our stories. When we venture to take on the role of a storyteller—an essential role, I believe—we add complicating layers. By revisiting our stories and reflecting on them, we can potentially affect the memories.
Sanders considers these layers and revisions and the tricks they can play on us. That visit of his to the tiny dot on the map known as Wayland represented the challenge of those layers:
There is more to be seen at any crossroads than one can see in a lifetime of looking. My return visit to Wayland was less than two hours long. Once again several hundred miles distant from that place, back here in my home ground making this model from slippery words, I cannot be sure where the pressure of mind has warped the surface of things. If you were to go there, you would not find every detail exactly as I have described it. How could you, bearing as you do a past quite different from mine? No doubt my memory, welling up through these lines, has played tricks with time and space…certain moments in one’s life cast their influence forward over all the moments that follow. My encounters in Wayland shaped me first as I lived through them, then again as I recalled them during my visit, and now as I write them down. That is of course why I write them down. The self is a fiction. I make up the story of myself with scraps of memory, sensation, reading, and hearsay. It is a tale I whisper against the dark. Only in rare moments of luck or courage do I hush, forget myself entirely, and listen to the silence that precedes and surrounds and follows all speech. (192-193)
It’s a bold statement to say that “the self is a fiction.” Is he right? Do we add to our story? Do we forget? Are we gently fabricating the self that we are, by telling ourselves a version of our past that makes the most sense, or sounds the best?
Do we fictionalize ourselves to the point of believing ourselves to have been far better, stronger, gentler, wiser, and funnier than witnesses would attest?
Or do we beat up on ourselves by fictionalizing and believing ourselves to have been far worse, weaker, harsher and more naive and blundering than witnesses would attest?
How can we revisit memories and tell our stories and understand ourselves in a way that is true, even if not 100 percent accurate?
Because who I am becoming flows out of who I have been. As a self, I would like to know the truth; as a storyteller, I would like to tell the truth.
All in order to continue becoming.
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Previous posts that discuss the book Staying Put:
Curiosity Journal: Geography of the Mind, Birdfeeders, Sarah Kay on Story and Mini Flash Mob
Curiosity Journal: Staying Put, Christmas Decor and Advent
Curiosity Journal: Extinct Green Parakeet, Puny Petunia, and First Snow
Curiosity Journal: November 16, 2011Curiosity Journal: November 9, 2011
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Note: This book is a title that I bought with my own money and selected from my personal library to read, enjoy and share briefly with you here. I was not compensated in any way by anyone nor did the publisher or author provide me with a complimentary review copy. My “reading” posts are not intended to be reviews; instead, I generally compose personal responses to passages from books I’m reading, focusing on the portions that I enjoy and pretty much ignoring sections with which I neither agree nor connect.Credits: all images by Ann Kroeker, all rights reserved.
Sanders, Scott Russell. Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Print. (Amazon Associates Link)
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“By revisiting our stories and reflecting on them, we can potentially affect the memories.”
I think this is true. We are the only one who really knows what we were feeling and what other complicating emotions or events were occurring at the same time.
Sometimes it is a good thing to affect the memory, especially if the memory was not especially a good one. To concentrate and find the good in the memory and concentrate on that.
Does that make sense? It’s a type of cognitive therapy.
I’ve been using it to try to reshape and alter the bad memory. For example – each time I look at my husbands wounds on his face, abdomen, and back (from being stabbed by a poacher), instead of freezing up and experiencing the horror of that night, I’m teaching myself to say “Thank you Jesus for saving my husband’s life. Thank you for the scars that are a reminder of your miracles that night”.
This is an intentional altering of memories. That may not be what Sanders was referring to. I wonder how much we do alter our stories otherwise. I bet it’s more than what we think.
Thanks for this thought provoking post.
Janet, I really appreciate your response here. And your behavior modification or whatever that technique is, seems so wise and gentle and productive. “Intentional altering,” as you say.
Always good to see you here. So good.
I have loved your reflections on this book, Ann – and these top it off beautifully. Great questions to ask. We are indeed always in the process of becoming, and the past (whether we have remembered it accurately in terms of facts or not) has great impact on that process. In the end, it doesn’t always matter how much ‘fiction’ there is in the remembering and the re-telling – it is still the truth as we have experienced it. That’s why memoir can be both technically untrue (in terms of factual accuracy) and deeply true at the same time. A paradox, right? But I think it’s a centrally important one for the telling of us, don’t you? I loved L.L’s daughter’s response to her first reading of “Rumors of Water:” “Well, that’s not exactly how it happened, but it’s the truth.” (Or something close to that – I just looked for it and couldn’t find it!)
“It is still the truth as we have experienced it.” I like that distinction, Diana, and your next statement, too, about memoirs. Your quoting L.L.’s realization that the story was “off,” but that it was still “true.” And she “got it.” She understood.
I don’t spend much time staring at myself in mirrors–even when I wash my hands in a restroom, I don’t take extra time to fix my hair. So sometimes I do stop and look and think, “Is that what people see?” and then I remember, no, they see the opposite of this, with the part of my hair on the other side. Even a mirror doesn’t provide me with a perfect view of myself that others see. There is always, always, point of view…and then the tricks of memory and time…to complicate our stories.
I still love reading them.
and I’m still willing to write them.
I love that statement “the self is fiction”. You know, lately or over the past few years, I am amazed about how different perspectives my twin sister and I each have. We were both together for much of our “story” but sometimes she’s forgotten a specific memory until I tell it from my point of view and vice versa. Plus our older siblings have a different time frame and their stories are so different from how we saw things. What is truth? And LL’s book spoke of this and it has given me a lot to think about. Thanks for sharing your curiosity journals and this post.
Even twins! How fascinating that even the two of you saw and remembered things quite differently. Point of view. We all take things in and run them through filters, like Sanders said, and, as you and Diana pointed out, like L.L. said in her book.
I love this, Ann! As an introspective person, I often think I’m over the top with so many people. Too often questioning purpose in memories and digging deep. I think stories remind us of purpose. It’s not just living for the sake of living. It’s savoring and growing out of them.
Love your line, “I think stories remind us of purpose.” Nice.
I’m savoring stories and craving more.
Well, I’m the one who looks back and beats up on myself. And then I write a column to that effect and get kudos. I am still confused that praise would be the response to my despair.
P.S. Please write your memoir. 🙂
Is that column available to read online??
p.s. Perhaps a New Year’s resolution to write installments via blogging? Thanks for the encouragement!
Oh, Ann, what an inspiring read this post is! You know I’m such a fan of memoir for the reason that it invites–even requires–us to reflect, ponder, look back and dig for deeper meaning. In my writing of memoir, I’ve discovered many more joys and blessings than I recognized at the time. Discovering such treasures settles and stabilizes me.
In teaching memoir, however, I’m struck with something you, too, observed: “I always thought everyone shared that ‘unshakable hunger’ to know who they are and where they are and from where they have been sprung. But I have discovered that many people don’t relate to this. Perhaps they simply live in the moment without any desire to dig deeper into the soul or memory. Curious, they are not… at least, not about the past that makes the self.”
People miss so much when they write only the surface elements of their story. Like you said, “…Who I am becoming flows out of who I have been.”
Do you know how to encourage people to dig deeper, to reflect?
Ann, I agree with the others: Please write your memoir!
Thanks for your inspiration today.
Linda Thomas
Hi Ann,
I enjoyed your post and your focus on how who we are becoming springs in part from our past…I have struggled with this as I try to revisit past events, and I think what L.L. said about how we experienced it, or as Ian M. Cron writes in his memoir, it is what he felt, and I think that is so important because childhood events cannot but be remembered but through a child’s mental and psychological constraints /stage of development…plus, if there is trauma, that adds another layer of complexity…but yes, to always seek for truth and to aim to write as truthfully as one can in one’s imperfect state…my two cents 🙂