I've been on a Joan Didion trip recently, ever since I discovered, somehow, her book titled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". I liked the vision in that title, apparently it's a quote out of Yeats. Or Keats. One of those poet type people who everybody quotes but nobody reads.
I picked up a compilation, a fat, heavy monster leaning in on 1000 pages, this titled "We tell ourselves stories in order to live". Jaw drops to floor when I read that and immediately issue it (see I'm poverty struck I haven't bought a book in, I think, 4 years now. With my own money that is. Thank you, library!). A powerful line, but check the following extract, it's from a book boringly called "The White Album". Emphasis in italics, they are mine.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five...We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
In many ways, the pursuit of a line of inquiry into the world - otherwise known as "research" - is, implicitly or explicitly, exactly this. The problem is most people conducting the damn research are unaware, trusting in some misplaced notion of "Science" (with a capital S) as being this purely objective thing that arrived by itself and dribbles itself into our conscience every now and then.
Recognizing that in research we are essentially carrying out "the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images" would benefit not just the researcher and the research, but also the world wide notion of what research is. Telling stories. To live.
"You know, some people got no choice
and they can never find a voice
to talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
that allows them the right to be
why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck."
and they can never find a voice
to talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
that allows them the right to be
why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck."
"Street Hassle", Lou Reed, 1978
2 comments:
those last lines are semi-prophetically scary
yes, but how true it is. One of three decent songs Lou Reed came up with. Describes 95% of the people I see around me.
Flip side: the selected quotes are prophetically...hopeful.
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