January 16, 2007
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no stories…
You know… I don’t think I’ve ever had a story about myself that I thought was worth telling. No achievements worth boasting over, no failures worth letting other commiserate with me over, no funny tales worth joking about. Is that why, when so many others can so easily engage in idle communication I find so often that I have nothing to say? Is that why I need to struggle so hard to come up with little anecdotes or clever responses to fill the endless silences that drag on when in conversation people wait for you to pull your share of the burden of communication?
It’s sort of ironic when so many of my family members seem to be almost legendary in their story telling abilities. When I was little I used to sit on the porch or the living room sofa and just listen to my aunts and uncles, grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, cousins, and other various relations just spin their tales and discuss things far and wide with astounding ease and comfort. I could sit there forever. I loved listening to it. It didn’t have anything to contribute, not an opinion, not an idea and certainly no stories of my own. Sometimes the stories would be silly or trivial. They could spin stories out of the sports, out of television, out of the weather, easily as if it were a natural thing to do. Other times the stories would be funny, hilarious reminiscing of the past but which held deeper meanings or imparted lessons and knowledge upon the listener. Still other times the conversation would turn deadly serious and the stories they told were all too horrifyingly real. Stories of death, and sickness and injustice and cruelty and prejudice and suffering and thoughtlessness. When I was little they would only tell those when the kids were upstairs and out of the way, but of course I managed to over-hear my fair share of them anyway as I’m sure did all of my cousins and siblings.
In retrospect some of the stories were quite cruel. As in just about every group I’ve eve been in, conversations inevitably turned to criticisms of certain groups or persons often not fully justified. Most often the cruelty was wrought for the sake of humor. The outsiders folly oft serves to bring merry comfort to the group. Less frequently the cruelty was only masked in humor but underlying was reflective of a deeper shared rage and anger that permeated the group.
Back when I was young I used to wonder a lot about how they almost always managed to hold these conversations without turning to argument or anger and making everyone uncomfortable. To be sure sometimes they did but it was the exception from my perspective not the rule. In my schoolings I observed that children were far more likely to alienate one another should any conversation last more than fifteen minutes. Disagreements would break out and become obvious more likely in the first five seconds. That is, until children found their niche group of entities with whom they were unlikely to find offense. But even in those groups, offense was common, just more likely to be forgiven.
As I am older I see now that my relatives were not all that different really just a little wiser and a lot more disciplined. I look back and I see how they would steer their storytelling to prove their point or use their examples to express their disagreement all without having to directly assert anything. I can see now when relatives would hold their tongue rather than say something that would break the flow and shatter the contentment and happiness of the evening.
This is not to say that my relatives were dishonest or indirect. Quite the contrary. These are very forthright people, direct in their dealings and un-inclined to subterfuge almost to a fault. Some of them would speak their mind forcefully enough that you’d wonder how anyone could tolerate their way of dealing with you. So why then the lack of discordance in their dealings with one another? It’s really quite simple really. They shared a belief in the importance of the event. Family gatherings were serious business for them. It was important that they get together and important and meaningful to have conversations with their sister and brothers and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. It was important and valued enough that they were all willing to sacrifice a little in order to not taint the event, to ensure that it remain special.
I observe this kind of behavior all the time really now that I am wise enough to see it. Nearly all conversations entail people holding back, even those who pride themselves on being brutally honest, you see them hold back if you know how to look for it. All in order to ensure that conversation can occur.
So is all conversation then just a kind of dissembling? Do we with hold our true thoughts in order to ensure that we have can continue to communicate at all? Probably yes to some extent that is true, but I don’t think it is a bad thing.
Ach! I was supposed to be talking about stories and how I lack any stories not about the inherent nature of conversation. They are not at all the same thing.
Stories come from a kind of observational outlook toward reality. To acquire stories you must be interested in finding the quirky and unusual and noteworthy things about the world around you. Storytellers are those who want to share the experience of reality with others and talk about it.
So why am I not a ‘storyteller’ in that sense? Because I’m still the little boy sitting on the porch step. I am fascinated with hearing the stories. I love them and want to learn them, but I don’t particularly feel any desire to share them or to discuss them. I just want to listen. I want to immerse myself in them and thus know how fascinating the experiences of humanity really is. Is that selfish? Probably. I should tell my own stories anyway, however trivial and uninteresting they may seem to me in case someone else can find meaning in them or learn from them. But then you gotta deal with the questions and the discussions and the sympathetic comments and the offers to help and blah blah blah. I don’t care about that garbage. I just want you to tell me more stories!
In order to be able to converse I have acquired three tactics that I have found effective alternatives to being a story gatherer and storyteller like so many other people seem to be.
One is to simply do something that most people don’t do for no other reason then to be able to tell the story about it. I don’t really care about the story and I don’t even do it for the experience, though I feel all experiences are worth having. I just do it because I can and if nothing else I can tell the story. The more unusual the story the less likely anyone is to question it. More like, they’ll get into a boasting contest and respond with their own more unusual story! Yes! Score!
The second strategy is to tell other people’s stories. Not as my own of course, that’d be evil. But since I enjoy hearing stories so much I do have quite an archive of stories I’ve heard. Too bad my memory stinks so most like I’ll be telling these stories wrong and half making it up as I go along. Still, I enjoy that a lot more. There’s a risk though of seeming close minded or even somewhat parasitic if you tell too many tales of others. People will wonder why you are never a major character in any of your stories! For some reason that tends to alienate people.
The last strategy and by far my favorite is to avoid telling stories altogether and simply talk about my ideas. That’s actually something that is mine which I enjoy sharing and discussing. Someone tells me a story and in it they feature some aspect of the world they wish were otherwise, well now I’ll just respond with my craziest suggestion as to how to make it otherwise. In a lull in the conversation I’ll just randomly bring up some subject matter that I dislike and tell people how I believe it could be made better and exactly how I think we should go about doing it. In less directive matters, I’ll just talk about how I feel the world really works, how people really think, what the great mysteries of the world are. I’ll talk about books I’ve read on these subjects, the thoughts of scholars on these matters, history and science, math, psychology, programming, philosophy. Whatever. Anything I have an opinion on I’ll share that opinion just because I like thinking about it and I think pretty much everyone has something interesting to say about it so I feel that by sharing these things I’ll learn something from the listeners response. I’m sure I must sound arrogant when I do this or perhaps psychotic, but who cares! There are too many cool ideas to be explored in the world to worry about such stuff.
Usually that last strategy carries additional risks besides the risk of sounding like a ranting lunatic. Recall, earlier I talked about how people “hold back” opinions during conversation in order to prevent discordance in the flow of conversation. People are very careful not to respond with their ideas and opinions when those opinions are likely to upset or enrage someone. You can really cause someone to hate you by saying you think something should be a certain way if that person is morally opposed to that idea. And of course, I am cautious of this as well. If there is some clue that leads me to believe that a particular idea I have would not be well received I don’t voice it unless I think it is really important to do so, but most times since I am spontaneously bringing up subjects not earlier discussed there’s always great risk that I could be entering an area of taboo without realizing. Who knows maybe one day such a thing will get me in big trouble. But wouldn’t that make an interesting story to tell?
There’s a fourth strategy too that I used to dabble in a little and that is the time honored art of asking questions. It is entirely possible to carry on an entire conversation without volunteering anything but questioning everything. Only deep down this is what I want to do. I want to listen yes, but I also want to ask questions and find out what other people are thinking about matters that interest me. I’m not super super curious because I’ve learned that people don’t often answer direct questions in a manner that is particularly interesting or necessarily truthful. Still, even half-responses to deep questions can be intriguing and even bad responses can lead to an interesting socratic dialogue in which we try to uncover the truth of what is going on.
Still, I don’t do that and although I’ve never been a talkative person, I ask even less questions now than I ever did before. Why? Because in college I encountered someone who used to carry on discussions with me in such a manner, basically questioning me about everything and every idea and challenging my every word. I discovered that I despised this tactic! It was horrible, no matter how kindly the presentation, it felt like being involved in an interrogation. Every time I felt the need to dissemble or avoid answering I felt terrible like I’d lost some precious part of my honor and morality. I could not in good conscious continue to do this kind of thing to others even a little. Every now and then I’ll catch myself asking two many questions and forcefully stop myself. Fulfilling one’s curiosity isn’t worth causing that kind of harm however important the question. I’ll always love Socrates but I know that if I ever met him in real life, you’d probably have to tie me to a chair and hold a gun to my head in order to force me to hold more than a five minute conversation with him. I guess I’m just more of a natural listener.
