| sentiments about journaling/story telling |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|01:11 am] |
"Why, when something important happens to you, do you feel compelled to tell someone else about it?... It's as if nothing has happened until an event is made explicit in language... The process of story creation, of condensing an experience into a story-sized chunk that can be told in a reasonable amount of time is a process that makes the chunk smaller and smaller... Normally, after much retelling, we are left with exactly the details of the story we have chosen to remember. In short, story creation is a memory process... [that] creates the... structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering."
-Roger C. Shank, Tell Me a Story
"If you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and your friends you'll probably say something beautiful."
-Paul Marshall, From the Poets in the Kitchen
"Then if it is remembered, if the stories are still told and retold, does everything change?... It is reechoed in the Holocaust survivors' fierce determination to 'bear witness,' to return from hell and tell what they had seen. It barely mattered if there was someone listening. Few survivors were so optimistic as to think people would listen, nevertheless the tale is told aloud, to oneself, to prove that there is existence, to tame the chaos of the world, to give meaning. The tale certifies the fact of being and gives sense at the same time. Perhaps these are the same, because people everywhere have always needed to narrate their lives and worlds, as surely as they needed food, love, sex, and safety... Homo narrans, humankind as a story teller, is a human constant."
-Barbara Meyerhoff, Number Our Days
"We learn from events as we interpret them, and one of the main ways of interpreting them is by talking about them - by giving them shape in language."
"We've only got one life as participants. As spectators, countless lives are open to us. They are extensions of our own. And what is afoot when we are extending our experience into each other's as we gossip is above all an exploration of values. As I recount a story of events, I'm offering evaluations and I am looking to you listening to me to come back with your evaluations."
-James Britton, Writing to Learn and Learning to Write |
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Like ignorant explorers, the more we see and experience, the bigger our world map grows. The more people exist and have experiences, the bigger the world grows. If everyone in the world blogged, how much information would we have about the same events, real events absorbed and filtered through each person's personality and point of view? They wouldn't be the same at all. You and I saw the same concert but it was totally different in the retelling. And each experience that is narrated becomes part of our consciousness, we get attached to others' stories because we are given that connection through language. The more friends i have from other countries, the more I care about what happens in that country. I have an investment there, in a friend, in a set of eyes that is now important to me, in a heart that is now connected to mine, who feeds me language. Without that verbal connection I would be an island.
Animals, too, in communicating with us, give us so much knowledge about life and the earth... I want to see some quotes and musings about animal communication. <3 | |
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