Storytelling

"Oh, nobody knows who I am 

  Till the judgement morning."

―An old African-American spiritual

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"The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It’s as if, attending to the day-long cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly."

― Russell Banks, "Continental Drift"

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Dear Kate,

Storytelling is not activism.

Actually quite the opposite.  Only that the word picture is also not there either, a spectrum with storytelling at one end and activism the other.  When was the last time you laid life on a line and found satisfaction?

Actually often.  "Telling it like it is," we the educated, enlightened, evenhanded folks of reason and conscience often claim to do.  "I do not know myself" is a statement saved for our dying breath (if we do come around to know our last and acknowledge then).  Not only we know about ourselves, we know about others, the world, how things (should) work, and, most of all, that God doesn't exist---which, not incidentally, is the reason why we claim to know so much so thoroughly.

Years ago I was about to give a book of short stories to a friend, a lady who thrives on activism.  I don't claim to know her enough; I wondered if she knew herself at all.  Like many of us but even more so, she can always find an angle (which is often hackneyed and convenient, riding the zeitgeist readily available and agreeable) to exploit, for the betterment of mankind, as a way to "find" herself.  Of course big words like "calling" and "vocation" and even "destiny" must be conscripted for the mythmaking.

I didn't give her the book after all.  It was by Russell Banks, a moral voice as strong as there ever is one in America, which makes him sound almost like an activist, almost like my friend.  Why did I decide against it the last minute?  I don't know.  It's not contempt, I hope.  Pity maybe?  I hope it is not contempt.

I am not saying storytelling cannot spur a person into action.  But if activism is what we are dead set on before opening the pages, we can never come alive in the presence of Creation without mistaking ourselves for being the Creator.  Do it often and extensively enough as a civilization and we are left with nothing but propaganda, podcast and TikTok.  

"Stop racism," you heard it, I did too.  You don't want to express any disagreement (especially when you appear to be a beneficiary of the noble effort), but somehow couldn't quite tell why there's something disingenuous, distasteful about the sloganeering.  It feels almost like someone is using you, someone who cares not to ask fundamental questions necessary for such lofty pursuit, someone who is more interested in how s/he appears on the right side of history while claiming to uphold justice, goodness, even bliss, for the rest of us.  Someone who is cheating at your expense.

"Pictures of the Ice," a minor Alice Munro short story, one of her easiest, I think, least ambiguous, that is.  It touches on much of what we are wrestling with now.  It should be prescribed reading in the Parliament and on the pew.   Why don't you read it and tell me what you think you heard?

Yours, Alex

P.S. The video I made above, if you can give the lid a catchphrase and make a meme of it, what would your line be?

(If you are "woke" enough, it should be "Put me in the trash bin."  Not that you actually need to do that when you see a wayward one on the roadside.)