Sometimes I wonder if reading is bad for me.
You see, life is ridiculously ambiguous and sometimes serendipitous but more frequently has odd loose endings yet I sometimes find myself functioning as if my life were a novel I'm reading. It's all very well when I'm in media res, when I'm in the thick of things and there's drama and people. But things just don't always happen, there's a lot of not-happening-to-you times and that's when you have to stop waiting for a bedtime story of your life fix and instead focus your attention to other things.
My whole world view is based upon our lives as stories, as collections of stories and the benefit of telling our stories, of studying them, documenting them. But life is more haphazard than a story. It's kind of like we're all actors on a stage and our scripts are more layered, connected, and convoluted than a Charles Dickens' novel but things just don't get tied so neatly, sometimes I'm on stage reciting my dialogue with a fellow actor and they just walk off with no warning. Their exit wasn't on my script, it was probably on their script because of a confluence of factors in their story arch that I have no knowledge of. An audience watching would hold their breath with understanding but I've never been allowed to see their scripts so I am left confounded––Actually, I don't think we have scripts at all. It's more like the director met with us separately to tell us our goals and motivation and now we're all improv-ing and running amuck.
I am hardly making sense right now but I am developing a greater affection for French New Wave and Italian neorealism. Also, The goalie's anxiety at the pentalty kick.
But tonight I was sitting here and I realized what I really wanted was to be able to read more chapters of a story that hadn't been resolved yet. But it was no story at all, rather, real things that happened in my life.
Life makes more sense when it happens to fictional people.
19 May 2012
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In media res is one of my favorite phrases.
ReplyDeleteAnd viewing the world as the setting for the novel of your life is basically one of the few ways we understand the world. We tell stories because we live as stories. Our minds are hard-wired to need beginnings, middles and ends. Finding them is the excitement of life.