Saturday, April 21, 2018
story as scaffold of uncapturable life
Narrative can be invitation to imagination, such that the more minimal it is, the more gracious toward reader imaginability the line is.
“This is my confession,” as if narrativity in quote marks is distanced pretense without commitment to authorial candor. Characted confession may cloak a candor that thereby escapes others’ want of elaboration, as if her or his innerwordliness has no more to share beyond a brevity of time passing too quickly, which the story shows.
With respect to one’s times, there may be too much news to recall, too much influence (implicit, as well as explicit), as if otherwise the full reality of a life’s era is to be captured in retrospect. Especially for a journalist, living in a sea of it all, “reality” is made of choices.
1968 is now fifty years ago. So, news media now track events of that historic year because half-century milestones find most persons of that time still alive to mark living remembrance. I was 18 then, but already a sophemore in college.
This month, MLK’s death was duly remembered. The May 1968 student protests—Paris, Prague, and all around the U.S. will soon be remembered. (Some “radicals” back then thought that a world revolution was immanent.) 1968 was an election year in the U.S. RFK’s assassination will be remembered this coming August.
There’s an eerie godliness to standing far beyond historic times, as if witnessing history happening from an Archimedean Point of timelessness. Yet, recounting a life relative to any one year’s events could be a book of its own, let alone trying to capture an era of a life. Novels may involve merely a few days, even one day (Ulysses).
So, story emerges from selectivity in the life, never capturing life itself. Manageable narrative about an important era of time is likely skeletal, as if there are few important days, few important scenes, lost conversations, and no silences where we decide to say one thing rather than another, and our feeling is more than anyone else but a near intimate may know.
