The First Person Singular

11. Chronicle and Story

53 11 Chronicle and Story Once we have affirmed “I am a dancer” or “I am a mother,” we have something to tell, which is not just the anonymous and haphazard course of events beginning with the dumb fact of our conception and birth.1 We see and tell, first to ourselves, where we came from, how we came to be here and to be a primatologist, a sexual outlaw. We hold on to the impassioned experience that shimmers with visions of remote and portentous things and events, and we map out our situation and our resources. It is a story, not simply our life plan, that we tell ourselves.2 A story is dramatic; its episodes are apparitions, excitements, risks, and adventures. The events of the story are determined not by the laws governing the causality of nature and our nature but by our visions and the omens and portents they cast before and behind us. The story recounts stretches of exasperated frustration, forced detours, dead ends, and windfalls; unexpected breakthroughs, unforeseen triumphs, and the gnawing anxiety that such triumphs may never come again. Our story integrates them into our identity: I am a mother; in a chance visit to a refugee camp I adopted this orphan. I am a journalist who finally was able to tell the real story of the inner city. I am a revolutionary whose struggle was crushed. I am a dreamer who settled down. We can tell ourselves that our story is the story of everyman, or of a mass of mindless particles passing other masses with the same kind of insignificance that other clouds of mindless particles have in outer space. Those who say “My life is shit” or “Me—I’m nothing” say so out of the story they tell themselves. Our story is not a chronicle of our lives; much is left out: the continuity and regularity of ordinary life, events that left us indifferent. Whole stretches of our lives may appear to us as distractions or as times when nothing really happened. Our experiences break with the continuity and regularity of ordinary life, but our story acquires a rhythmic character. Our experiences figure as motif and counterpoint. Periodically we retell our story to ourselves . Know thyself! Socrates enjoined—but we do not know ourselves by conceptualizing our decisions and actions in rational and explanatory schemata. New experiences, however unforeseeable and baffling, and the impassioned states they arouse, will be shaped by the story that had pre- 54 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R ceded them. And they may induce us to realign the plot, introduce new characters, or even abandon our word of honor. As we project the plot of our lives into the coming days and years, we incorporate pure guesses, wishful thinking, and imaginative constructions. We shift points of view and narrative voice; we incorporate into the story we tell ourselves our story as we hear others tell it. We insert it into or compare it with the plots of stories told of others in the newspapers, in the media, in literature, in the anonymous legends, myths, and epics of our culture. Yet the story I tell myself about who I am and where is unlike any story ever told. I find that my situation, my vision, the accidents and windfalls on my path do not fit into the available cultural patterns of epic, opera , tragedy, romance, ballet, comedy, vaudeville, sitcom, or farce. With abashed wonder I recognize the chance to have been born in this time and place with these resources or to have been born at all. Even if I am everyman and no one, I am so in a here and now that has never before occurred and will never be repeated. The story I tell myself of my experiences may remain secret, as may the word of honor I have put on myself. Or I may tell my story to others, to make clear to them who I am, to integrate my experiences with theirs so as to make clear our common predicament and resources, or simply to entertain them. Telling my story to others may well function to clarify it to myself and enable me to commit myself to what an impassioned experience showed me was important, map out my resources, and enable me to exult in my strengths and laugh over my bunglings...