The trauma of narrative or why talking to my grandma is depressing
Is In that it gives us the illusion that life is a story, a linear, chronological arrangement of events that build to some coherent end where In reality, at the end of teh average human life most lose what they have strived for all their lives-- friends die, work becomes irrelevant, outdated, views archaic, stale...life is ultimately non-cathartic but because we've arranged everything around us Narratively its nonfulfillment is experienced as failure. HENCE suffering. Right now I am operating under the "narrative illusion" that everything I am constructing is this Narrative of my life. It will have the three or four act structure of youth, coming of age, middle age and ultimately achievement, of what I don't know. It doesn't really matter because the last twenty to thirty years of my life is not a part of the structure. It is unaccounted for in the construction. So why do we live our lives like this...why don't we account for the last thirty years? Why don't we prepare ourselves for the final chapter of an existence apart from the rest of the story? Why does my grandmother expect her son to call her? In her mind from the time he was young she created an illusion of a reciprocally dependent relationship. But this is a lie. The child does not turn around and reciprocate. That is considered perverted--the man who lives with his mother in Hitchcock's Psycho is a testament to our views of such a psychological relation. Indeed If it is reciprocal it is a failure. So my grandmother in decrying her son's lack of interest has in fact set herself up for this brutal tragedy--her life is a vacuum that the narrative lie she built up for over half a century (she's like 82 fucking years old) . There are other paradoxes as well. We strive also for predictability. It's called planning or working towards an end goal. Without the end goal there is also no meaning. And yet consider the INHERENT sadness in the word" predictable". Predictable carries the weight of narrative failure. When the story moves in steady measures towards an inevitable end. What's that all about?
So how to duck out of suffering? Recognize the narrative construct as a separate one. Separate from your existence. Separate from anything except itself. We tell ourselves stories in order to live according to Joan Didion. But what to do when the story has come to an end and you are still alive? You are alive and suffering because of the lie? My grandmother's narrative is now one of struggle and the worst part is that her struggle's outcome is she knows will be defeated.
So how to duck out of suffering? Recognize the narrative construct as a separate one. Separate from your existence. Separate from anything except itself. We tell ourselves stories in order to live according to Joan Didion. But what to do when the story has come to an end and you are still alive? You are alive and suffering because of the lie? My grandmother's narrative is now one of struggle and the worst part is that her struggle's outcome is she knows will be defeated.