Narrative

Two things happened to me today. First, a friend sent me this New York Times article. The second took place later in the day, in the afternoon when I was struggling to focus. I downloaded (i.e. bought) Darius Rucker’s Charleston, SC 1966. In a strange way, I think the two events are related.

The New York Times article came about when I was trying to find someone to waste time with. I needed a coffee break, and was hoping to talk one of my workmates into walking down to the canteen with me. That played out, but I happened to stumble across my friend in an industrious (today anyway) colleague’s office. We’re both ‘truth seekers’, and have broadly similar views on philosophy, religion, life, the universe and so forth. Anyway, my guy and I got talking, and the question of what constitutes one’s identity came up (really, really geeky, I know, especially given the fact that this conversation tok place in an open corridor).

Identity. He brought up Locke. I tried not to express my horror which I knew stemmed from an irrational resistance towards British thinkers. I countered with – surprise, surprise – Kierkegaard; and also confessed my affinity for Heidegger, which is a little problematic given his cosy relationship with the Nazis. We went back and forth for a little bit, then finally settled on Jerome Bruner’s paper, Life as Narrative. We decided that we both liked the idea of identity as a verb, a process of, to borrow from Kierkegaard, becoming what one is, and we went our separate ways; he to do more economic modelling around the health of the Rwandese, and me, to have a bit of an amble, pick up yet another book from the library that may be returned unread, and get that coffee.

Before getting stuck into his modelling though, my guy sent me the article on prisoners with dementia, and gave me strict instructions to watch the accompanying video. I did, and nearly cried.

Isn’t there something incredibly profound, something jarring about the relationships between the two sets of condemned men? The closest I’ve ever come to this sort of thing was in reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection, but Tolstoy, unlike Dostoevsky, seems at his core to really like happy endings, or at least resolution. The video strangely has for me a kind of Tolstoyan ‘optimism’ about it, yet ends with the sort of lack of happy ending or resolution that you’d expect from a Dostoevsky work.

What really got me was thinking of both sets of prisoners – those with dementia and the ones caring for them – in light of the idea of life as narrative. Like Resurrection, how moving an account of redemption and grace. How amazing is it that the man who literally plucks out the eyes of a woman, mutilates her, murders her, and then just carries on as usual, could then in another moment, albeit years later, wipe the soiled bottom of an elderly demented convict? What striking contrasts of utter contempt, and the most beautiful, substantive, love and nurture. Now, there’s obviously so so much more to that man, but when facing him, when trying to ‘see’ him; to ‘apprehend’; ‘fix’; get an idea of; ‘encapsulate’ him – what do you do? What do you do when you stand in front of the mirror and try to do exactly the same thing with the person facing you? How do you define/apprehend/‘see’ even you?

I have the same problem when I’m standing in front of a beautiful scene, or a lovely person, with my camera in my hand. How do I ‘capture’ what’s before me? What can I afford to ignore or sacrifice. What is the essence of the thing I want to get a hold of? And if I’m honest, not even my best photos, my best attempts, come even close to reproducing or grabbing a hold of the thing I want to grab a hold of.

I think we’re faced with the same dilemma when confronted by the prisoners in the article and video. Do we choose to see violent, barbarous men (not animals, because only men and devils are capable of that sort of evil; nature couldn’t birth that sort of thing)? Do we see redemption? Change? Rehabilitation? Affirmation of our ability to will and contort the world into rational order such that even ravenous wolves can be made to lie peaceably with lambs – or, as Nietzsche put it, that we indeed have become gods?

All of those are options. But all distort what’s really there, to varying degrees, in the same way my photos distort what I try to grasp. I like the idea that those men are narrative. That who they are is a complex process, and understanding who they are is a function of ‘reading’ that process. The closer the reading, the more ‘facts’ known, the more time spent with the individual, the more questions asked, the greater the engagement, then the greater the degree of understanding and the closer the ‘picture’ one leaves with is to what is in fact really there. And the same is true, in my opinion, of the 24 year old Canadian woman standing in front of her mirror trying to grasp who she is, her wherefore; as it is of the elderly Malawian woman who is approaching the end of her story and is trying to evaluate it.

The glimpse I caught of some of the men in the New York Times video was breathtaking. In and amongst the filth and violence and bars I think I saw just a little bit of the idea of Immanuel – divinity embodied in the mortal – in those men.

Which brings me to Darius Rucker. I don’t listen to very much country music. I like folk rock, but the baggage I still carry from my high school attempts to be cool are such that country is a step to far for me. And back then in school, Darius Rucker was ‘Hootie’ from ‘Hootie and the Blowfish’, a weird black dude who made music for white kids. Granted, I now think just that of people like 50cent, Kanye and so forth, but I digress.

I couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an interview in which Rucker shared part of his journey from pop into country. As he spoke, I saw a man, as Unamuno would say, a man of flesh and bone. A regular guy, like me, trying to figure stuff out. Trying to make sense of everything and figure out his purpose and ‘wherefore’. Maybe not even that, he seems to have, in one sense always known where he wanted to end up – which, oddly enough, was playing country music. It’s more like he was working it all out – not figuring it, but actually doing the work of the process of being; like someone walking through a thick rainforest with a machete does the work of clearing out the path before him. Honestly, I ‘saw’, or at least caught a glimpse of Rucker, or the Rucker narrative, and recognised myself in it – I saw my own process and my own struggle, which is radically different yet comfortingly similar. I recognised another narrative, and in that I found comfort.