Sometimes I Change My Mind

Every day is a good day for me to be suspicious of my assumptions. Today is an especially good day. For starters, it’s my 78th birthday which suggests a new leaf must be turned. I hadn’t really considered that expression before. I thought it had something to do with the appearance in spring of green possibility on every branch of every tree. But instead, the leaf in question is the page of a book. When you turn the page, a door opens on to the next chapter, the next idea, a different shade of green. This brings me back to the dense forest of story which seems to be encroaching on me, hemming me in and leaving me with the feeling that I may be entirely misguided. What else is new? I may be completely lost with no trail of breadcrumbs to help me find my way home. What do I mean when I use the word story. What is it? Where does it come from? Last week, I posted an essay I called “Finding Your Essential Story,” https://susiekaufman.substack.com/p/finding-your-essential-story which brought on a flood of heightened awareness that the search for one’s story is itself the story. I was very proud of myself.

No sooner did I write that piece than I came across Parul Sehgal’s July 23rd New Yorker article, “The Tyranny of the Tale.” Sehgal, a literary critic, holds us all to account for turning everything from recipes, to advertising, to personal growth, to politics into story, as in Joe Biden had “a good story” when he ran for President in 2020, transmuting all his personal losses into a marketing tool. People talk about needing a new personal story as if they’re looking for a new pair of running shoes, as if navigating the choppy waters of this life  might become less challenging if considered from the other side of the boat. Story as spin. Once this idea creeps into your consciousness, you’ll find it everywhere. It reduces experience and literature itself to plot which in my mind has always been the most primitive rung on the revelatory ladder. This happened and then that happened. It’s always something, isn’t it?

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

Story comes to us from the oral tradition. It is so ancient, such a given of the human condition, that we assume that we know what it is and how it does its magic. Is story a synonym for plot? Perhaps every plot is indeed a conspiracy, a means of gaslighting us, causing us to question our own perception of reality. A writer constructs a plot to cordon off the crime scene so that other explanations are no longer viable. Not much room for ambiguity. There is a story that you’re told and expected to believe. Conspiracy theorists depend upon it. How Anthony Fauci promoted vaccination because he was in league with the pharmaceutical companies. How Jews control the media. Or, in my day, how chlorine in the water is a Communist plot. You better believe it.

My living relationship to story goes back to Torah, where we begin in the beginning with squiggles on a parchment scroll, the Written Torah. But from there, we engage in a conversation that has taken place over the millennia among readers of that text. This is called Oral Torah. It changes and expands every time someone encounters the original story of, say, Moses at the Burning Bush, and filters it through her own sensibility, her own bare feet standing on holy ground. In this reading, the plot of a story is not a conspiracy or a piece of land measured to accommodate an individual consciousness that is already dead. It’s more like a suggestion. Here, see if you can feel this, think about this, try it on for size. This reading of story is more in line with the way life actually unfolds, bouncing around with particles of experience crashing into one another and taking off in unexpected directions. It’s untamed, unsettled and unsettling like the stories that are given to us in our dreams. 

Great literature can do this. Merchandising cannot. This means that all stories are not created equal. We would be wise to suspect any story that attempts to corral all the complexities of lived experience into an easily digestible format. This is especially true of the stories we tell ourselves about our own sojourn on the planet. I still say the search for one’s story is itself the story. But let’s be clear. It is not a comic book or a campaign speech or a whodunnit. Like Scripture, it is filled with contradiction, ambiguity and befuddlement. It is living and breathing until it’s not.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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