For some time now, this question has been simmering at the back of my mind. It started well over a year ago when, suddenly frustrated by how hard it was to articulate the changes wrought by the web, I realised what I wanted was a story, not analysis. Enough brittle, steel words had been laid down. It was time for something else.
If what we ‘new liberal arts’ bloggers and writers were actually talking about was the way the present was spilling into an unknown future, suddenly it seemed even the most lucid analysis was, at best, like a clean, closed room with the blinds drawn. The outdoors, with its rolling hills, its horizons beckoning – that was where we needed to dwell. What we needed was a gesture towards half-formed thoughts, dream-like impressions, images seen from the window of a speeding train. A couple of things – a short-lived tumblr by Rex; a post here and there by Diana – cemented this new-found belief.
I had initially intended for this post to focus on one Mr. Penumbra. And I’ll get to that soon, because when it comes to stories about our time, I think it does smart, interesting stuff – and I just kinda’ loved it. So, sometime in the next couple of weeks, I will write about Robin’s writing and we’ll call that part 2.
But a couple of nights ago, I saw Goodness, a play written by Michael Redhill that, tangentially at least, gestures to the Rwandan genocide. Now that’s a world away from stories about the post-textual, microfame or 3D data visualisation. But I wanted to touch on it because: 1) it’s worth keeping in mind that, as we chatter on both excitedly and sincerely about the age of the screen, people continue to suffer and die in ways they shouldn’t have to; 2) those things don’t seem as disconnected as they originally appear.
But that sentence is a tough one, isn’t it? I mean, how can you ‘tangentially gesture toward the Rwandan genocide’? How do you use it as a marker for something else without cheapening it, without somehow making miniature an event that defies words, resists representation?
The answer – as much as there can ever be answers – lies, I think, in those last ideas: it defies words and resists representation. What might you ever say or film or paint to capture it? What exactly might you do where you’d sit back and say, “yes, now I have said enough”.
So, we’re left with Goodness. Now, as much as I joke about how little I read, in my short life I’ve stumbled across a lot of literature and film. Less than most of my peers, sure – but a lot. And, though I know I’m rather prone to hyperbole, Goodness may have been one of the most stunning, devastating and masterful pieces of art I’ve ever witnessed. I was shaken by it; pushed to the edge of something I didn’t know existed. But beyond its power as theatre – its capacity to elicit the feeling that somehow, almost against your will, you were slipping outside of yourself – it made me think: why did it work so well as a story about our time?
Well, I don’t know. When something borders on a kind of personal experience of the sublime, it’s hard to parse how it worked its effect on me. But there were these simple things:
- There was no truth at the end; only ambivalence.
- The personal and global overlapped; so much so, at times they were indistinguishable to the characters on stage.
- It wasn’t simply a tale of who gets to tell stories; it was also a story about the pressure exerted by narrative upon itself to coalesce and to ‘make sense’.
- Who tells a story is important. This has nothing to do with ‘authenticity’.
- That stories are told is important; we have no idea how the database and the network are going to constitute individuals in relation to both history and the future – or if they in fact can.
- Laughter is the only thing that allows for humanity in the fact of the abject.
- Everything of consequence happens between people – often in the silent spaces between looks and caresses and touches. This is because life actually has no words; those little audible markers are just the signposts by which we recognise our movement from one moment to the next.
How do we tell stories about out time? I don’t know. But it seems that the age of wholeness is over. We no longer know things.
A storyteller is a person who points to the dark and asks you not simply to imagine, but to let yourself be enveloped by it.
You won’t see yourself in it. And you may not see your hand in front of yourself.
But you will be changed as, stumbling into the next minute, the next hour, coughing, struggling to catch your breath, you see a glimmer of just how big the dark is.
