Tell Me a Story
This is a story I like to tell about Phoebe, our oldest child. Before she could even properly talk, she loved to hear us read stories to her at bedtime. By the time she was three, we had moved on from Goodnight Moon and Go, Dog, Go, to books with chapters, running to the dozens of pages, and taking rather a long time to read. Some nights we were readier than she was to put the book away and turn out the lights. I remember vividly one night when was reading I read to her a long, illustrated book version of the Disney film, Dumbo. It wasn’t the first time we’d read Dumbo. I don’t remember that time, or the next one. What I remember is that time when Phoebe had learned very well what was coming. I finished, and clapped the book shut, when she looked straight into my eyes, with the shining, the pure delight of the happy child, and said, “Again!” And so I read it to her again, whereupon she said, again (I can hear, now, her hard emphasis on the first syllable), “Again!”
I told that story many times, before I realized that it expresses a principle: how the pleasure we take in finding out what happens in stories so often pales next to the pleasure of already knowing what happens.
And then it occurred to me that Phoebe, waiting expectantly for me to begin the story again, could see into the future.
I’ve been re-reading Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” the title essay in her 1979 collection The White Album. Why? Well, it begins with this: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Phoebe’s story suggests a variation: “We live in order to tell ourselves (or be told) stories, over and over, again and again.” I’m not sure how much the difference between the two versions would matter to Didion, insofar as both suggest a foundational relationship between life and the stories we tell, and the subject matter of “The White Album” is the crisis that ensues when that relationship falters, or fails, when the stories stop doing for us what we need and want them to, in order that we may live. Didion writes, of her experience of the late 1960s, “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.” In another essay, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” she recollects her college career at Berkeley in the early 1950s, and recounts her shocked realization, circa the late ’60s, of “the extent to which the narrative on which so many of us grew up no longer applies” (205).
The premises she mentions, and the narrative enabled by those premises, were straightforward enough, certainly for someone who came of age, as she did, in the 1950s USA. America is a free country. The core of American character is individualism, typically, and most admirably, of the rugged sort. Big changes — clean breaks from the past — tend to bring about progress, tend towards the greater good for all. The agents of such changes tend to be rugged individualists. These are stories that Americans, individually and collectively, tell ourselves over and over again, even to this day, to this moment. Whatever you might think about such premises, and such narratives, the consequences of their failure, for Didion, were debilitating bouts of vertigo and nausea, a prescription for Elavil, and a clinical report by her psychiatrist on her condition, from which she quotes at length:
Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations, many of which are distorted and bizarre….In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psychotic process….
As a comment on this dire assessment, Didion says only that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”
The problem Didion sketches, however, is hardly limited to the 1960s, much less to her. “The White Album” reads as prescient in 2021, when, as then, violent political and cultural polarization strains the social fabric, when the very idea of a stable and predictable future seems like a hallucination, or perhaps a distant memory. It reads as if Didion was seeing into the future. And now, in 2021, our public stories about ourselves are showing the strain. Take the Q-Anon story, featuring a global ring of cannibalistic child-sex traffickers, featuring leading lights of the Democratic party and the Hollywood elite, which will be smashed imminently by the hero, Donald Trump, in a “storm” of righteous bloodletting. The rugged individualist — Trump — is recognizably there in the leading role, and the clean break with the past — the “Storm” — is there, too. But in its signature details the story is a preposterous mash-up of the Book of Revelations and action-thriller cliches. Odds are that you, whoever you are, reading this here, do not embrace the story told by Q-Anon, or perhaps might even be tempted, like me, to diagnose it as a form of “fantasy life” that has been virtually preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations, many of which are distorted and bizarre. Maybe the story Q-Anon is telling gives you fits of vertigo and nausea. But let me ask you this. What’s your story?
I’ve been struggling to tell myself what the story is. Prompted by Didion, I’ve been wondering what it is that I (or we) want (or aren’t getting) out of the stories we’re telling. What qualities of a story enable us to live, save us from collapsing into nausea and vertigo? The Q-Anon story may be deranged and preposterous, but it clearly demonstrates one absolutely essential such feature of stories. They tell us, simply, what is going to happen. They tell the future, or at least as much of the future as we need to know for our story to go on making sense. Thus the common figure of speech Didion turns to, in “The White Album,” writing that she feels she’s lost the “script”; she’s lost her guide to and through the future, where rugged individualism suddenly no longer appears to be the core of the American character, where it’s more and more difficult to identify anything as the core of American character. By showing us how our present and past connect to a future, by “scripting” that continuity, stories give form and meaning to our experience. We need these things to live, as Didion reminds us. Without a feel for the continuous unfolding meaning of our lives, our very sense of self may begin to unravel. And that feeling, those experiences of form and meaning, are far more than merely functional on the level of individual psychology. As young Phoebe showed, they can be the sources of complex and keen pleasure; as Q-Anon shows, they can form the binding cords of impassioned, unified communities who share, among other things, sweeping and hugely consequential political visions, and this can be so even when — sometimes, particularly when — the specific predictions the story makes about the future are deranged and delusional.
It’s certainly worth reflecting on how often, and consequentially, the predictions of the future that we value stories for giving us turn out to be wrong, and also worth reflecting, as Didion observes, on how and why those failures don’t prevent us from grasping for stories, in order to live, even when the stories are deranged and murderous. Didion has made a long and admirable career out of such reflections. What interests me even more right now, however, is our conviction in the first place that our stories have the power to predict the future, a conviction that appears, for one thing, stubbornly immune to serial failures of prediction. Whether our stories are accurate or not in predicting the future, we need them to be accurate, or rather, more precisely, we need them to make us feel like they are. Perhaps it takes both that depth of need, and that history of failure, to produce the likes of Q-Anon, and Trump as Jesus-action-hero.
What strikes me as most curious, however, is our persistence in using stories to fulfill this need regardless of how doing so conflicts with and contradicts our most basic and commonplace views about the future: in short, that it’s unknown and unknowable. Common sense says that, sure, we’d love to know the future, but we can’t, by definition. We travel through time, so we tell ourselves, on the tip of a metaphorical arrow coming from the past and into the present, in the direction of the future. We remember the past, and we know the present, but the future remains unknowable, until it becomes the present. Nobody ever speaks of “remembering” the future. We like to say that we wish we had a “crystal ball” with which to peer into the future, and to regret that crystal balls exist only in storybooks, failing always to recognize that a crystal ball, in fact, is an excellent metaphor for exactly how we expect our stories to serve us.
But our error, of course, lies not in believing fancifully and so mistakenly that we can remember the future — of course we can; take Phoebe— but in telling ourselves that the future is unknowable, in the face of so much evidence.
Consider a tiny set of examples. I know the sun will set. I know also that it will rise in the morning, and that this cycle will continue for at least a billion years, in entirely predictable seasonal patterns. The moon will orbit the earth as it has for eons, and go through its visible phases in the night sky, again and again. The earth will orbit the sun, again and again, and the stars, “which are the brain of heaven,” will wheel over the night sky as they have for eons; the solar system will proceed with its appointed travels in relation to the galaxy, which in turn will perform its pre-determined dance in relation to its cluster of galaxies. Those travels, that dance, are known in detail to astronomers, and the knowledge is available to the public.
There is more, infinitely more. I know just how the shadow of my house will stretch across my backyard as summer days wane, until it climbs my back fence, and into the trees, and day turns to dusk. I know that the live oak in my backyard will continue to produce green leaves and shed dying leaves year-round, until it dies or is destroyed. The black oak just to the north, in contrast, will shed its leaves in the fall and remain bare through the winter, before leafing out next spring. The robin, turdus migratorious, will return to the trees in and near my backyard next spring, and sing for me.
My heart will continue to beat until I die, as will yours. I will continue to inhale and exhale until I die, as will you. I will grow tired and in need of sleep, every day, until I die. I will die, as will you. We know with absolute certainty, as Robinson Jeffers writes, that “Man will die out/The blithe earth will die/The brave sun die blind and blacken to heart.” A pessimist and a misanthrope, Jeffers, but his story is true, and then he does give us this: “Yet stones have stood for a thousand years/And pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems.” I remember the future perfectly well, then when I will again seek and find pleasure, consolation, and understanding in old poems, until I die, or lose my ability to remember old poems.
I know now that, later, when I will page through the book, and come to the first line, I will know it:
On a starred night, Prince Lucifer uprose
Slim Greer went to heaven
The Brain — is wider than the sky
Something startled me where I thought I was safest
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall
The wind doth blow today, my love
And all the lines that follow, I will know them. I know them. I know the language they are written in, and will know it, until I lose language, or die. My wife, my children, all the people I love best, know the same language. I know that we will be able to talk together. To read each other’s writing. To tell stories and to hear and take pleasure and understand when they do the same.
That story you love, you, whoever you are, the one you’ve told so many times? Unless you die first, you will tell it again in the future. You know you will, and when you do, you will know just how it goes.
When you sit down to open the book again, you will know everything that’s going to happen. The pleasure and satisfaction you take will come from your already knowing.
____________________
We’re not quite in the position of Phoebe, who knew every last detail of what Dumbo would do and what would happen to him. But we know so much, and there is so much pleasure, so much satisfaction, to take in our knowledge. Why then do we believe, and tell ourselves over and over again, that we don’t? Why do we take it as common sense that the future is unknowable? The answer is this: because, in the story we’re telling ourselves, the future has to be unknowable.
Helpfully, there’s a story about all this — the experience of “remembering” the future, our conviction that we can’t, and how these shape the stories of our lives — by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, called “The Story of Your Life,” published in his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others, and the basis of the 2016 movie Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve, and starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Maybe you know it. Let me tell you, briefly, again. A race of aliens unexpectedly arrives on Earth. Our protagonist and narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, is a linguist brought in by the government to attempt communication with the Heptapods, as they are called, because of their seven legs, which give them an omni-directional spatial orientation. For the Heptapods, there is no front or back, no forward and backward (they also have eyes ringing their heads); all directions are the same. Louise soon learns that same is true for the written language of the Heptapods, which not only has no rules dictating word order (common enough in human languages), but no orientation in time whatsoever. Where the basic form of all human writing is a line, beginning here and ending there, the basic form of Heptapod writing is a circle. A reader may begin anywhere along or inside the circle, and take innumerable different paths to completion, while always coming to the same meaning. Ultimately, Louise discovers that the orientation of the Heptapods in space, and the non-linearity of their language, both reflect and correspond to the orientation of the Heptapods within time itself. They do not experience time as an arrow moving from past through present towards the future. They know the future as well as we know the past; they remember the future, so to speak, as we do the past. To put it differently, the Heptapods are always present to any and all moments in their lives.
Louise checks with a physicist on her team, who tells her that the laws of physics offer no bar to such an omni-temporal orientation: they work pretty much the same going forward, or backward, in time. Nonetheless, she struggles with an intractable objection to the possibility that the future is knowable, and the basis of that objection, she thinks, is “free will.” She imagines a “fabulation,” in the spirit of the storyteller Jorge Luis Borges: a Book of Ages, recording every event occurring through all of time, past, present, and future; a reader, standing over the Book of Ages, and paging just to the point where she is paging through the Book of Ages, and then ahead, to what she will do later that day: “acting on information she’s read in the Book, she’ll bet $100 on the horse Devil May Care and win twenty times that much.” And here, in Louise’s fabulation, her reader of the Book of Ages perversely triggers a paradox. Being a “contrary sort,” she decides not to bet on the horses at all.
But of course this is impossible. By definition, as the true story of all events through all time, the Book of Ages cannot be wrong. The reader cannot choose to do other than what the book says she does. Logically, this suggests that the price of reading the Book of Ages to learn of one’s future is surrendering one’s free will. But we can’t do that. Can we? “Volition,” Louise reflects, “[is] an intrinsic part of consciousness.” She concludes that the Book of Ages could exist only on condition that it be inaccessible to all possible readers; “that volume is house in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges”(132).
And then she thinks again. Is volition always an intrinsic part of consciousness? Well, no, not necessarily. “What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act exactly as she knew she would?” Here we recall Didion. What if our knowledge of and relation to the future was not that of a rugged individualist, a free agent, deciding what to do next, but more like an actor with her script? What if in the story of our lives we played the role not of the heroic chooser, in the mold of Louise’s imaginary reader of The Book of Ages, willfully asserting our freedom, breaking cleanly with the past — but rather the performer, reciting the beloved script, returning again and again, urgently, to perform the beloved role she knows so well, be it tragic, or comic, or both, or neither? What if Didion’s trouble back in the summer of 1968 were rooted in her unacknowledged and enduring commitment to a story in which she, the hero, is a free agent, however flagrantly that unrecognized investment in free individualism conflicts with her desperate, urgent longing for a “script” to follow, for a way to know already what happens? What if the source of her nausea and vertigo lay in that unacknowledged investment, and the irreducible conflicts it committed her to?
As we gather, this is the sort of story Louise is telling. Learning how to read Heptapod writing, it turns out, has changed the temporal wiring of her own mind. She realizes that, like the Heptapods, she’s remembering the future. The “you” in “The Story of Your Life,” is her only daughter, who, Louise knows, will die in a climbing accident at age twenty-five. She tells her daughter the story of falling in love with her father (the physicist), of the night they conceived her, of assorted favorite or indelible memories from her daughter’s infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood. She tells her daughter the story of going to the morgue after the climbing accident to identity her body. All of this is always happening, again and again. Louise always knows already everything that’s going to happen.
Is it so, that in the deep story most of us are always telling ourselves — so deep we don’t recognize it as a story — we identify ourselves as free agents, and that this freedom, this agency, are what makes us, in this particular story, into our own protagonists, the heroes of the story? If it is, then the key plot events of our deep story all turn on the free and undetermined choices we make, not knowing, by definition, what their future consequences will be.
In other words, the core premise of the story of our lives is our overriding obsession with those future things to which our obsession itself, by definition, renders us blind. It’s hardly surprising that our stories fail over and over to predict the future accurately. The predictions we’re most interested in — what will be the outcome of my free individual choices? — how will our next clean break from the past turn out? — are by our own chosen premises the ones we can’t predict.
This is a story designed, however unknowingly, to produce maximal turbulence, unpredictability, chaos. Perhaps this is why we’ve taken to heroizing “disrupters,” those figures who succeed in creating and then thriving off of turbulence unpredictability and chaos, those rugged individualists, like Trump, who make a clean break from the past pay off for them, big time, however many of the rest of us are left with only nausea and vertigo. A story all about free will and free agency and breaking cleanly with the past suits them, maybe. The rest of us? Look around. Not so much, I don’t think.
I make no argument here against the existence of free will, or for it, for that matter. What I am talking about here is the stories we tell, what they’re about, what matters in them. For us, choosing freely, and thus not knowing the future that will result from our choices, seems to matter enormously. But, what if the experience of knowing the future changes a person? If you discovered that you knew the future, as Louise Banks discovers, what stories would you tell? Try telling yourself a story in which you do know the future. Try telling the story in which much, or even most, of The Book of Ages is written on the world, in plain sight.
Maybe, knowing the future, we would tell fewer stories, and listen to fewer stories, about capitalism. These are stories of the choices we make, in deciding what productive work we’ll do, what schools we’ll go to, what major we’ll pick, what jobs we’ll seek, what promotions we’ll try to get, how much money we can gain control over, and then, deciding what we’ll buy, or where we’ll invest. Perhaps we’d recognize that the very foundations of our heroism, our free will and agency, such as they are, have been massively colonized and instrumentalized by a capitalist economy. Perhaps we’d conclude that the single most significant expression of our free will is shopping — that, as we hand over our private lives to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, our “free will,” so-called, comes closer and closer to merging with their will to profit.
I make no argument here against capitalism, or in favor of it. I’m talking about the stories we tell.
Tell me that story. You, whoever you are, you know, the one you’ve told me so many times. You know the one I mean. The one with the twists and turns, the one that says so much. The one with the beautiful things. I mostly know it by heart, by now. We both know everything that happens in the story, and in what order. Your telling it is not a matter of choosing what to say next, nor is my listening a matter of wondering, or finding out, what happens next. We both know. The drama, the interest, the pleasure, of my listening each time, grows out of your sense of urgency, your sense of obligation to tell it as it should be told.
Sure, you have volition, and agency. Sure we do. And now they serve your ardor to do the story justice, to tell it right, to me, who wants so much to hear it told so.
I picture myself, or you, graphing your telling of the story over the years and decades. With a black ink pen on heavy paper, we inscribe a circle over and over. The end is a series of heavy lines all blended and blurred into a thick band or ring, marking a groove worn into the paper. That point where the telling ended, that time, that’s the point where it begins (began, will begin), the next time, and again and again. The end always touches the beginning, the beginning the end. Knowing all that happens from beginning to end, we know that all moments in the story lead to all moments. We remember how it ends. We look forward to it beginning. Now we are delighted, and will be delighted.
Tell me again.
