The Mythology of our Youth

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We see the world through the lenses of the life we have chosen.

A biologist, I imagine, sees the forces of nature at play as he or she walks down the street. A business person see profit potential, the politician - policy and power. An artist, form and color. As someone who teaches about media and technology and society, those parts of the world jump out at me. New tech toys with great potential and scary invasions of privacy. The lenses of our life bring into focus those things we feel professionally obligated to think about, take note of, to understand.  It gets to be a bit much after awhile. Those things we "ought to think about" can overwhelm those things that intrigue us, that we like to think about, that allow us to revel a bit in curiosity.

We all need to take a break from the adult, serious, "stroke-my-whiskers-and-frown" issues. Often, given the opportunity, I spend my breaks doodling. Other times I use my leisure breaks to read mysteries and thrillers. I do not expect these novels to stray far beyond entertainment. I read them like I eat popcorn. Not quite Evelyn Wood super-speed, but zipping along pretty quickly. You know the basic framework so you cruise along looking for the identity of the power broker behind the curtain, the former black ops operative out to revenge the death of his family/lover/father, or the twist in an intellectual 'Holmesian' puzzle.  We are not expecting great literature here, just good story telling. 

But occasionally these modern troubadours surprise us with an arresting construction. After all Shakespeare was just a simple playwright, right? And a novelist is likewise a storyteller, staring at their screen or moleskin sweating to find just the right word.  It is probably inevitable that sometimes even the most commercial scribbler hits a few out of the park, and there it is; a sentence or a phrase that pulls you out of the narrative and spins you off into places the novelist never intended - or maybe they did.

A few days ago I was reading Dry Bones, book number 11 in Craig Johnson's  Longmire series. And there it was at Kindle location 1140 of 3561. Longmire muses, "My youth is becoming a mythology to me."  Whoa. Excellent sentence. Whipped me right out of, where is it, Wyoming? And sent me staggering back into a consideration of my own personal mythology.

Here is the issue. If we live, as I believe we should, intensely in the moment, parts of the past inevitably fade a bit, in spots it is virtually forgotten, until it is recalled when we stumble across an artifact from what we could call the archeology of the self. And like traditional archeology, the archeology of the self begins with the discovery of, and the examination of, these scattered artifacts

The dig that reveals the self forces us to travel paths no less remote and dusty than those trod by the explorers who walked the Valley of the Kings, America's four corners, the Mayan rain forests, or the highlands of Peru. But the mystery that draws us forward is not the mystery of an ancient or lost civilization; rather we seek the often forgotten corners of our self - the past that leads us to a clearer understanding of ourselves in the present.

So where do we find these artifacts of the self?  Social media - Facebook and the like - would have us believe that their timeline is the mother lode of our personal artifacts. Here are the faces and places that defined our life. Here, neatly woven together with the narratives of our "friends" lies the best possible description of our life and our culture, here are sketched the beliefs and attitudes that will allow our children, our friends, our family and possibly just curious strangers to "know us."

Nothing, I'm afraid, is further from the truth.  Our efforts to parse the Internet in pursuit of an broad, public understanding of our culture may bear fruit as we slice huge data sets to look for general trends in law, fashion, art and politics. But, even for those who have a significant social media presence, to look to the Internet for an understanding of ourselves, to understand any unique individual,  “an n of 1" is most likely an exercise in futility 

One profound flaw in any such attempt is the fact that often individual information on the Internet is - like Facebook - a self report, one that most often paints the most positive depiction of our self.  The notion was underscored for me recently.  I think I was in Bed Bath and Beyond.  I was waiting to check out, when I noticed a "Selfie Stick" hanging by the register.  You know, one of those telescoping poles that lets you use your phone to take a picture of yourself, or you and a cluster of your friends, that depicts how much fun you are having in some far-flung travel spot, or awesome party, or wedding or a Disney World of some stripe or another. The “tag” is vital as the cluster of faces often obscures the actual venue.

The problem is that "Facebook-Google+-Selfie-Stick" messages are designed to be seen by a group, possibly a large group, hence such postings are intentional public artifacts.  Public artifacts that define us as we would have others see us.  The monumental sculpture of the monarch/god, that hides the graves of the slaves who died in its construction. OK, that may be a bit much, but you get the idea. An examination of social media trails might tell others how we want them to see us, but certainly reveals little to us about “the mythology of our youth,” the person we used to be and how we got from then to now; from that person in the past to the person who now shares our skin.

It seems to me that such a revelatory “archeology of the self” necessarily centers on private artifacts, private reminders of private lives. Such artifacts are the antithesis of Facebook posts.  Social media posts are, by design, public. By “sharing" them we - by definition - give up our unique ownership of them.  They are now public artifacts. These are very different from private artifacts. Private artifacts are stored in spaces presumed private - diaries, journals, letters, paintings, artworks, photos in private albums. And these artifacts are jointly owned by the those who possess either the artifacts or the memories, the participants in the moments. 

I once did a rather lengthy - no surprise there - proposal of a social media application called The Trunk in the Attic.  The idea was to replicate, digitally, the iconic storage space of private artifacts.  It has, however, become increasingly obvious that the phrase “digitally private” is an oxymoron. An artifact simply cannot be simultaneously digital and private. For something to be digital makes it public, if not immediately and overtly so, then at least potentially so. For every digital lock there is a key. Sometimes it can be staggeringly ponderous - but it is there.

Contemporary privacy then takes on two primary guises.  The truly private moves back into the realm of digitally-free media.  Pen on paper.  The written, the drawn, the symbols that never - even temporarily - have a digital version. These artifacts are those where the only copy really can be stashed in the trunk in the attic. And there they are safe except from old-fashioned breaking and entering.  And strangely a big hulking padlock on a trunk just feels more secure than a website “protected by” a password of 32 letters and characters that should not contain the  name of my first pet or girlfriend. And who’s going to look for the trunk for crying out loud?

Yet, in the digital world privacy becomes largely a matter of intention.  Since we know that anything made digital can be accessed without our permission - hacked, stolen, whatever, we need to distinguish between artifacts we wish to share and those we wish to make private. Public is no problem. Put it online.  Post it, blog it, self-publish it.  Hit send and it is public. "Private-ish” is more complex.

As I think about discovering the mythology of my youth, the first challenge is remembering. Because what was central then is now peripheral. So, when I try to consciously recall those revelatory artifacts that may be out there, but fading, I try to construct “memory boxes,” maybe closets: I open the door to the walk in closet and enter a different era - when I lived in that house, when I went to that school, when we had that pet, when I lived in this city, or that one, when I was in that play, when I loved that girl, that woman. I look around me for anything that allows me to isolate a series of remembered artifacts. Of course, traditional artifacts are also wonderful touch points; photos of my childhood, of my parents and grandparents - all are artifacts that push me back to the mythology of my youth and even further back into a history I did not share, but which led to the one that is mine. That mind game has led me to some interesting memories and shifting assumptions.

Most important is that I have come to believe that I am not ethically at liberty to move recollections of private artifacts that are shared with another, into a public sphere without the specific consent of any “co-owner” of the private artifact.  This presents a couple of problems.  First, I have no idea where many of those “co-owners” are or if they would want to hear from me, let alone allow me to make public those private artifacts.  That realization is complicated by the realization that many of those private artifacts enhance my personal understanding of ways of approaching Harmony. And I feel increasingly bound to share those insights which might aid others in the exploration of their own harmonic self. So how do I share without revealing? How do I make the artifact public while respecting the co-owner’s right to keep the artifact private? Or am I honor bound to keep the artifact hidden? Destroy it? Nah, That sounds too Taliban, too ISIS. Unless it is solely my artifact, I cannot destroy it.  Even if it is wholly mine, I still have a problem with destroying it if it might be meaningful to others.

The better answer, it occurs to me, is sort of like Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak, but different. It is an Anonymity Cloak.  Writers have used the device for centuries.  We see it on all kinds of disclaimers: "This story is based on actual events but names and places have been changed to protect the innocent."  And a good writing mentor always tells us to write what we know .  .  .  .

So this then is the rather strange conclusion into which I have chased myself: If I wish to understand the mythology of my youth I must seek out the vital private artifacts of my life and write passionately about them, but as if they had happened to someone else.

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