Weaving a Narrative in Our Personal Spacetime

.

Back in the late 1980s communication scholar Walter Fisher gracefully wove together his own and other’s observations into the assertion that “we are the people of the story.” It is a theory that has stood the test of time well in the swirling, competitive arena of communication scholarship where the newest, shiniest perspective tends to garner the “buzz.” For those of you who want to explore the “narrative paradigm” in more detail, look up either Fisher or his intellectual forerunner Kenneth Burke in Google or Google Scholar. Fascinating reading but admittedly sprouting in some pretty tall cotton. After all, they did need to get published.  But in this post, while admitting that some of my rambling can be traced to the works of those to illuminaries, I am going to try to stick close to the third tenet of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity.

So here we go.  As we move from infancy to aged, we live one intricate story. Many times it seems that it is a story whose evolving plots and interweaving characters could put Game of Thrones to shame.  But, no, it is really just us.  Occasionally, from some high point or major crossroads in that story, we glance back over our shoulder and see the countless tributaries of our narrative Mississippi twisting and turning through the forests, wheatfields and bayous of our lives until, lo' and behold, there it is, running between our feet. We weave the fabric of that story from our beliefs and behaviors. Our choices. We often explain those choices to ourselves and others through a variety of symbolic narratives - these days often through the Internet, Facebook, emojis, etc., that whole constantly shifting panorama of the digital delta. The dominant foregrounded narrative is what we consider our “real” life.

However that “most obvious” narrative - the Mississippi between our feet - isn’t the “whole story.” Elsewhere here on the Wall I have toyed with the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics. That view of reality asserts that every time we chose a path down the Mississippi, other versions of ourselves floated off up the Ohio, the Arkansas, or somehow even found their way over to the Nile and the Danube. 

Today I am particularly focused on the choices we make when we create narratives that  are admittedly fictional. The often playful narratives that spring from our imaginations - fanciful depictions of other “unlived” stories in our narrative. The would-have-beens, might-have-beens, could-of-beens, should-have-beens, of our narrative river. These imagined narratives are our art. We imagine a whole universe of stories that might have unfolded from the roads not taken. In these artistic imaginings we become the puppet master, deciding the script, motivation, and actions of all the players. We can even create the players themselves, from “whole cloth” as it were.

Of course, there is no “reality” against which those imaginings are measured, so they become their own reality. And as we give them life in any of a variety of forms they become literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Accepting that multifaceted notion of our personal narrative requires no great intellectual or creative stretch. Two-sides of a coin, mask of tragedy, mask of comedy, bass clef, treble clef - we do that all the time. Real world, world of the imagination; no big deal unless we start to conflate the two allowing our imagined narratives to infringe upon the harder edges of the real world inhabited by others. Wander too far down those paths and the guys with the butterfly nets show up.

But perhaps we should not be quite so hasty. The many worlds version of quantum mechanics would seem to allow for just such a conflation of the “real” and the “imagined.” According to my, no doubt incomplete, understanding of this aspect of quantum mechanics, our choices in the “real” world do determine the immediate course of our existential Mississippi, but they not simultaneously render the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Nile, etc., fictitious. Those “rivers not taken” continue to flow along carrying alternative versions of ourselves into alternative futures nestled within our personal spacetime.

Hence it occurs to me that our personal "quantum narrative" is a tapestry woven from all the lived, and the imagined narratives that reside in our spacetime, including those narratives that are the ‘unchosen siblings’ of those other lived and imagined narratives.

All of which brings me to this assertion, which may well form the opening of another, even stranger Wall post:

Spacetime can be envisioned as a onion of infinite narrative layers each part of which is contiguous with every other part. And, it would seem to follow that that which we define generally as “enlightenment" is the ability to sense, and/or make sense of, those contiguous points.   

.