Category Archives: Thinking about story …

Telling, reading, hearing, writing stories.

Small Talk in the Worlds of WEIRD and un-WEIRD

“Save oxygen: stamp out small talk.”
Thus Spake Aforista

jpegI seldom agree wholeheartedly with the Postfuturist Sage Aforista, but I’m right on board with this saying. Whenever small talk starts, Pat and I both glaze over and remain in a quasi-catatonic state until the conversation returns to something real. As someone who loves language and works with it every day, I find small talk downright offensive. I once had an English teacher who loathed slang, calling it an “abuse of language.” I actually like slang, and agree with Steven Pinker that it enriches and enlarges language. But small talk is another matter. It does use up precious oxygen, and it clutters up the brain.

Call me a snob if you like. I don’t see it that way. Here’s what I’ve always thought: When human beings lived closer to nature and to each other, surely nobody wasted time on pointless blather. Surely small talk is a sign of language in its decadence; we “civilized” people talk in inanities because we don’t give our brains enough meaningful stuff to think about. We’re mentally just plain lazy.

But Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, has given me cause to reconsider. Subtitled “What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”, Diamond’s book reflects upon years of fieldwork among people living traditional lifestyles. It is an unsentimental assessment of what we in the world of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) have to learn from traditional peoples. Diamond points out that small talk was hardly invented by us WEIRD people:

I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans.

So these uncorrupted children of nature are not communicating gems of ancient wisdom; they’re engaged in the idlest possible chat about food and bodily functions and what have you. (Diamond calls it “gossip” because it consists of people talking about other people; I call it “small talk” because it is about trivialities. Let’s just treat the two terms as interchangeable.) What’s more, explains Diamond, small talk serves perfectly valid functions in the non-WEIRD world. In a society lacking in mass media, it is a justly valued form of entertainment; in a community where interdependence is crucial, it is a way to create and sustain social relationships; in a habitat where danger is everywhere, it is a source of precious information about every possible contingency.

But in his review of Diamond’s book, Steven Mithin goes further …

The value of gossip provides one of the best theories for the evolution of language among our hominin ancestors …

I can’t say I much like this possibility. I prefer Julian Jaynes’s idea that the first words were warnings: not nouns or even verbs, but modifiers like “far,” “near,” “slow,” or “fast”—utterances to communicate the proximity of danger and the urgency to do something about it. That idea appeals to me, because it suggests that language has its origins in matters of life and death importance.

But maybe it’s just not so. Maybe primordial language was all about bowel movements, embarrassing physical mishaps, and spur-of-the-moment sexual encounters—a cultural step lower even than People magazine.

Surely none of this justifies the continued use of small talk by our species. As Diamond also points out, we crave salt and carbohydrates because they were once so hard to come by; now that we’ve got them in abundance, such cravings have become hazardous to our health. It seems to me that our craving for small talk is likewise toxic—an adaptation that has long since turned maladaptive, causing the mental equivalents of hypertension and diabetes. If we can cut down on unhealthy substances at the dinner table, can’t we do the same on Facebook and Twitter?

Of Fish, Women, and Bicycles

When my teenage daughter broke up with her boyfriend recently, her Awesome Grandma sent her a t-shirt with this slogan:

 A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE

It’s an old maxim, one that I can remember seeing on t-shirts back when I was in high school. I hadn’t seen or heard it for a long time. I’m glad it’s still current, and even more glad that it has become part of my daughter’s phraseology. It also got me thinking about women and bicycles, and how the Story of gender roles reached a turning point courtesy of a two-wheeled vehicle.

In a previous post, I considered innovations and inventions that had spelt the end of culture itself, ranging from slam poetry (according to Harold Bloom) all the way back to writing itself (according to Plato). I just now remembered that bicycles also played their role in the destruction of civilization.

In 1896, Charlotte Odlum Smith claimed that the bicycle

brings on the most appalling diseases among young women; it swells the ranks of reckless girls and outcast women; it will prevent motherhood; and it’s the devil’s advance agent, morally and physically, in thousands of instances.

Now Charlotte Smith was not by any means an antifeminist. To the contrary, she fought for safe conditions for female laborers, sought recognition for women inventors, and was a pioneering proponent of equal pay for equal work. But even she was alarmed by the freedom that the bicycle unleashed upon womankind.

After its origin in 1817 as a wooden vehicle powered by feet on the ground, the bicycle suffered from many decades of irredeemable clunkiness. But the 1880s introduced the diamond frame, the rear-wheel chain, and pneumatic tires. The “safety bicycle” of the 1890s was recognizably the two-wheeled vehicle that we ride today.

Women were attracted to the hugely popular new mode of transportation. But radical fashion change was needed before women could ride bicycles. Although bustles were mercifully approaching extinction, those were still the days of corsets, voluminous skirts, and ponderous undergarments. If a woman’s home was a domestic prison, her clothes amounted to a ball and chain.

The bicycle changed all that. To partake of the freedom of bicycle travel, women donned unheard-of new garments—lightweight, loose, comfortable, and liberating. Instead of dresses, women began to wear bloomers—or “rationals,” as they were fittingly called.

Suddenly, women were unshackled and set loose to explore a hitherto inaccessible world. The protest, of course, was enormous. If even a feminist like Charlotte Odlum Smith was alarmed by the bicycle, one can well imagine the horror of gender norm advocates, especially husbands. Medical experts fretted about the consequences of so much outdoor exercise to the “delicate” female frame, and moralists stewed over the mischief that women, so notoriously unreliable in powers of judgment, might get themselves into if unchaperoned.

But the backlash didn’t stand a chance. Memoirist Flora Thompson recalled how “men’s shocked criticism petered out before the fait accompli, and they contented themselves with such mild thrusts”:

Mother’s out upon her bike, enjoying of the fun,
Sister and her beau have gone to take a little run.
The housemaid and the cook are both a-riding on their wheels;
And Daddy’s in the kitchen a-cooking of the meals.

And another anonymous verse captured the changing cultural story with images of wheels:

The maiden with her wheel of old
Sat by the fire to spin,
While lightly through her careful hold
The flax slid out and in.
Today her distaff, rock and reel
Far out of sight are hurled
And now the maiden with her wheel
Goes spinning round the world.

Charlotte Oldum Smith notwithstanding, most feminists rejoiced. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it in 1895,

The bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect and self-reliance and make the next generation more vigorous of mind and of body; for feeble mothers do not produce great statesmen, scientists, and scholars.

And the following year, Susan B. Anthony declared that bicycling

has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel … the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

So while fish have scant need for bicycles, never let it be said that women haven’t found them vitally useful, perhaps especially for the commonsense fashion innovations they provoked. A Punch cartoon of 1895 portrays two women, Gertrude and Jessie. Gertrude’s full dress reaches the ground, and she appears to be paralyzed from the waist up by a corset. Jessie looks much more at ease in “rational dress,” including bloomers. The women speak the following lines:

GERTRUDE: “My dear Jessie, what on earth is that bicycle suit for!”

JESSIE: “Why, to wear, of course.”

GERTRUDE: “But you haven’t a bicycle!”

JESSIE: “No, but I’ve got a sewing machine!”

Bicycle_suit_punch_1895

Concerning Wisdom—Old and New

“There is no such thing as ancient wisdom; it is always new.”
Thus Spake Aforista

Count on the Postfuturist Sage Aforista to say something strident, hyperbolic, and even untrue. Of course there is such a thing as ancient wisdom, and of course we all need to be mindful of it in this speed-of-light age of rampant newness—what Douglas Rushkoff has dubbed Present Shock. As the authors of a recently published novel exploring Mayan culture of a millennium ago, Pat and I would seem to be active proponents of ancient wisdom.

And yet …

Mayan-72Is Mayan Interface really about ancient wisdom at all? There are certainly aspects of indigenous culture that Pat and I extol. In my post of February 13, I wrote about our fascination with Mayan storytelling techniques. A related excerpt written in authentic Mayan fashion may be found in the current issue of SOL: English Writing in Mexico.

But readers looking for a quick and easy fixes based Mayan ancient wisdom will surely be disappointed by our book. Pakabtun’s fictional king Bohol Caan has no more of a grasp on certainty ca. 900 CE than epigrapher Lydia Rosenstrom does in 2012 CE. In our novels, Pat and I just don’t do certainty.

Just yesterday, Pat asked me if any of our novels even had “endings” to speak of. Could I think of just one that culminated in some final resolution, realization, or insight? No, I couldn’t. While I hope that all of our stories have satisfactory and satisfying denouements, Pat and I always leave our protagonists on the brink of fresh discoveries, as if another turn of the page will lead into an entirely new adventure. “And that’s essential,” Pat remarked.

One of my favorite twentieth-century plays is Bernard Shaw’s little-known The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. In this 1934 extravaganza, an angel arrives, announcing that the Day of Judgment has come. This is not to be the noisy apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, the angel explains:

The Day of Judgment is not the end of the world, but the end of its childhood and the beginning of its responsibility.

According to the angel, there will be no reward or punishment, no heaven or hell—only the quiet vaporization of almost all of humanity:

The lives which have no use, no meaning, no purpose, will fade out. You will have to justify your existence or perish.

The play’s characters are understandably unsettled by this proclamation. How can anyone ever “justify” one’s existence? Whose life can assuredly be said to have use, meaning, and purpose? None of the characters can answer these questions, and one by one they vanish—accompanied, presumably, by most if not all of the human race.

Finally, only two people remain onstage: the priestess Prola and her husband, the priest Pra. Fully aware that their lives have been engaged in folly and futility, Prola and Pra expect to evaporate at any moment. But that moment never comes.

Flawed, failed, and seemingly useless as they are, Prola and Pra share the redemptive belief in the doctrine, “Let Life Come.” And this doctrine is, after all, merely a denial of all doctrines, of all beliefs.

Prola and Pra prevail through the Judgment, for together they grasp that “the future is to those who prefer surprise and wonder to security.” As Prola puts it,

Remember: we are in the Unexpected Isles; and in the Unexpected Isles all plans fail. So much the better: plans are only jigsaw puzzles: one gets tired of them long before one can piece them together. There are still a million lives beyond all the Utopias and the Millenniums and the rest of the jigsaw puzzles.… We are not here to fulfill prophecies and fit ourselves into puzzles, but to wrestle with life as it comes. And it never comes as we expect it to come.

So I suppose Aforista may be onto something after all. There are no endings in the world of Story. There is only wisdom’s perpetually unfolding newness.

Jaynesiana

9k=I must admit that I’m fairly obsessed with the ideas of the late psychologist Julian Jaynes. If you’ve been following these posts, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Just about everything that Pat and I write has been influenced by his mind-blowing classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Our latest visionary novel Mayan Interface is steeped in his thinking.

I recently finished reading The Julian Jaynes Collection, a splendid new anthology of Jaynesiana edited by Marcel Kuijsten. I found the last half of the book to be a special treat. Consisting of interviews and discussions, it brings me closer to the man himself than I ever hoped to get.

Here’s an exchange that I particularly like. In an interview with Sam Keen, Jaynes says this about the ongoing evolution of human consciousness:

We are still in transition, entering into the gateways of a different kind of mentality.

At the end of the interview, Keen comes back to this point:

It would seem that we are becoming freer. Is history pushing us toward enlightenment, toward waking up from the illusion that we must be blindly obedient to external authorities?

I love Jaynes’s reply:

What interests me is the metaphors you use: freedom, awakening, the passage from darkness to light. You are creating or changing consciousness by metaphors. In my value system, the effect of those metaphors is to strengthen the individual, to change consciousness for the better. But I am mostly aware of what the metaphors are doing. When you ask me what we are becoming, it is like asking me to choose one of a thousand roads. It’s like asking how history is going to end up. To ask for an end or a purpose is to ask for a single path. And consciousness is always open to many possibilities. It is always an adventure.

Pat and I put it this way in an interview with each other:

Our protagonists learn to abdicate certainty and safety. Life is risk. Transformation means never knowing what will happen next—or even what or who you will become. Nothing that’s evolving ever knows exactly where it’s going.

Mayan Storytelling

Mayan-72“Happens all the time,” says Coyote. “That’s what myths do. They happen all the time.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

Pat and I like this quote so much that we put it at the beginning of our new novel, Mayan Interface. It sums up a lot of our thinking about Story (with a capital S).

Mayan Interface is set in two different times. One is during the fall of the (fictional) Mayan kingdom of Pakabtun during the Terminal Classic period, around A.D. 900. The other is the present day—or last year, to be precise—when a breach between past and present occurs in cyberspace, and primal shamanism and today’s information technology become pretty much one and the same thing.

As we researched the book, Pat and I studied Mayan storytelling. We were especially fascinated by Allan F. Burns’s 1983 collection, An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya. The stories that Burns brings together are a crazy quilt collage of old and new, traditional and contemporary, fictional and true. Incongruity reigns as Christianity collides with Mayan myth and religion, and as worldly personae mingle with the mythic and the holy—for example, Jesucristo, “Beautiful Woman Honored María,” and “Wonderful True God” turn up in the same story as Richard Nixon.

Regarding the oral performances he took part in while gathering his tales, Burns writes,

In Yucatec Mayan, it is not possible to say “tell me a story.” Instead, the only way to bring a story into verbal expression is to ask someone to “converse” a story with you.

Or as our protagonist, Lydia Rosenstrom, puts it,

All speech is dialogue to the Maya.

We incorporated this idea into our novel, modeling whole chapters on the Mayan oral tradition. Here we set the scene for a Yucatec storytelling session:

The three people all understood their parts perfectly. As the principal storyteller, Nacho would do most of the talking. As his designated respondent, César knew the story, too, and would prod the narrative along with questions and comments. As for Julio, he knew better than to commit the unspeakable rudeness of keeping utterly silent during Nacho’s tale. He, too, would make his voice heard in small but crucial ways as the story unfolded …

Pat and I hope that we put this philosophy to use in our novel as a whole, and that Mayan Interface is as much a conversation with the reader as it is a fixed narrative. And we hope the conversation continues after the book has been read, passing on to other people. In all of our stories, we’re not interested in imparting truths so much as we are in prompting questions, getting dialogues going, and generally stirring the hot, tasty, and variegated stew of evolutionary possibilities.

That sort of open-endedness is a part of the Mayan tradition. In Burns’s book, we noticed that a Yucatec tale never seems to take place in time at all. One notably haunting story tells of a Mayan hunter who slays a magical deer belonging to the Master of the Deer. The hunter perishes because of his hubris, and at the end of the tale the storyteller emphatically says,

“WHEN I PASSED BY, HIS FUNERAL WAS IN PROGRESS.”

When I read that story, I felt almost as though I glimpsed his funeral as well.

Maybe all of us did …

… or do …

… or shall.

Like all myths, it happens all the time.

And everywhere.

__________

We also visited specific sites, see Researching the Maya.