I was talking to my brother the other day and he made an offhand comment that I almost missed. We had been talking about communication and our different approaches to it. I said that I was speaking less during social occasions these days, since (as it seemed to me) whenever I did I seemed to be the target of irritated looks from people. Foremost among those angry glancers were members of my own family.
Well, you're a storyteller he said, not a conversationalist. I shrugged acknowledgement, and returned to the main topic. Suddenly I stopped, as it occurred to me that what he had just said was a huge portion of the problem that I have with interpersonal communications.
I am a storyteller. I communicate in narratives that flow along specific channels in order to reach a point. In order to communicate, I need to follow that stream until it finishes.
To use another metaphor, when I converse I'm like a weaver amongst tailors.
I carefully arrange the threads, the warp and woof of my thought, and create a tapestry. The tailors around me are impatient with the complexity and unconcerned with the subject. They interrupt, their words like shears cut across my work, my story, my meaning as they take small inconsequential pieces and stitch them into a patchwork. They glare as the sound of my loom and shuttle slowly click and clack. They have plenty of leftover scraps. They have no need of this new cloth.
But still, they cut the cloth as it comes from the loom and finally they cut so close that the weave is damaged the loom falls silent and I sit quietly at the table with nothing to contribute. Unlike Penelope, I have no need to unravel my work. That task is done for me.
I sit in silence and listen to the spools of thread whiz by my head, words that could be woven but not by me, or at least not here and now.
In a little while, after those around me have blocked my existence from their minds, I will pick up my loom and go to the small room, walled with books, and set the device back up. I will take the stories I have to tell and I will weave them the way I want. I will use black thread for the borders of the story and the pauses, the ellipses that indicate the twists and turns. I will use red thread for emotional content, green for physical growth, blue for spirituality, or maybe I will mix and match in different ways.
But I will sit alone in my room with my loom and I will weave the stories the way they should be woven. I will finish them and I will hang them whole on my walls.
In the other room the tailors chatter and make cat's cradles with the thread, playing with what I can only perceive as remnants and scraps. They have their art, I have mine. I cannot tell which is the best. I can only turn inward and realize that my weaving is what I do, is who I am, and if I am doomed to live as a weaver among tailors, I will have to get used to silence, solitude and (most painfully) scorn.
2 comments:
ARGH, Dad. I'm going to speak only on my own behalf here, but I really can't let this one go by.
J is right. But seriously? The solution to your issue here isn't to sequester yourself and complain that we don't appreciate your craft. The solution is to learn how to be a conversationalist as well, and then apply each skill as the situation warrants. I had to learn that - God knows (and so do my friends) that I can go on at length if I don't catch myself. Sometimes I don't catch it, and I hear the room go silent around me and that's my cue to wrap it up in 30 seconds or less.
If we're dealing in metaphors - which we seems to be - the effect of dropping a story into a conversation is like dropping a big rock into a little creek. It's an obstacle to be navigated around. It interrupts the flow and shifts the focus from communal to individual. Which doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with storytelling, or that you don't tell stories well, it's just that it's not generally the right context. You can be adaptable, or you can miss out on the interactions you could be having, as well as the appreciation that you might get, if you weren't locking yourself into one pattern of behavior that clearly isn't working.
- H
The problem is that, these days, it is never the right context. I appreciate the fact that my long form doesn't play well with the short form of other's conversation, but it seems as if people around me rehash and gnaw at the bones of who knows who, what if, and so on, much of which information is already common knowledge. There will be a discussion, for instance, of some distant relative that only one person in the room has ever met and no-one really cares about and the news of whom has no impact on anyone present ... yet there will be tsking, gasps of minor outrage, awws of delight, and general acceptance of information about people they do not know as well as a character in a sitcom that they've never watched.
You would think that the smooth surface of the distilled and tasteless water of this conversational pool would be improved both in design and flavor by an occasional frog leap from the bank with the bellyflop sending concentric rings and lapping waves to beautify the pond with whorls, droplets, and bubbles.
But enough of the fancy talking. The plain fact is that affordances are allowed to some people to tell stories, but not to me. An uncle may tell a story about his work, an aunt may tell a story about where she grew up, a mom may tell a story about her baby, a traveler may tell her tales, an artist describe his inspiration. But, if I so much as draw a breath a look of long-suffering and mild hostility appears of the faces of ... not all ... but some of those around me.
I can and do make small talk. But there is no venue for my stories other than my friends online who are also aficionados of the long form.
Perhaps that's it. Perhaps the oral tradition is no longer viable. Perhaps the post can only be understood if presented as a series of irritable tweets.
But it is sad to me that I can't tell the story of meeting J.B.S. Haldane in a sunny Italian garden, or my adventures climbing mountains with one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world, or how Grandma Brady planted an entire orchard in her small backyard in Cambridge, or how a distant relative escaped from a colonial jail.
What is the proper venue for these stories. There is no right time to tell them. We seem to be a people afflicted with terse meaningless communication with no time for stories unless it is a paid performance by a storyteller.
That sounds querulous and isn't true. It's just that some of the people around me have no time for MY stories. Which leaves me with a rather odd situation. I can only tell stories about my family to people I don't know.
I accept that ... I just can't help thinking that it's a shame.
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