HoW wants to tell you a story. But we can’t, quite. For
one thing, we’re too preoccupied.
“Recent events,” as they say, compel us to spend an awful lot of time
surfing the internet: looking at
foreign newspaper websites in order to read some real news, checking in on
the well-chosen blog or two, nervously checking back to see if there are
updates. And then there are the non-topical diversions:
shopping for books online,
watching videos,
watching soccer on Fox Sports World, and looking for a laugh to take our
minds off of
“recent events.” Stories take time, and we are too much of our age to be
able to make the time to tell, or listen to, stories. HoW remembers the
occasions for stories when we were
young’uns—a long weekend for our parents, maybe some relatives
visiting, and people staying up long into the night retelling the past
over and over.
Walter Benjamin foresaw all of this, of course. Benjamin
sees storytelling as intimately associated with artisanal work: with weaving,
spinning, pottery-making, even farming. This is so because stories are
connected with the kind of life these
traditional practices both exemplify and create. In other words, stories
are part of folk culture, and such cultures have been
dying out for some time. He says that to hear a story
"requires a state of relaxation
which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical
relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream
bird that hatches the egg of experience . . . His nesting places—the activities
that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities
and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is
lost and the community of listeners disappears."
Instead, today we are immersed in information, which is
focused on the immediate, rather than stories, which are focused on the
timeless. Benjamin again:
"[I]t may be seen what the nature
of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment
in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it
completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is
different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its
strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time . . . [A story]
resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of
the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this
day."
We may not have time for stories today (hell, we probably
don’t have time to read Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” and have to make do
with the above partial quotes - and by we, we mean you), but perhaps there is some way to wrest something
transcendent, or at least interesting, from the
detritus that floats by us daily. Perhaps, if we are able to collect
together some of the seemingly
unconnected fragments, we will be able to find a pattern that formerly
eluded us. There is a model for this. Benjamin published One Way
Street in 1928, his own collection of fragments. The street doesn’t
seem to be an appropriate metaphor for what we are doing. Streets are public spaces, public space is dead, and we're all locked in our houses. How about
channel surfing?
