I haven’t read either, but I would imagine that I’d pick up the second one before the first. I mentioned the introduction of Manhattan in the third part of Gaze wide, aim far, because it’s visceral and it makes sense. Recap: a man (Allen) narrates clips of a city (Manhattan) and he drops about a dozen incomplete thoughts (fragments). Then fireworks erupt over the city and the classical music climaxes.
If you have never seen Manhattan, then you should at least watch the introduction to understand what I’m talking about. This is one of those instances when something is ‘all of those things’, because many of our experiences are plural in the sense that they tend to mean something else to different people. That’s the human condition in a nutshell, and that’s okay.
Past and future as a continuum
Autobiographies are by definition accounts of a life lived, a looking back and a reflection when all things are set and done. It’s like a movie: once it’s written down, the story is the same every time around. But that’s when you write things down. If an autobiography stays in your mind, then it stays fluid and in a way past and future melt together in the face of a narrative that shifts and changes gears as we try to understand and comprehend.
And that’s another point right there: many times in life we do things without exactly knowing why. We either act on instinct, out of boredom, out of habit, or we’re urged by some outside force to get something done. Of course we tell ourselves that we have free will and all that, because we are all existentialists in that we try to define ourselves, and we’re nihilists when we don’t. What’s in the middle is much more interesting, or better yet: what’s ahead of us.
There are a lot of modern problems that have to do with this inability to deal with a life lived. The most striking are still soldiers that come back home and crash and burn in ptsd. For most of us, we don’t have lives lived as soldiers, but it’s more everyday, and in a way more ‘real’. More times than not it has to do with something that happens outside of ourselves that we can’t deal with at the time, and that ends up wearing us down.
In terms of fiction: the terror is outside of us. This is exactly the fictional premise that Stephen King started with and that he applied throughout his career and that he addressed with the simple question: what do ordinary folks do when faced with a terror? That’s the same mechanism like the inability of living with that life lived, but it’s that on another level. It has become acceptable, because it has created its own symbolism.
This might be less of a leap than it seems at first. The way most of us deal with things that happened during the day is when we sleep (besides discussing things with our spouse or partner, but that’s a given, right?). When we sleep, we dream. Most of those are forgotten by the time we wake up, but those that we do remember are fantastic and over the top.
Those dreams take on a reality and a symbolism that’s very much like works of fiction. How it works exactly isn’t well understood, but the base premise is that the subconscious kicks in and does the heavy lifting for us. When it doesn’t suffice, ptsd and all that other nasty stuff kicks in, and we have to find another angle in our waking life.
This is obviously the extreme, and I didn’t intend to go there when I started this piece. Let’s paddle back a little.
Redirecting the narrative
Personal autobiographies are more than an account of a life lived, it’s more than a story as well, and that’s where we get by stretching up the notion of past and future, and mixing that with a narrative that changes over time, because of how we lived our lives, but most of all ---- how we look back on our lives.
That’s where the whole fluidity comes back in. That’s where you are able to take your account of the past and how you feel about that past, and project it towards the future. That’s the point where the story becomes more than an account that’s written down at a certain time. That’s where a story becomes part of our identity.
This was one of the first things that I discussed in part one of Gaze wide, aim far: to some degree, how we see ourselves is a story, and in fact ---- a narrative because it continues, and in that sense it makes sense to define it as the narrative identity. To do that you need to both reach back to the past and aim for the future. That’s what is meant by living autobiographically.
By and large this is part of finding out who you are and where you stand. It’s sorting yourself out, it’s you figuring out who you are and this is one of the keys that’s needed to not just develop a wide gaze, but also to be able to aim far. Understanding yourself and the world around you is the width of the gaze, but to aim you need to know what’s within reach for yourself, and for that you need to have developed a keen sense of who you are.
This is where it pays of to study biographies, to talk to mentors and family to figure out how they got to where they are today. If you manage to mix insights from those instances with a wider understanding of living autobiographically and narrative identity, then you will have a very powerful tool at your disposal.
In summary
- autobiographies are aimed at understanding the past
- powerful fiction is written around a theme and will help you to understand the world around us (check out my fiction-blog to learn more about that; including my novels….)
- aiming personal autobiographies towards the future helps to create a narrative identity
- to some degree, changing the story of who we are can help us figure out who we are, and is called narrative identity
- mix this insight with studying how role-models created their success will widen your gaze, and help gear you up for success.
“More, more!”
“In a few days, partner.”
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