narrative

Maybe what I am doing is telling my own personal narrative. Not just telling, wrangling it. For the overarching narrative arc has never been my forte. I can manage 5-10 minutes in music, 3 hours on a bike, but putting together days to make weeks, weeks to make months, months to make years, is a higher level.

A couple weeks ago, I stepped back from the day-to-day and made a highlight reel list of bullet points of my life, thinking it important to have some perspective. Right now, I am the only one charged with both the living and the telling of my life; some are not so fortunate:

"How does a man who invented himself as a force by writing one of the most eloquent memoirs in political history lose control of his own narrative?"

That is Maureen Dowd talking about Obama. I'm having a difficult enough time drawing an arc in my life; I can't imagine also having to contend with external biographers.

Sartre was famous for saying: "Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose." I've spent the last 6 months, among other things, destroying and then rebuilding my own meaning, documenting it through the blog. Obama seemed to have a good sense of where he was from and where he was going--when he wrote Dreams. Maureen Dowd may be right, but I'm not too worried, hoping that his loss of core meaning is temporary.

hOpe.

Sartre and Beauvoir lived out their philosophy, but it was mostly Beauvoir who then turned her own biography back into philosophy by writing thinly disguised narratives of her life. (Which I hope to read in Paris, maybe finding the books used chez les bouquinistes.)

Beauvoir is remembered, of course, for The Second Sex, more of a dissection than a narrative, that posits women as second-class citizens. A lot has changed in the last 50 years--in America we almost just had a President who was a chick--but apparently there's a new translation that restores cuts made in the 1953 translation. According to the review, it is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Just like Obama, feminists have to tend to their narrative, pruning it like a tree.

As for me, I think I'm out of the "tending" phase and am moving towards "growing".