The Stories of Our Lives

Earlier today in my Religion in Asia class we watched a film called "Among White Clouds," about Buddhist monks currently practicing in remote hilltop monasteries in China. While the film itself presented interviews with the monks, skewed through the interpretations of the American filmmaker to an incongruous Western soundtrack, it grabbed me in some way that I haven't felt in some time. Afterwards the teacher asked if any of us were inspired by the film to want to go on a similar hermitage and I realized that I have certainly had that dream, both figuratively and literally, from time to time. I began to feel sad, thinking that while I have certainly chosen the life that I am leading as the best one for me, there are moments when, if I could live in another reality, I would have gone and hermited in a remote monastery.

Later I was sitting in a café reading Joyce's "The Dead," in which a party is held in a Dublin mansion with much dancing and feasting. On the way home in the morning, the main character Gilbert is struck by memories of all the ecstatic times his wife and he had once had together, which makes him desire her as they draw closer to the hotel. Once inside, he is shocked to discover that a song heard at the party sparked reminiscences in her, but of her first lover, a young man who had died for her. At the end, Gilbert looks out the window at a rare snow falling over Ireland, and thinks that it is falling over the living and the dead, as if the climate and culture around them is a great equalizer. I was deeply moved, and putting down the book looked out the window at the snow falling over PIttsburgh, thinking how much we can get caught up in the stories of our memories, our desires, which never seem to match up with the world around us. In a Joycean moment, my reveries were interrupted by a man canvassing for a local political organization, asking if I was registered to vote. Needing to change my address, I stepped outside to fill out the forms and smoke a cigarette, and saw an old lover of mine walking down the street, someone who had been deeply wrapped up in my memories, dreams, and this story I live in not such a pleasant way, though much of that sorrow has only ever been in my head.

Feeling that all this was building towards something, I went to my Short Story in Context class, where we continued our discussion of the stylistic use of language in Joyce's "Dubliners," specifically trying to untangle why many characters are cast in the narrative voice of Arthurian legends. Someone asked if this might be ironic on Joyce's part, and, preempting my teacher's response, I suggested that perhaps Joyce was trying to suggest the way that people use myths and stories in general to frame how they look at and talk about the world, which becomes particularly clear in the rest of Joyce's oeuvre. My teacher went on to posit that our use of stories in this way is what causes the paralysis and unrequited longing suffered by many all of the characters in the volume.

Walking home after school, with the snow falling through patches of setting sunlight, I realized how true this really is. Certainly, from a very young age, I have shaped my life from stories, they fill my dreams, and everything I have done, everything I've wanted, everyone I've loved, has been part of a script that could be traced back to particular literary and cultural narratives. While something like this idea has occurred to me before, I felt for the first time just how trapped we become by the stories we tell ourselves. We weave a reality from words, indeed have nothing else but the constraints of language to articulate existence. I thought back to the Zen retreat I attended years ago, and how I told the master that I often felt that I was living in a dream from which I couldn't wake up. He said, our lives, the work, habits, longings, loves, stories, these are all the dream. The first step of waking up is realizing that this is the case, which makes wanting to go live in a monastery sound quite pleasant, though even the desire to do that is still just another story, another dream. And yet, I realize, it is often not such a bad dream, and as a storyteller there is a certain power, even a responsibility, in trying to weave the kinds of stories that people might want to live in.