Does narrative control our lives?
Do mere words, forever shifting on the barnyard wall, mold our collective behavior?
If a lie lands in the narrative, and no one knows it’s a lie, does it pass for the truth?
Enter, the Scapegoat:
“No, everything seems conditional now, contingent on proof of cognitive compliance. Their cancellation of me has been cemented into their own identities. The people who were once closest to me now exist in direct opposition to the person they imagine I’ve become. There is no way to dissuade them, to show them that I really am me, the same me I’ve always been. I realize the framing they’ve embraced since the lockdowns cannot shift without destabilizing the shaky narrative they’ve chosen to inhabit. I am the problem. I have to be the problem in order for their reality to remain steady.”
Alison McDowell
Oh how I know this role so very well! I was born into it—by chance, divine intervention, twist of fate—I have no idea.
Alison, having experienced life primarily as the golden child, here feeling it now so poignantly, perhaps for the first time, navigating as an outsider, has put words on my reality as I never could. Such poignant, touching, true words.
There is something about venturing into new territory and trying to map the landscape for yourself that highlights what is most special and unique about a particular place from a particular perspective. It’s a kind of magic I think. What has become invisible to the native through habituation has new meaning through new eyes and in turn brings new insights to the observers’ previous perspectives simultaneously.
It’s why I wanted to be a travel writer, why I thought I could be good at it, because if I could recognize that level of magic, surely I could learn to apply it myself.
But now I deal in inner worlds, instead of outer ones. So many of us find ourselves here in these times that we can hardly consider ourselves outsiders anymore. Can we?
“The Herculean effort to struggle to come to an understanding of something alone, without mature guidance and the fellowship of other stumbling souls is more than most can bear. This is what angers me about the glib soundbites in praise of the ‘freedom’ for individuals to simply learn alone via internet study.” Christine Jones
Withered Leaves & Spoiled Fruits meet Wrench in the Gears, if only here in my words. I hear you say the same thing, though you are physically and in so many other ways, so far away, from me and each other.
But, in ways that don’t seem to matter to me much these days.
That we are each middle aged women who have been cast off—by our own or divine, or others’ design—how delightful, still, to find sister castaways.
What I’ve come to learn lately navigating the inner worlds at the expense of the outer ones is that words matter much less. Labels hardly at all. That works out pretty well since language has forgone nuance words have become superfluous. (Spellcheck just tried to correct me from ‘become’ to ‘Beyoncé’, how apropos)
The inner world narrative is not man’s narrative. Words hardly fit. Words hardly fathom. The words sound ever-more more political the further in you journey. Falsity reigns and duplicity rains and you find that words only rein in reality. They don’t invent it, they don’t even represent it, not really. The map is not the territory.
In fact, it becomes more difficult to navigate the inner worlds the more you rely on the words.
What are thoughts but words yet expressed? What am I to rely on once words begin to lose their meaning to me? Me, who spent four decades devoted to the study of words. Who considered language to be the cornerstone of civilization and all that made it function.
What a shift, now to think in fact it is not words that craft the spells that create our cultures, but rather enclose them, like walled gardens or mazes, constructs that sometimes illuminate and sometimes obstruct. Sometimes nurture and sometimes confound.
Once upon a time “devious” and “clever” were not synonymous. To understand how they’ve become so confounded one must explore the inner world, beyond the words and into the being. There the answer lies.
Lies?
Perhaps the lies inherent in the words, inherited with the words, are driving us collectively mad? Everywhere I hear about the ‘clever’ machinations of the great powers. Clever?
Perhaps if we shake hard enough, like a soaked dog after his bath, the words will be cast off like water droplets, leaving the cleansed being behind.
