Our Stories, Our Truths

From Menletter August 2008

By Tim Baehr

This Is Your Life

One activity that marks many men's gatherings is the telling of and listening to stories. Often the stories are myths taken from classical mythology or folk tales taken from traditional cultures, for instance, from Africa or from Native American peoples.

We also tell our own stories, sometimes relating them to the theme of the myth or folktale we're hearing, and sometimes telling about a portion of our lives. In many cases, these are stories of conflict and trial: lonely or abused childhoods, love relationships gone wrong, losses, addictions, illnesses, the crushing ordinariness of suburban life. We bring these stories to the community of men as offerings of ourselves, as a beginning step in making sense of life, as a beginning step of initiation by revealing our wounds to our elders.

"Life story" is such a simple metaphor that we don't usually recognize it as metaphor. In "Life is a story," we are (as in all metaphors) comparing two disparate things: a life with all its richness and complexity to a necessarily simpler narrative that follows the expectations and customs of what constitutes a story in a particular culture.

When we reduce a life to story, we select and highlight our experiences of people, facts, settings, and events, putting the selected elements into a sequence and revealing or implying causal relationships. Even the account of a single day or a single hour is a reduction of the moment-to-moment phenomena.

We regard stories told in a men's circle as true. The teller is putting forth a story that we trust is an honest distillation of his particular experience into a narrative. Also, we all share some cultural knowledge and expectations about how stories work - how they create this distillation. Further, we understand that a story is one man's truth, and that another person involved in the events underlying the story would probably have given a different account, choosing or highlighting different elements. And finally, we relate the stories of others to our own stories, sometimes discovering new truths.

Chaos Theory

Not all life events can be reduced to a simple narrative. The problem can be expressed in another metaphor, this time from Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

We can identify chaotic lives (or portions of them) like the one described by Macbeth only because we have an internal notion - a prototype - of what a more conventional story, and a conventional life story, is. It may be impossible to judge the truth of chaotic events, the sound and the fury, because it doesn't coincide with any of our notions of what a story is.

Sometimes a man who has experienced ongoing chaos for a period of his life or his entire life is hard-pressed to make sense of the chaos. Starting out babbling like an idiot, he jumps from one event to another, from one episode to another. He reports (to himself or to others) a barely coherent narrative, with dramatic sounds and furies, making little or no sense.

A narrative may emerge that explains maybe just a small piece of the past. And the narrative becomes this man's truth, more or less convincing to the audience depending on how it coincides with shared experiences and expectations about stories. But it's a start.

The important thing is to start. Writers of stories, even memoirs based on personal experience, often don't know where the story will take them until they are deep into their first - or tenth - draft. Their life is a story; and in the telling, their story becomes their life.

We all probably have aspects of our lives that cannot be neatly packaged as a story, aspects that cause us grief, confusion, dismay - the sound and fury of our existence. We can begin to tell about them, feeling like idiots, until those aspects begin to make sense. The stories may stand alone, or they may become a part of our larger life story. Sometimes the chaos remains chaos, but it is placed in a surrounding narrative with the chaos contained within a larger, coherent story.

We may create our stories - out of chaos or out of more ordinary experiences - in daylight or the sleepless black hours past midnight; we may share the stories in men's circles; we may write the stories as poems or memoirs.

Revised Editions

All our stories, the straightforward ones and those arising out of chaos, are subject to revision. We may choose a different set of facts, settings, or events to highlight. We may extend a story to experience, and then retell, a new ending. An unimportant participant may become prominent, or vice-versa. Our stories, and our truths, are not carved in stone.

Sometimes a major shift in a story's emphasis can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world. Sometimes a shift can lead to forgiveness or heal old wounds.

In creating and revising our stories, we cease to be passive prisoners of life's events; through narrative, we take control of events and find the truth - our truth - in them. This is not absolute truth, or something that would stand up in a court of law. This is the truth that can be shared with a community, truth that gives us peace, truth that sets us free.

[Note: The notion of story as metaphor and the Macbeth example, and the testing of metaphors for truth, come from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, a classic treatise on linguistics and philosophy.]