Making Sense

Telling a story is a way of structuring existence, creating order out of, not chaos, but the absence of order. Thinking about storytelling in this way requires that one momentarily accept the notion that the very idea of a unified narrative, a collection of incidents and emotions translated into sentences and paragraphs that are meaningfully interrelated (rather than haphazardly clustered together) and have a beginning and an ending, is not something that can be discovered, but something that must be, through an extraordinary process of mediation between one's mind and one's society, formed. It is difficult to tell a story that coheres internally, but in order to "make sense" this is what one must do. Yet the catch-22 here is that a coherent story requires one to make use of omission and to create bridges out of words, craftily so, to make what was omitted seem not as critical as what was told. These omissions account for, in some part, why it can never be satisfactorily said what it means to be human. That question is certainly the central force driving the human artistic impulse, and if it is ever universally resolved that the story of what it means to be human has been coherently stated without omissions, the artistic impulse will expire.