Theories, Facts and Biography
In a back corner of the Pigsty some guys have been arguing about how the character Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s novel On The Road gained his interesting name. The discussion started out as an entertaining digression but has, in my humble opinion, become tedious in the extreme. If you bother to look, you will be astounded at how many comments, even heated debate, can be generated about such a small pebble of literature.The other day, in a futile effort to stop the beating of this poor dead horse, I suggested that Anonymous, who had written in quoting a 1947 letter from Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, had given us “the last word” on the subject.
One of our regular commenters, the.chronicler, immediately reminded me that theories, no matter how plausible, are never the “last word” about anything
He got me wondering. Can theories ever be “the last word”? A fact is a fact and a theory is a theory, yet we fight on as if theories were unshakeable truth. For instance, creationists base their reality and world view on the unproveable theory that God created the universe in seven days, while evolutionists base their reality on the equally unproveable theory that life came from mutations of some carbon molecules over hundreds of millions of years. When someone invents time travel and we can go back and see – then one or the other will be a fact. Till then…pick your worldview and good luck.
“My parents moved up to San Francisco in, I think, somewhere round 1929.” That’s about as shaky a fact as there could be, yet I’m comfortable with it – doesn’t shake up my reality one bit. Why should it?
“Hmmm, not sure when this picture was taken. Nothing written on the back. But Suzie’s still a kid – must be in the Eighties sometime.” I’m basing my understanding of time and history on a reasonable conjecture. And I’m happy and comfortable with it. Let’s go on to the next picture.
Over in the Congo, folk are beating up their children and chasing them out of their villages because they have a theory these kids are practicing magic to bring ill-fortune on the family. Pretty good plan, if their theory is a fact. The fiendish kids deserve it. Safety of the village and all that. But of course, if their theory turns out to be incorrect, then massive suffering has been laid on some little kids who just wanted to be home with their mommies and daddies. So they’d better be right!Sometimes it matters whether or not you have your theories and your facts straight. And facts are few and far between. Useful facts are even harder to find. Theories, on the other hand, rise with the sun and drop like the dew.
I pity the poor biographers, including our recent guest commenter Paul Maher Jr. Here is a paltry pile of facts – some letters, some journals; an address in an old phone book, a bus transfer used as a bookmark, an interview with a doddering survivor – and from these they must build their airy cloud of theory and reasonable conjecture – and come up with that wondrous thing, a living biography. A story that makes sense, that gives meaning to the jumble of one life, now complete. They mustn’t give way to scholarly disputation about who started a fist fight in the schoolyard in 1928. They can’t drift too far into explaining their subject’s motivation or they’ll end up with a work of fiction. Who can ever know the deep heart?
Yet, somehow, a biography that feels like the true story of a true person – what an act of homage. To rescue a life from the night of forgetting, to entertain us and teach us and deepen our understanding of this wispy thing called life. That’s a mountain to climb that’s worth climbing.
Labels: Jack Kerouac
posted by Christopher Newton at 3:26 PM
4 Comments:
From the time I was a young girl some of my favorite books have been biographies. I love having the opportunity to look at the world through someone else's experience for a while. What might it have been like to have lived in his or her time, in that location, in those circumstances? How would my choices be different if I had been born this person's contemporary instead of into my own season and place?
I think we are fools if we believe any book can fully capture who a person was or is. But the stories told can be very compelling, and come close to sharing some particular slice of a woman or man. No doubt there were other slices. But that does not make THIS slice any less authentic.
How much can we ever truly know even the person who is sleeping in the bed next to us, much less one who has been lost and gone low these many years?
There is a great line from a book I recently read... "Fading Rainbow - A Reporter's Last Story" by Robert Liss,
Liss was a child of the '60s who lived in Israel for a while, came back to the States with his wife and kids to build a career as a newspaper writer until he died in 1979 in his 30's from leukemia. He tells the tale of his illness, coming to terms with death, coming to terms with life, and finding meaning in this crazy, haphazard world. Anyway, in the afterward written by his wife (then widow) to finish up the book after his death she writes:
"Getting to know somebody is a slow process of weeding out expectations and fantasies. It never ends, because the people involved keep changing and there are always new expectations to deal with. I guess it is those rare clear moments of affinity and your greediness to have more of them that gives you no choice but to keep on weeding."
Assumptions, beliefs, preconceptions, expectations all shape us in our social construction of reality and the facts can be damned. "FACTS" are only bits of information someone has evidence to back up and they stay facts only until new facts come along to rearrange the truth in a different form or fashion.
Pluto is no longer a planet they say. But the rock named for a dog still swims in space and does it really matter what we name it?
In Barbara Kingsolver's "Poisonwood Bible" the missionary minister who wanted to baptize little native kids in the river in the Congo was viewed as a madman - the parents were convinced he was trying to feed their children to the crocodiles. What mattered more - the man's actual motive or the native's understanding of the dangers in the river?
All through life we paint motives or knowledge or needs onto the people around us and then interpret their behavior through the foggy lenses we have built up when perhaps some or all of it was pure invention on our parts. Try as we might to know others and allow ourselves to be known in return, I sometimes wonder how close any of us ever really get.
I’ve heard the word INTIMACY can be understood as “In To Me You See”. But can you ? Can I?
I really don't give a rip over when or how J.K. came up with names for his characters. All I care about are the feelings and ideas his words may evoke within me here and now as I soak up his writing.
What makes a subject worth arguing over? What makes a line of discussion petty?
Each day we choose how we will use our words. Some seem committed to craft communication to nudge themselves or others to consider deeper, to care more, to call to action, to soothe, to remember some moment from our past, or to ponder some area that feels significant. Others appear to behave like spoiled bullies throwing sand.
Respectful disagreement has merit, even when belaboring a point that may seem inconsequential. Belittling and namecalling, however, seem mean spirited and pointless, and sends me away to read somewhere else.
...uh...what she said.
*quietly and meekly goes to have another cup of coffee cuz she's obviously not awake enough to have such fabulously deep thoughts*
Belle, you add a lot to the blog. Thanks for continuing to drop by and I hope you be one of the regulars here. You have a lot to say and you express yourself powerfully.
You be special too, Paula, now go get some coffee!
Wow. Belladonna has the word these days. The rest of us word peddlers got nuttin' on her. She cuts right to the nut and leaves little space for conjecture. I'm sure some of us professional conjectors could come up with some witty or sarcastic barb to rejoin. My question is, right now, why?
Truth is buried in the facts, somewhere. We think it is, anyways. We rely on facts for confirmation of our deep and long held thought dreams. In the end, what else are they?
Me? I live on facts. They prove everything we seem to think. They confirm our doubtful beliefs. They guarantee our sporatic outbursts.
As Ken Krsey has intoned, and I reiterate, the truth is there even when the facts aren't right.
So why do we strive and thrive for stuff that we can't completely hold? Why do we chase the truth in facts? Why are those pieces of inoccuae worth more than emotions? How come facts drive our lives when they aren't even , in most cases, even provable?
Why? Because we can't be wrong. We, most Americans, ramble and babble daily about what we believe and, whenever they show up, we rely on the ubiquitous facts.
No. We can't be wrong. No matter how inncorrect we are, we can't ever be wrong.
Sometimes I think the relevativism we all seem to reject is just as strong on the "conservative" side of the argument as on the "liberal". When we take the nationalistic, jingoistic attitude about world relations that we curently hold nationally, how do they reflect the "facts"? How do they realistically portray the "truth"?
We all know they don't . But we hold to them like sacred revelation, like they really matter, like they will matter in another generation.
Why don't we give them up? Probably bcause if we do it will somehow reflect badly on our understanding, that to be wrong will show us as less than omnicient people.
How long, Lord? How long will we walk and struggle with these notions that we are somehow liable or responsible for the truths and realities of the cosmos that YOU created? Why do we ignore the reality that we have no power besides tthat given my you? Even those of us that don't believe in you ask the same question in the end.
Why do we think we, somehow, posess the ability to divine the truth?
Borroweed from Bella...
"Pluto is no longer a planet they say. But the rock named for a dog still swims in space and does it really matter what we name it?"
Call it what you want. Truth will never rely on facts. Thank goodness. Otherwise, none of us would ever get any sleep.
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