Narration (6 page)

Let’s make our flour meal and meat in Georgia.

Well believe it or not it is very difficult to know whether that is prose or poetry and does it really make any difference if you do or do not know. This.

And so things moving perhaps perhaps moving in any direction, names being not existing because anybody can know what any body else is talking
about without any name being mentioning, without any belief in any name being existing, I have just been trying to write the history of some one if his name had not been the name he had and I have called it Four In America and it is very interesting. You can slowly change anyone by their name changing to any other name, and so slowly just knowing the name of anything and so making anyone remember about such a thing the thing whose name its name anybody has happened to be mentioning cannot really very much interest anyone, not really very much, and so perhaps narrative and poetry and prose have all come where they do not have to be considered as being there. Perhaps not I very much really very much think perhaps not, and that may make one thing or anything or everything say itself in a different way yes in a different way, who shall say, and all this now and always later we will come to say, perhaps yes, perhaps no, no and yes are still nice words, yes I guess I still will believe that I will.

You will perhaps say no and yes perhaps yes.

NARRATIVE
concerns itself with what is happening all the time, history concerns itself with what happens from time to time. And that is perhaps what is the matter with history and that is what is perhaps the matter with narrative.

I am now going to talk not about the successes in narrative and history but the way they who write narrative and history do not do what they say they will do when they start out to do what they are about to do.

Let us think of newspapers, of novels, of detective stories of biographies of autobiographies of histories and of conversations. Let us think about them. I do not say let us know about them because it is hard to know what you do know about a thing that does not do what it does do.

And so what does the newspaper do and what does it not do.

But before we begin with anything that does or does not do what it is to do what it says it would if it could do that thing let us think again of narrating anything of beginning anything of ending anything.

It does happen it is bound to happen that the way of telling anything can come not to mean anything to the one telling that thing. When that does happen that the way of telling anything has come not to mean anything to the one telling that thing perhaps then one does go on telling the thing in the way that telling that thing does not mean that thing to the one telling that thing or one stops telling anything or one starts telling that thing in some other way that mayor may not come to mean anything.

The choice of one of these three things is of course a perfectly natural thing although it is usually called experimenting because it is really not experimenting,
experimenting is trying to do some thing in a way that may produce a result which is a desired result by the person doing it but telling something is not an experiment it is a thing that has to be done since anyone since every one inevitably has to tell something and has to tell something in the way that makes it feel that that something is what that thing is.

That is what narrative is and always at a time no one can go on telling anything in the way he has been telling that thing because no one is listening and even if that does not make any difference to him then he himself is not listening and perhaps eventually that does that can that will that may make a difference to him. Anything may make a difference to anyone but that certainly can or may make a difference all the difference any of the difference to him.

Think about how anyone is no longer listening when some one is telling something and you will know all about this thing.

Narrative is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen has happened will happen in any way.

That is what narrative is and so of course there always is narrative and anybody can stop listening to any way of telling anything. This undoubtedly can and does happen, even if it is exciting enough or has been. Anybody can stop listening to any telling of anything.

And this brings us to everything how anything is told will be told or has been.

There we are.

What do you tell and how do you tell it.

If you tell it very well how do you tell it and if you do not tell it very well if you do not tell it well at all how do you tell it.

This anybody knows since everybody is everybody and everybody is always one or many of them to always tell it.

There are many ways that anybody has that is anybody who is everybody and everybody and anybody is anybody and everybody there are many ways that they have to tell what they tell and to have anybody or themselves or everybody or not themselves or any combination of themselves or any combination of anybody or everybody to listen to it, listen while they tell it.

This makes narrative and at any time there is a great deal of it anybody can say at any time that there is not enough or just enough or too much of it. Anyway anybody everybody can say anything about narrative their own or anybody else’s narrative but one thing is certain and sure that anybody telling everything even if it is nothing that they are telling or is either telling what they want to tell what they have to tell what they like to tell or what they will tell they tell a narrative.

Sometime anybody can get tired of it and when everybody who is anybody does get tired of it then that is the end the natural end of that way of telling it.

That is what happens what has happened when everybody begins to think in a kind of a way which is a different way and that can happen of course it can. Feelings may have something to do with it or they may not have anything to do with it. Let it alone if you like let anything alone if you like but feelings are feelings and they are always there but anybody can have any way of telling anything they are telling about it. That makes a narrative and does a narrative have to have a beginning and an ending.

To know about this you have to look at country to see what it looks like, since land and water looks not like itself but is the whole of it, and therefore is there any beginning and ending to it. Is there, are there not two things
to think about it are there not, about beginning and ending but later very much later we will go into that but now to consider the perfectly ordinary ways narrative has been written, newspapers, novels, detective stories, biography autobiography history conversations, letter-writing whatever kind of way any of these things are written makes no difference a narrative is any kind of way of trying to tell anything anyone has to tell about anything that is or was or will be happening, and any kind of telling is the telling of what is happening inside or outside but is the telling the natural the immediate the necessary telling of anything that is happening. Now the newspapers have been and are very interesting as being one way one variation of one way in it if you like but one way of telling anything of telling everything of telling something.

What do the newspapers do and how do they do it, and what is the matter with it that is if there is anything the matter with it.

But to go back again just a little again to the way anybody or everybody tells anything anything about anything that is happening all the various ways there is of doing it and all the different ways anybody that is everybody can or cannot get tired of listening to it.

Think about it anybody listens to it as you yourself tell anything and as you yourself or anyone listen while you yourself or anyone tell anything. It is extraordinary how few and how many ways there are of telling anything listen to yourself and you will know something of all about it and how few and yet how extraordinarily varied ways there are of listening or of getting tired of listening to it.

All this makes anything written interesting to anyone interested in it the number of ways anyone tells anything theatre novels history poetry biography
autobiography newspapers letter-writing and conversations and the number of ways anybody that is everybody gets tired of listening to it. Everybody always has to be listening to something, that is the way it is always anybody has to be listening to something that is what makes life lived the way that is what makes anybody who they are what they are, of course it does any of you think of your life the way it is, you are always listening to some one to something and you are always telling something to some one or to anyone. That is life the way it is lived.

I once said and I think it is true that being a genius is being one who is one at one and at the same time telling and listening to anything or everything.

Any of you try it and you will see what a difficult thing it is to listen to anything and everything in the way anyone is telling anything and at the same time while you are listening to be telling inside yourself and outside yourself anything that is happening everything that is anything. That is what genius is to be always going on doing this thing at one and at the same time listening and telling really listening and really telling.

That is the reason why so often people have genius when they are twenty one, talent when they are thirty one, repetition of this talent when they are forty one and then nothing of anything that can make anyone listen to any of them after forty one. This is of course a well known thing but if you notice any and every one you will see how naturally this thing does happen. When you are young you have an energy that makes hearing and telling beginning over all at one time, but you grow older and when you listen you can not be telling anything and when you tell anything you cannot hear anything and so then what was begun when you are young and had energy often for two things does not go on.

This is a sad story and does happen so often that there is no use continuing to sadden anyone by going on.

I do not cannot believe that anything is or can be more interesting than the way and the fact that everybody is always telling everything and that anybody can in their way go on listening or not go on listening. But everybody can feel about telling and about listening like that. Anybody can.

So now about the newspapers what are they telling how are they telling what do they intend to tell about what they tell and who listens who does listen. It is very interesting.

Newspapers want to do something, they want to tell what is happening as if it were just then happening. They want to write that happening as if it was happening on the day the newspapers are read that is not as if the thing was happening on the day the newspaper is read a little that all the same but as if the writing were being written as it is read, that is what they mean by hot off the press, but yet after all there is an interval generally six hours or so but always an interval, and that interval they try to bridge by head lines, and do they succeed, not very well I guess not very well because it is not possible to tell in the way they have to tell a thing that is told as a reality, all this has an awful lot to do with the writing of history.

As I say what does the newspaper really want to do and what does anybody who reads the newspaper want to feel that they want the newspaper to do.

Really what the newspaper does really want to do and what the reader of the newspaper wants the newspaper to do is to know every day what happened the day before and so get the feeling that it has happened on the same day the day the newspaper appeared the day the newspaper reader reads the
newspaper and not on the day before. If they did not want to do and to have this thing the newspaper reader and the newspaper writer then they would not mind so much reading the newspaper of the day before and anybody knows that anybody who reads newspapers always objects to reading the newspaper of the day before.

Well there are two things about it, the newspaper reader wants to read the newspaper every day because he wants the idea of happenings happening every day and if there is a day without the happening of that day which is really the happening of the day before then the newspaper reader feels that it is like the sun standing still or any abnormal thing there is a day and nothing has happened on that day.

That makes anybody feel that you cannot call a day a day if it is not a day if nothing that had been happening has happened on that day.

That is really what the newspaper has to say that everything that has happened has happened on that day but really this is not true because everything that has happened on that day on the newspaper day has really happened the day before and that makes all the trouble that there is with the newspaper as it is and in every way they try to destroy this day the day between the day before and the day the newspaper day. Of course by day I naturally mean night too but the newspaper really does not know and so it cannot really say that there is really any difference between the night and the day. That is another of the difficulties they have in face of the real trouble that the newspaper day is always the day before the newspaper day and yet that is what they really have to say that the newspaper day is the day it is, which of course it is not.

And so everything in the newspaper begins with its not being so and that like everything complicates and makes difficult telling and listening, it may
complicate and the newspaper does by making it too easy, so much do they have to deceive the reader into feeling that yesterday is to-day that they have to make it too easy and in making it too easy they do do something they had not intended to do they make it no longer an exciting thing to do because they have commenced to do too well what if they did have it to do it would be impossible to do.