Beyond Rivalry

New series -- I'm going to post and comment on excerpts from James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (1996) every day for a while. I am almost finished reading the book. I've found it both profound and confounding (mock antonyms!). 

Alison on our stories and the way death forms them:

"We can all tell stories, and our stories have beginnings and ends, and Jesus's story had its end, a sad end, but at least an end [until he reappeared to the disciples]. This is part of our human experience: our stories are ritualized in the same way as our lives, by the way in which our culture is bound in by death. How do we tell a story about someone who died and then rose again? ... We have to change our whole conception of the stories we tell, which is pretty fundamental since not only are we animals who tell stories, but it is the stories we tell about ourselves and about others which make possible that we act in the way in which, in fact, we act. How are we going to tell as story which has no end, at least as far as we know such ends? To ask this question is, already, to ask about the eschatological imagination. What I am claiming is that there is only one reason that a Christian eschatology exists at all, and that is the resurrection. The resurrection was the irruption in the midst of the normal human story, shot through with death, of a rather different story, one which we do not know how to tell very well." (p. 28)

My comments:

I have been told that I'm not very good at telling my own stories or other people's, though I like to listen to stories. Maybe my thinking that I am "not a good storyteller" is a story in itself, even if corroborated by every other person on the planet. 

Today I wondered if perhaps it's not so much the story itself as the narrative of the story that often escapes me --  the thread that weaves it all together in a linear, coherent progression. When I think about my "life story," and other people's, they feel so elliptical ... unwieldy and ungraspable non-structures that circle back, reach out tentacles, shoot into twenty places at once, confuse time and memory. When I've written stories, including autobiography, I usually construct a framework to keep it all tidy and in place ... but the essence of life experience, liminal moments, sublime subjective reality feels so poetical, something that can only be obliquely told, if it can even be told at all. The minute I start to speak it, it changes, because I am speaking it, and I can never catch up with it.

I think I act partly on my story about my own identity -- trying to conform to, resist, shrug off, or protect my perception of it; and partly on the way other people seem to see me (my understanding of that), which I incorporate into my "own" identity or I resist the way I feel I am seen, and I incorporate that resistance into my identity; and partly on some factual history that I think I know about myself and the world; and partly on ... intuition? listening to something reverberating? participating in whatever it is that allows me to fly, flip, hover, and glide night after night in my dreams?  Something. 

It seems to me that Alison is saying here that our stories look roughly like this: I was born, I grew, I aged, I will die. And because we know, theoretically, that we will die, the story is geared to that climax. Our actions are framed by and look forward to the end of the story, i.e., the eschaton, whether we focus on it by working hard to deny it, rushing headlong towards it, trying to figure it out and control it, finding ways to manage, forestall, minimise, engage, practice, or ignore it, or by immortalising ourselves (or a genetic piece of ourselves) beyond it; and so on. It looms.

Some of my stories. (in .doc format)