I met Jean my last year in undergrad. A core group were taking both the Virginia Woolf and the honors literary criticism seminars, so in the natural way young people do (and older people don’t), we fell in together.
Jean’s mind moves like a computer except she’s working with one or two more dimensions, making her mental loops fluid and fascinating. Add to this her urban upbringing and her spot-on taste, and even a myopic magoo like me was intimidated. After we graduated, that she’d been biding her time awaiting her reunion with better company was obvious. We stayed in touch mostly due to my persistent letter-writing, until I found what I thought were my own people, ex-husband-to-be included.
Fast-forward some twenty odd years, and I’m wondering if I can find her on the internet, a do-hickey that was still in its university swaddling clothes when we’d last signed off. And there she was. Reconnecting with her was one of the shining lights of a 2017 where fog enshrouded and eroded much of what I’d thought was happening (aka, my reality).
Besides the advantage of the internet, we now also had cheaper long distance, so we were able to catch up in some small measure. My lack of discernible progress in the material world ceased to embarrass me when she shared her own dissatisfactions. We began to share strategies and insights, dream interpretations, youtube links, and photos. As other friends had dropped away, retrieving Jean from the past was a timely gift.
The distance and difference between us, however, remained. She had jumped from San Francisco to NYC to LA to Paris to Austin and back to the Bay Area, while my wanderings had taken me to places like Southern Utah, Yellowstone, New Mexico, and the Northern Neck of Virginia. I don’t think she could conceive of why I would chose to live in these spots. Helping me sort out my vision for the future, she offered a provocative comment: “I think you’re avoiding something because you think you’ll get contaminated by it.” The assessment sounded right to me, but she thought I’d done the calculations wrong.
I was taking time to ponder the merits of this critique when she sent me a link. “Great job for you,” she e-mailed. The title did sound intriguing: “Narrative strategist.”
Since I’d welcomed Jean’s earlier commands, like the latest version of What Color Is Your Parachute, as good structuring exercises, I read through the description with as much open-mindedness as I could muster, no easy task after the fifth sentence which touted serving clients like Facebook and Google and other “global change-makers.”
Eventually, despite my sympathetic willingness to imagine myself as more affluent and much much hipper and busier, even a cursory look at the job showed how I wouldn’t fit. I was not only a “luddite” but proud to be so, and I was about as far down the line as anyone could be from their imagined candidate who was “passionate about disruptive technology.”
Passionate about disruptive technology?! A storyteller?! Would Homer be passionate about disruptive technology? George Eliot? Tolstoy? I might be an “inherent optimist, with faith in the future despite the immense challenges of our time” and possess the “ability to process complex stacks of information without getting lost down a rabbit hole” as they phrase it, but I’d rather put my intellectual juice into conversations on how disruptive technology affects our ability to summon resonant metaphors and strategies for how to counteract it than into pretending it’s enhancing our lives.
Basically, the small start up wants to “on-board” someone to use stories to sell shit or to justify shit. To convince people that shit doesn’t smell like shit because there isa beautiful story that connects us all to shit or whatever the fuck they need to do to make money so they can keep up their aesthetically and spiritually multi-hued new agey lifestyle in Sonoma county. One of the bulleted “capabilities” for the position was “Maturity – you must have an active contemplative practice.”
During this moment, as I sat slackjawed, probing my disinterest in stepping up into the metropolitan fast-paced future Jean was envisioning for me, a few other “tells” passed in front of my eyes. First, a Guinness beer ad that suspiciously sounded as if it were narrated by Alan Cumming, that deliciously gay man with a gorgeous Scottish accent. Over images of all manner of folk connecting over a pint of frothing ale, the ad tells us that, in our desire to cozy up to friends and alcohol, we’re all alike deep down. Okay, fine, I like beer too, and Cumming is hot regardless of his sexual preference. All good. But what if the challenge were to de-weaponize Amazon with a compelling story?
Then I stumbled across an article detailing what certain behaviors convey about a person revealed that long e-mail messages show neediness. Well, yeah, that’s me, I conceded. Needy. Look at how long this blog post is. And guess what? NO ONE READS THEM. After the shame the stupid content managers had slimed me with dribbled away, there remained a flicker of anger. Yeah, I’m fucking needy, I wanted to shout. I need people to pay attention; I need people to think for themselves. I need people to understand how their day job is connected to the rest of the world. My bad!
Then another article, which makes 3 and certifies this as a fairy-tale, began with this quotation
We cannot be careful enough in refusing to act as splitters (i.e., like the Nazi doctors) or in refusing to live a split life in that sense. And yet, in many circumstances, we cannot avoid acting as economic men and women of our time, performing certain professions and thus maiming our hearts.
— Ivan Illich In Conversation (David Cayley, editor)
I had a wild hair of a thought using a picture of the stories I was currently consuming as part of a job application. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Cheyenne Autumn; Killers of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and The Birth of the FBI; Pillar of Fire: American in the King Years 1963-1965; The Magic Mountain. Which of these stories, I imagined asking coyly, might they ask me to draw upon to craft a narrative strategy for Facebook or, say, Energy Transfer Partners?
I suspect that the e-mail I received from Jean in response to my “thanks but no thanks” signals our friendship has shifted on to a back burner if not into cold storage. This time, however, despite not yet finding my tribe, I’m less hurt. She’s given me much to think about, even if it’s an awareness of where I don’t want my life to go and why. And I hope when we connect again I’ll be able to report my progress and she’ll be able to share hers. The stories we share will be complicated ones, cobbled together after we’ve done the hard work to chisel out and stay close to what’s most important to us. I’ll drink to that!