~from a barbara kingsolver interview © organic style:
I grew up in rural Kentucky where people paid attention to the seasons and their neighbors, and everybody had a story. My dad grew an organic vegetable garden when everybody else was still using DDT. He did that because he had read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and that became his story. The neighbors talked about it. And I could see the power of what he had done, translating an idea into action. So I grew up with this dual passion: my imagination smitten with books, and my feet flat on the green, green ground.
one of my favorite themes comes straight out of one of my basic tenets: we are the stories we tell. the we being all of us. the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us.
today, i heard on morning edition that baby jessica graduated from high school yesterday. do you remember baby jessica? the baby in the well? how we sat mesmerized for the 50+ hours it took for them to get her out? the flood lights pouring down in the black night on that hole where, if anything important was happening, it was happening out of sight? and how we all knew and understood that? how most of the nation sat there glued to the screen, especially those last hours? 1987. jessica mc clure. yes, that was her name, i was thinking as i listened.
how fickle history is. how easily we do forget so we have to have those mottoes like, lest we forget. how we can be in the grip of someone's story and fold it into our days, and then poof one day it's just no longer there. their story is no longer on our tongues. the short-term memory has closed over it and filed it deep away. the only we even have to know that it is gone is if it is somehow dredged up again.
and if we ponder even for a second how we could have forgotten, we have explanations. well, it was just pop culture, anyway, not real history. we'd remember the big things. the important ones.
we cling to the idea that history is somehow only about large, world-altering events because we need to believe that some things in and of this world are immutable.
that's especially true in these information-laden days. what is implicit but unsaid in warhol is that any of us may be historically fixed - pinned down like a papery moth in a specimen case - as the story told about us in those fifteen minutes of fame we all get.
i mean that jessica graduated from high school and there were few cameras to report is a different story. not really one about her at all. the cameras that may have been there - aside from those of her family and friends - remind us that despite that one extraordinary moment of holding a nation's interest, jessica is ordinary. she lives in texas, she goes to high school, she graduates. that is what survival is. ultimately that is all that it is. that is what being is about. what kind of story is that? who'd glue themselves to the set for that?
maybe that's why web diaries and web logs have become such a phenomenon. so many of us aching to get our stories out there. our songs of ourselves. pre-emptive strikes at history for the moment the flood lights turn on our dark well. or if the moment never comes.
i'd love to be a story by barbara kingsolver.
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