pioneeringoverfiveepochs

<p>I could not figure out how to introduce myself</p><div></div>

<p> NARRATIVE THOUGHT TO THE RESCUE<br /> <br /> The visual imagery of the mind appears to be both more complex and less systematic than the visual imagery of cinema. Images viewed through conscious effort are more often indistinct and elusive. Even the faces of loved ones are often difficult to recall. They sidestep the mind’s gaze if their images are actively pursued. Long familiarity renders such objects too complex and heterogeneous for a single image to suffice. Such faces become, in our mind, multidimensional, ambiguous and possessed of a breadth and complexity that photography and film condense and strip away. This is also true of sensory experience in general.<br /> <br /> Because of the elusiveness of sensory experience a mode of thinking comes into acton, into play, called narrative thought.1 Narrative governs the disposal of objects and actions in time without which memory and language would be impossible. Most of our experience can be assigned a place in our narrative history or at least its potential, although some of our life is clearly and inevitably incoherent. -Ron Price with thanks to David MacDougall, “Films of Memory”, Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review:1990-1994, editor, Lucien Taylor, Routledge, NY, 1994, p.266.<br /> <br /> Just as film and documentary makers<br /> are often uneasy about their narratives,<br /> so are the autobiographers among us <br /> as we try and reconstruct our lives, our <br /> narratives, our stories. Some, of course,<br /> seem less troubled. Often a celebratory<br /> stance is adopted towards one’s memory,<br /> masking uncertainty, an emptiness at the<br /> heart of such authorship, a fundamental lack<br /> of conviction; reminiscence is usually treated<br /> as fragmentary, rarely as omniscience which<br /> is presumed arrogance. The richness inside <br /> people’s memories is often unattainable and<br /> is supplanted with endless illustrative material,<br /> with physical experience, primary stimuli and<br /> photographic iconography. These usually <br /> do not serve to integrate society, <br /> encapsulate ideology or create social order; <br /> rather they give us the unalterable record <br /> of appearance and place <br /> and a more profound place in our memory.<br /> <br /> I would like to think that this story will <br /> allow more than the record of appearance<br /> and place and will contribute in a rich way<br /> to that ultimate integration of society.<br /> <br /> Ron Price <br /> <br /></p>

This question of trust is crucial. I submit the following from my own memoirs on the subject:

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Those things we call interviews, conversations recorded for the public and found in the print and electronic media by the multitude, while not entirely superficial and valuable in their own right for information and entertainment, for the quirks and friendships laid out for us, do not deal with the innermost self which can only be recovered or uncovered by putting aside the world and the social self that inhabits that world. "The secretions of one's innermost self," says Naipaul quoting Proust, "written in solitude and for oneself alone" are the result of trusting to intuition and a process of waiting. In time, with the advance of years, I will come to understand what I have written, although even then not fully.

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If the autobiographer is sensitive to the processes of minute causality, he will slowly and inevitably come to see that behind each fact there is a "swarming mass of causes on which he could turn the historical microscope." The fragmentary, ambiguous and opaque material of our days makes it difficult to wield the pen with any kind of authority over our lives. What started off with a sense of my authorial imperium, as was the case at the start of writing this autobiography in the early 1980s, is often the case with writers and was also the case with Edward Gibbon. Such a feeling of literary authority often results, though, over the long stretch of writing in an increasing vulnerability. Egotism, energy and a will to power are all required to sustain a long piece of writing like this. Such qualities are not all a writer needs to create a literary presence, but they are essential. I would use the word power but not authority. As Richard Sennett wrote in his brilliant analysis of authority: "authority is an act of the imagination, it is a search for solidity and security in the strength of others.? Although this work is certainly an example of the former, it does not possess any of the capacity to bind, to bond, people together. Power is quite an ambiguous word as used in the social science literature. It?s use is so ambiguous I am happy to coopt it, to use it in association with my writing, as I proselytise for my vision using my life as a vehicle.<div></div>