One cannot both experience and document something at the same time. This crisis, of having to choose either experience or the document of it, has been one that surfaces throughout my life in art. As a photographer, do I ‘experience’ less because I ‘document’ more? Is the experience more valuable than documentation? And how do we understand the experience of making documents?
Eric William Carroll, ‘The Crisis Of Experience’, 2009
I found this first at Jacob Sam-La Rose's tumblr blog - one I've been following for a while. I think it's appropriate to writers too, or at least it seems that way to me. As an almost life-long diarist, I often get the feeling that I'm only doing, saying or watching something so I can write about it later. The recording becomes, or has always been, much more significant than the experience. I don't notice any 'crisis' the way that Carroll reports. When given the choice, I'll take the diaries, the documents, the keyboard and the pen and the editing over the experience every time. Is that bad? It's so natural to me it's a question I've never really thought about before, until I read this and realised the question caused a crisis for someone else.
I have very vivid memories of writing about experiences that I can't actually remember happening. The experience of writing is more vivid and meaningful than the experience of living through the things I write about. Experience is messy and disordered and almost meaningless until it's been put into words, arranged and narrated. I know it's impossible to narrate reliably - just as it is impossible to speak reliably, or remember reliably - but for me, the written down life is many times more trustworthy than the lived life - is it that way for everyone?
Jo Bell says - They're not mutually exclusive. My own favourite quote about photography is this one: 'The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.' That's Brooks Atkinson, who I guess might be a photographer. So the point of writing is to make you look more closely at the actual world. Innit?
ReplyDeleteused to wonder at tourists who video or photograph rather than experiencing their tour; often to the extent that it seems unlikely that they would ever live long enough to actually view all their images.
ReplyDeleteIt started to make more sense when I read Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski. Diski writes about the value of remembering the remembering.
To varying extents I think it is a deep-seated human trait. The ‘real’ experience is only a small part of its value. When forager hunter groups gather many of the rituals and material exchanges associated with assemblies seem to act as conduits for remembering; the ‘straightening out’ and rehearing of cultural information and lore. As westerners, I think we see the same phenomenon at weddings and funerals and Christmas gatherings; grandads and uncles getting old stories straight – the year, the events, the funny bits, the people involved - it doesn’t ultimately matter at all if the story is inaccurately remembered; it inevitably will be. What is important is that there is a consensus of sorts so it becomes an ongoing remembering. We’ve all got childhood ‘memories’ that we don’t recall but we feel we are part of because we’ve had them told to us so many times. My own children have memories of things - pets we had or significant events - that happened before they were actually born because they have heard the remembering rehearsed so many times by others.
I realise this isn’t the same as documenting events rather than experiencing them but I feel it is an example of how possibly meaningless details are squirreled in preparation for them being incorporated into a formed remembering, or story, later on.
(I think)
kim
It seems sexist to be saying grandads and uncles get to do the 'straightening out' at family gatherings; but that's how I remember it, there they are, waving their fags...
Anthropologists have a term for this, participant-observation. One can be inside and outside the event or 'experience' at the same time .. the emic and etic perspectives - being involved in and learning from the ritual, whilst maintaining a professional analytical and objective understanding of the meaning and symbolism of the engaged action. It can and often does work - though many 'go native' in the sense that being part of any action necessarily involves becoming a member of the social group. So, although the uncle can tell you the story, he is remembering it from his point of view, and so will anyone - the professional separates the subjective and learns to enjoy the experience while in the process of learning from it and the responses and expectations and meaning to/of the 'others' .. But, yeah, you can get so bogged down in 'documenting' that the experience loses its immediacy and value as part of the great journey of life .. does experience only have meaning in retrospect? Can we only understand something after it has happened, or do we engage within during the happening? Hmmm .. KW
ReplyDeletemm, interesting, I struggle with this documenting vs experiencing in more ways than way. say, in daily life I have been used to documenting so much in diary, in writing, that sometimes the memory of my experience becomes changes through how I record it, not always positively. I have started to want to experience more. just 'be' rather than reflect/analyse/represent. but then, when I am writing, I like my pieces to be more like an experience than a document (if that makes sense), I want to write things that can be 'lived' rather than just read. I dunno if that makes any sense, and I'm far from achieving it. anyway, interesting thoughts Jenn, thanks xx
ReplyDelete"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they're not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They're always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they'd do it on the page. Always this disinterestedness . . . as if it really isn't to do with you, a certain cold impartiality." Martin Amis, Paris Review Interviews Vol 3.
ReplyDeleteOne of the hardest things I found about having a baby was that I no longer had time to "write my life." I couldn't get to the computer to put the incredibly things that were happening to me into words. I experience this as a loss. Writing deepens and expands my experience. I haven't lived something fully until I've written it down.
ReplyDelete