Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Proto-Story....

Looking over my notes I realized that I never commented on a sentence written by Schank on page 15. He says, "We understand events in terms of events we have already understood." Let's say for the sake of argument that this is indeed true. What does it mean? I can make sense of saying that events I now experience manifest themselves as a sort of knot on an expanding web of experiential relationships, but was there some sort of proto-event? Or proto-story? How did little baby Josh understand anything around him if he was not only experiencing them for the first time, but was too young to have had any other experiences to relate the new situations to? Doesn't this make you wonder if we don't already carry experiences with us? Perhaps situational knowledge can be encoded in genomes, and we have vestigial knowledge given to us by our parents' genes. Some religions believe that we are reincarnated souls who carry with them much of the knowledge learned from previous lives. (This reminds me of a book entitled, "Many Lives, Many Masters.") I wonder if it's now possible in my life to encounter a situation where I would have NO references. Essentially, in such a situation I guess I would have no understanding....

2 comments:

Barnabus said...

Josh, Over the years I have observed that undestanding comes through many doors in our minds, i.e. Personal experience, observation of events that come before you, but in which you are not directly involved, and knowledge gathered from books- laptops-teachers, etc. We all encounter situations that we have never encountered in any way and we learn from them. When we encounter them again we know how to react more quickly and less painfully.

Professional Storyteller Rachel Hedman said...

I think we underestimate how much as babies we understand about our environment. We may not be able to communicate with parents yet, though, as babies, we probably did much in terms of observations. We also had ears to connect with sounds.

Certain scripts and stories could already be ingrained by the time we reach the age of one or two.

Until we tell again,
Rachel Hedman