I've been thinking a lot lately about three related things. Events, data, and stories.
Events are things that happen. A thunderstorm is an event, a bird on a branch is an event, a date is an event. They are just random moments of simple or complex pieces of matter interacting with other pieces of matter. A person sitting on a bench and thinking is an event, if only in how their face moves and expresses things to those observing.
Data is what flows out of events. It is independent of observation, but inaccessible without it. Data is uninterpreted, available as information in a pure form.
Stories are data interpreted. They are what data turns into as soon as it flows through an eye, fractured into countless fractions by whatever filters exist behind any particular eye, and forever changed. Stories are necessary, but also easily and incorrectly mistaken for data.
So, I've been thinking about my own relationship with these things. It started with my lack of faith in god, and why I felt that way. It quickly descended (or ascended) into a working through of my relationship with my old religion. Lots of anger there. Anger, as a filter for data, is interesting. Not good, not bad. It can burn away a lot of bullshit that's floating around in your head already, but it can also disallow useful data from flowing in to replace the bullshit.
But it helped clarify something for me. I have always, ALWAYS mistrusted other peoples stories. I love them, but I don't trust them as truths. The only thing it feels like I have ever trusted as truth is my own observation of events, data filtered through my own lenses and crafted into my own stories. I don't know, yet, how much of that mistrust is truly crafted by my interaction with a religion that thoroughly controlled the data that was allowed to flow into my mind, and my rebellion against that. But I remember being very, very young and mistrusting stories I heard, young enough that an intellectual stranglehold on my thoughts hadn't yet been emphasized. This manifested most obviously in school, a place that is not remotely friendly to those who don't implicitly trust others stories. I can remember, in first grade, sitting on the floor for story time, and asking questions of my teacher who was reading a very simple book that should have just been enjoyable. I remember getting in trouble for asking questions, and it very quickly becoming clear to me that questions got you nowhere. They would rarely be answered. So I started observing, and trusting my own interpretations crafted through observation more than what my teachers tried to teach me. I started refuting teachers in 5th grade. Before that, I'd been a sweet, biddable, happy student. After that, I was a pain in the ass. Woe betide a teacher who did not know their shit around me. One dude in particular drove me batty, and he hated me. After I corrected him on his use of the term celestial (I don't remember the context he used it in, but when I raised my hand and told him he was wrong, that it was of or relating to the heavens, he was unamused), he coined the term Miss Funk and Wagnall for me, from an encyclopedia set in the classroom. That nickname stuck for a sadly long time.
I wasn't a know it all. I just thought most other people were wrong. And I wasn't wrong, about that. It took me a long time, though, to realize that I was wrong just as often. And my mistakes and wrongness got me thinking about my own filters, things that made the stories I told untrustworthy. This was about 17, a time I vividly remember because I latched onto science as a source of right. Chaos theory, complexity theory, and fractals entered my life. And I became obsessed with these things that felt true. I had grown up in a religion that styled itself as The Truth. Literal capital letters. When talking amongst ourselves, we spoke of being in The Truth. The word Truth had a lot of significance to me, and when I started to question the one big Truth in my life, after a short lifetime of questioning literally everything else, things fell apart quickly. I needed more and more data to fill in some big gaping voids, and science books provided extremely satisfying data. I learned to skim through books I didn't even remotely understand, and to just pull the data I did get and use it to build a better understanding of the whole message. I didn't think about how much this filtering process took away from my understanding of the full story, I just trusted my interpretations, and ran with it.
I was not an arrogant child. I am not an arrogant adult. But I was, and am, supremely self confident in my eyes and brain and body. I have always trusted myself, always relied on myself to interpret correctly the data around me. Thankfully, I'm not remotely power hungry...
That's past. My present is informed by a need for a constant flow of raw data. This, for me, is created by observing events. Travel has been nothing but a series of events, large and small, for me to observe. I've read less books in the past two years than at any given point in my life. I haven't been as interested in others interpretations of reality. I want to see, not read, and I want to craft my own stories.
This is getting overcomplicated and fussy, and going over ground I've already explored with myself. I don't want to be self absorbed about this. But it's almost impossible not to be. Damn it. If nothing else, writing this out has forced me to start looking more deeply into my own filters, encouraged me to acknowledge how many of them there are. I want to find a way to communicate with as few filters as possible, to tell stories as close to events as possible. That is not easy.
Events are things that happen. A thunderstorm is an event, a bird on a branch is an event, a date is an event. They are just random moments of simple or complex pieces of matter interacting with other pieces of matter. A person sitting on a bench and thinking is an event, if only in how their face moves and expresses things to those observing.
Data is what flows out of events. It is independent of observation, but inaccessible without it. Data is uninterpreted, available as information in a pure form.
Stories are data interpreted. They are what data turns into as soon as it flows through an eye, fractured into countless fractions by whatever filters exist behind any particular eye, and forever changed. Stories are necessary, but also easily and incorrectly mistaken for data.
So, I've been thinking about my own relationship with these things. It started with my lack of faith in god, and why I felt that way. It quickly descended (or ascended) into a working through of my relationship with my old religion. Lots of anger there. Anger, as a filter for data, is interesting. Not good, not bad. It can burn away a lot of bullshit that's floating around in your head already, but it can also disallow useful data from flowing in to replace the bullshit.
But it helped clarify something for me. I have always, ALWAYS mistrusted other peoples stories. I love them, but I don't trust them as truths. The only thing it feels like I have ever trusted as truth is my own observation of events, data filtered through my own lenses and crafted into my own stories. I don't know, yet, how much of that mistrust is truly crafted by my interaction with a religion that thoroughly controlled the data that was allowed to flow into my mind, and my rebellion against that. But I remember being very, very young and mistrusting stories I heard, young enough that an intellectual stranglehold on my thoughts hadn't yet been emphasized. This manifested most obviously in school, a place that is not remotely friendly to those who don't implicitly trust others stories. I can remember, in first grade, sitting on the floor for story time, and asking questions of my teacher who was reading a very simple book that should have just been enjoyable. I remember getting in trouble for asking questions, and it very quickly becoming clear to me that questions got you nowhere. They would rarely be answered. So I started observing, and trusting my own interpretations crafted through observation more than what my teachers tried to teach me. I started refuting teachers in 5th grade. Before that, I'd been a sweet, biddable, happy student. After that, I was a pain in the ass. Woe betide a teacher who did not know their shit around me. One dude in particular drove me batty, and he hated me. After I corrected him on his use of the term celestial (I don't remember the context he used it in, but when I raised my hand and told him he was wrong, that it was of or relating to the heavens, he was unamused), he coined the term Miss Funk and Wagnall for me, from an encyclopedia set in the classroom. That nickname stuck for a sadly long time.
I wasn't a know it all. I just thought most other people were wrong. And I wasn't wrong, about that. It took me a long time, though, to realize that I was wrong just as often. And my mistakes and wrongness got me thinking about my own filters, things that made the stories I told untrustworthy. This was about 17, a time I vividly remember because I latched onto science as a source of right. Chaos theory, complexity theory, and fractals entered my life. And I became obsessed with these things that felt true. I had grown up in a religion that styled itself as The Truth. Literal capital letters. When talking amongst ourselves, we spoke of being in The Truth. The word Truth had a lot of significance to me, and when I started to question the one big Truth in my life, after a short lifetime of questioning literally everything else, things fell apart quickly. I needed more and more data to fill in some big gaping voids, and science books provided extremely satisfying data. I learned to skim through books I didn't even remotely understand, and to just pull the data I did get and use it to build a better understanding of the whole message. I didn't think about how much this filtering process took away from my understanding of the full story, I just trusted my interpretations, and ran with it.
I was not an arrogant child. I am not an arrogant adult. But I was, and am, supremely self confident in my eyes and brain and body. I have always trusted myself, always relied on myself to interpret correctly the data around me. Thankfully, I'm not remotely power hungry...
That's past. My present is informed by a need for a constant flow of raw data. This, for me, is created by observing events. Travel has been nothing but a series of events, large and small, for me to observe. I've read less books in the past two years than at any given point in my life. I haven't been as interested in others interpretations of reality. I want to see, not read, and I want to craft my own stories.
This is getting overcomplicated and fussy, and going over ground I've already explored with myself. I don't want to be self absorbed about this. But it's almost impossible not to be. Damn it. If nothing else, writing this out has forced me to start looking more deeply into my own filters, encouraged me to acknowledge how many of them there are. I want to find a way to communicate with as few filters as possible, to tell stories as close to events as possible. That is not easy.
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