In the Native American oral tradition, and other oral traditions around the world, every story survives only if it is told. The mere existence of any story depends on its potency, the eloquence and passion of the speakers, the attention of the listeners. How much energy every word contains in the process – it has to be carefully weighed down against other words, chosen meticulously to avoid boredom, disbelief, to spark the passion to share. If the story dies out, if a tribe, a civilization dies out, the stories weren’t strong enough.
But we have written words. We don’t have to sweat. We don’t have to pass anything on. We are slaves to the opposite extreme; all that happens has to be recorded – coffee house visits, bikini waxes, nail polish fiascos. And if it’s written, it becomes a document, doesn’t matter of what. It’s fucking legit. How do you feel about the influx of social network messages in the 5 seconds you are on the site? Verbal diarrhoea, equivalent to nothing, feels like nothing. And nothing has successfully substituted reality.
We can’t go back to a world without Twitter. But marrying the eastern ‘little narrative’ of weighing in every word and celebrating silence in the absence of having anything necessary to say with the western ‘grand narrative’ of sanctifying the written word, however empty, could reconstruct, inform and better our sorry, noisy condition.
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