“The results of our experiments are never self-evident in
their import. They are merely the occasion for us to try to weave a narrative
in which obtaining a certain set of “significant” results makes sense – sense
in the context of ongoing narratives both of epistemology and of a developing
communal tale of human experience. And “sense” is a product of interpretation,
grounded in the social conditions in which we live, formed by inescapable
ideology, and spoken in a consensual language.” (Josselson 4)
In her essay “War Doll Hotel”, Kiana Davenport likens mental
experience to that of photographic snapshots. Snapshots are a bare narrative of
brief seconds of our lives, a single second record of existence, only holding
with it the true experience of our reality at the moment, and how we value that
experience later on in reflection. Davenport’s metaphor can lead one to believe
that our existence is one long collection of snapshots, each one to be examined
on its own. Our minds, like the camera, capture the ever present now. Snapshots
of our lives are just one way of looking at things one way amongst many, some
that we can appreciate, learn, anticipate, intuit, some that will forever be
lost to us unless they are revealed to us.
Our lives are essentially our experiments, experiments that
are defined by the circumstances with which we are born and raised, our natural
proclivities and predispositions, and the rituals and habits with which we find
comfort in performing throughout our lives. At first we take the opinions and
prejudices of our parents and families, not knowing whether they are right or
wrong, not even being able to consider our parents capable of being wrong. We
are too young to know for ourselves enough of the world to do anything other
than follow what others tell us how the world is, and how it should be
interpreted. As we grow older the opinions of our peers become just as
important as those of our parents, giving us awareness that the interpretations
of our parents may not be quite right for the present day and age as each
generation sees its own collective experience and perception of its current world
in different ways. In the world of our
peers, we recognize our own collectively shared experience as a culture
separate from other generations. As we reach adulthood we realize that there
are all kinds of ways to interpret our personal reality, and what works in one
situation does not necessarily broadly apply to all others. Once an adult, our
experience of our lives becomes a blend between our mental phenomena and the
social environment. The snapshots of our lives are neutral, have no meaning
other than what meaning and value that we give to them, and this meaning and value
changes over the course of a lifetime according to our education and
experiences. Once we accept that the experience of our life is nothing more
than the ever-present reality, mixed with reflections of the past, and
assumptions of the future, we could perhaps experiment with our reality,
examining it as thoroughly as we can a tangible second of our lives. This
experiment also allows us examine our experience in the moment, offering us the
chance to enhance our present experience through self-examinations to best
comprehend our “interpretations” of the current “social conditions in which we
live”, what the “inescapable ideology” is that we live within, and how best to
speak the “consensual language” with others during the ever-present state of temporarily shared experience
(Josselson 4).
Works Cited:
Davenport, Kiana “War
Doll Hotel” Daily Fare: Essays from the
Multicultural Experience. Ed. Kathleen Aguero. Athens: The University of Georgia Press,
1993. 65-77
Josselson, Ruthellen. “Imagining the Real: Empathy, Narrative,
and the Dialogic Self” Interpreting Experience. Volume 3
of The Narrative Study of Lives. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. 1995. 27-44.
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