At some point during his talk at Field Studies, Tim Ingold drew a squiggle on a whiteboard:

It looked a bit like this: 

He was talking about perception – in particular how we see and hear the world around us – and with this squiggle he was trying to show (I think) how anthropologists, in particular, have had a problem over the years about how to record accurately the experience of living within a community and comprehending its culture. (Someone else who attended this talk will almost certainly be able to report this better than I can.)

Tim repeatedly wanted to make the point that life, as it is lived, keeps going forward in a constant flow, so that any attempt to ‘record’ our experience of life in some ways always takes us out of that flow and forces us to look (and hear) backwards, and then ‘replay’ an experience.

So Tim’s squiggle was an attempt to show how an anthropologist might live in the flow of other people’s lives for a while, but would then loop back over that experience to where the journey had begun and would then replay it to the point where the journey stopped. Tim seemed to be claiming from this that all endings are imposed and somehow a falsification of actual experience. Is this right?

I got slightly obsessed with this squiggle – as you can already tell – and perhaps stopped paying close attention to Tim’s complicated but compelling arguments about how sound has been treated differently to sight over the centuries by intellectuals and cultural historians (most basically by talking about ‘sight & sound’ rather than ‘light & sound’ or ‘sight & hearing’.)

What interested me was how this squiggle might also be used to think about how writers take experiences and make stories out of them – imposing beginnings, middles and ends on chunks of life that are in reality just one continuous (meaningless? storyless?) flow.

I am starting to imagine a story structure that matches the squiggle.

(1) We start at the end, a scene or an event that somehow needs ‘explaining’.  

(2) We move forward in real time for a short while but with a slightly heightened perspective of the storyworld.

(3) Now we start heading back, already reviewing the end point of the story, but with some kind of overview rather than being ‘in the room’.

(4) I start to pick out significant moments from the past, significant in how they might relate to the end, without actually clearly stating or even understanding their significance. We stay ‘above’ the action.

(5)  We hit a key scene in the past where the experience of the story is actually lived again by the writer, a point where the storyteller is part of the story, too involved in the scene to be ‘dispassionate’.

(6) The writer is now working ‘below’ the storyline’, looking for undercurrents, themes, psychologies that can explain what’s been going on, and then reaches a third key point in the story, the point where the story *really* began, the trigger point for everything that came after.

(7) And now we start to replay events from this trigger point, events already described to us but which  start to have a pattern and a meaning we hadn’t perceived before. Til then the story had just been a set of selected points in time we scrolled back through without seeing any pattern. Now we can consider a key point both from above and from within.

(8) Perhaps now an event we’d logged before whilst going back into the past has a new hue, a new meaning now that we approach it from the other direction and with new knowledge of events that preceded it.

(9) And as we zoom down to an ending, the point where in fact the writer started, we come to that point with a new understanding, with a pattern defined, with the sense of an ending. What started as a bare fact, an isolated incident has now been imbued with significance, emotion, symbolism, meaning.

Now I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all. It is though (for me) an interesting (but not the only) way to think about story. (The story it makes me think of most of all btw is The Good Soldier). I’m already wondering what happens if I change the axes so that squiggle works symmetrically (well, almost).

Does that change things? Who knows? But I am indebted anyway to Tim Ingold (and Field Studies) for at least getting me thinking again about something that is pretty fundamental to a storyteller’s art.