Part the last of a Rockies mini-series of posts.
Part three is here. Part two is here. Part one is here. The introduction is here.
2007 Colorado Rockies: 90-73, 2nd place, 0.5 GB, Wild Card, Lost World Series
The Rockies 2007 season is best remembered for the absurd late-season run of 14 wins in 15 games to close the regular season. By sweeping the first two rounds of the playoffs, the Rockies ultimately won 21 of 22 before being swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Because of that flukey run, however, it's easy to forget that this Rockies team was actually solid top-to-bottom all season. Indeed, the Rockies underperformed for much of the year, and that they needed such a winning streak just to make the playoffs was not indicative of their quality season-long. There truly was no weakness on the 2007 Rockies roster: the rotation, bullpen, and lineup were all solid, if not spectacular. Nevertheless, the transition from under-performance to playoff darling was fueled by two out-of-nowhere players.
Defining Players: SPs - Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales
These two pitchers' careers went in opposite directions after the miraculous 2007 runs, but that only masks how fundamentally similar their mutual arrival on the scene was during the Rockies World Series season. If anything, Morales was the better of the two in 2007, starting 8 games and putting up a 3.43 ERA (compared to Ubaldo's 15 starts with a 4.28 ERA). Regardless, both players were a surprise to people outside of the Rockies organization, young guns who came from nowhere to lead - or at least serve as 2/5ths of a dominant rotation - the Rockies into the playoffs. In a sense, their careers since 2007 are also perfectly indicative of the Rockies: Morales's failure to harness his awesome stuff speaks to the 2008 and 2010 additions of the team, while Ubaldo's better command and work-horse mentality indicative of the 2009 campaign.
2008 Colorado Rockies: 74-88, 3rd place, 10.0 GB
The 2008 season was extremely disappointing for the Rockies, both because they had just made the World Series the year before, and because the NL West was as weak as it had ever been (the Dodgers won it with a 84-78 record). It's hard to say exactly what went wrong in '08. A number of offensive players took small steps backwards and the rotation was just a touch worse. Above all, the late run that saved '07 from the same fate failed to materialize, with the team all but collapsing down the stretch.
Defining Player: SS - Troy Tulowitzki
After nearly winning both the Rookie of the Year award and the Gold Glove (but losing out on both) in his 2007 campaign, Tulo suffered as bad a sophomore slump as a great player can. His batting average fell from .291 to .263, his OBP from .359 to .332, and his SLG from .479 to .401. In all, his value to the team was so much less in '07 that a not-insignificant portion of the Rockies failings can be pinned on him. Add to that an injury that cost Tulowitzki much of the '08 season, and it's not hard to see how 90 wins became 74 for a team that was never quite great in the first place.
2009 Colorado Rockies: 92-70, 2nd place, 3.0 GB, Wild Card
The '09 Rockies were eerily similar to the '07 version. After a slow start, a solid rotation and reasonably deep lineup woke up under new manager Jim Tracey - after Clint Hurdle, who had been at the helm since 2002, was fired - and eventually rode a late-season charge into the playoffs. The trade of Matt Holliday the previous off-season proved a stroke of genius, netting both the young and improving Carlos Gonzalez and excellent closer Huston Street in exchange for a player who was destined to leave Colorado after '09 anyway. While Gonzalez would share time in the outfield with Brad Hawpe, Seth Smith, Dexter Fowler, and Ryan Spilborghs, Street was the anchor of another excellent Rockies bullpen. Beyond the solid performance from the pitching staff and the Holliday-less outfield, bounce-back seasons from two key Rockies both lead the way, and were symbolic of the season as a whole.
Defining Players: SS - Troy Tulowitzki and 1B - Todd Helton
Both Tulowitzki and Helton has miserably disappointing seasons in 2008, but both bounced back to produce well-above league-average campaigns in '09. While the rest of the lineup and pitching staff improved incrementally from their under-performances in 2008, it was Tulo and Helton's giant leaps forward that propelled the team back into the playoffs. Helton's .325/.416/.489 slash line harkened back to the good old days of his early career, while Tulo's .297/.377/.552 showed that Tulo might end up being more than just a great fielder with a decent bat. Indeed, Tulo eclipsed 30 homers for the first time in 2009, becoming not just the leader on the field for the Rockies (a role he shared, by default, with the veteran Helton), but securely becoming the leader in the lineup as well.
2010 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 9.0 GB
It's easy to forget how much better a season 2010 was than 2008 for the Rockies, because the narrative that has been constructed is that they were parallels. The narrative goes like this: coming off of an improbable last season charge to make the playoffs, the Rockies followed it up in the next season by promptly collapsing and failing to compete. But the '10 Rockies did compete, only falling apart late in the season, echoing 2007 in the reverse by losing 13 of their last 14. Before that collapse, the team had been a very respectable (and competitive) 82-66, well within reach of the 91 wins that would have won them the wild card. The problem was, beyond the continued excellence of Tulowitzki and the emergence of Carlos Gonzalez, the offense lacked a single other player who put up a 100 or better OPS+. The offense wasn't bad, per se, but it just wasn't good enough, even with an excellent pitching staff and a near Cy Young season from Ubaldo Jimenez.
Defining Player: C - Miguel Olivo
Like the team he played for, Olivo actually started well in 2010, making a strong case for an all-star berth. Like the team he played for, however, Olivo ended up not having enough offense. By the end of the season his OBP - his longtime nemesis - rested at .315. That was a career high for Olivo, but not good enough for an every-day Major League player, even a catcher. His 27 walks were also a career high, but it bears remembering that he drew the vast majority of those in the first half of the season. Perhaps the most damning moment for Olivo in 2011, however, has nothing to do with him, but with the front office. After extending Chris Iannetta in the offseason, Olivo's hot April, combined with some early-season struggles from Iannetta, resulted in 'netta's demotion to AAA and Olvio's promotion to full-time starter. That itself was not the cause of the Rockies shortcomings in 2010, but it certainly did not help.
Conclusion
Trying to determine a defining player for a single season is, ultimately, an exercise in futility. But it doesn't look like it.
The reason it doesn't look like it is simple enough: we love to construct narratives. It's how we understand what goes on around us, how we make sense of a complex and often confusing world. It's a lot easier to remember, in short, a season as a failure or a success, a disappointment or a surprise, than to remember the exact won-loss record, the number of games back, the statistics of each and every player.
In trying to find a player whose individual narrative either matched up with or underscored the narrative for the entire Rockies team, I did exactly that: I looked through the won-loss record, the number of games back, and the statistics of each and every player. But then I turned it into a narrative, and that's where the futility comes in. Ultimately, how can I do justice to Miguel Olivo's 2010, or Todd Helton's 2006, or Andres Galarraga's 1994? Sometimes I listed statistics, but only to illustrate a point: the players I selected were, in some sense, a microcosm of a team's successes and failures. But in other ways they were no such thing: they were merely grown men playing a game for a lot of money, men who undoubtedly care about winning, but whose narratives are far less intense than those of a fan.
In the end, though, it's impossible to escape narratives, and undesirable to boot. Ironically, even the most sabermetrically-minded baseball fan is doing little more than building narratives. Are his narratives more quantitative? Sure. Are they more objective? Probably. But they are narratives just the same, built of words and sounds and ideas and stories, even if those stories are contained in season-long numbers and fancy statistical acronyms instead of anecdotes and clutch homers.
Of course, I've been more stat-head than story-head in this series, but that's exactly the point. The stats tell a story, too, and an interesting one. Silly though it may be to pin a whole season - for better or worse - on a single player, doing so might just give us a certain insight, or help us better enjoy a sport we already love.
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Parable of the House
Today I've decided to resign as Director of NALU Studies. The reasons are numerous, but the essence of why I can tell in a story without implicating anyone specifically. The title, "The Parable of the House," I think is particularly fitting because it says a lot about my own perceptions. As an astrological Cancer, my home is vitally important to me, and whether I am working in a job, in an academic setting, or even just doing something for fun, it is important to me to have a sense of being at-home. The following, then, is a story of a home that proved impossible to inhabit.
Once upon a time there was a man who had traveled the world, seen much, studied much, and spoken to countless people. The man was tremendously interested in houses, but time and again found that the homes he visited were flawed. They were too gaudy, on the one hand, or too bland on the other. There were so many overcrowded small houses, and a few very empty large ones. He had spoken with architects, draftsmen, and carpenters, most of whom acknowledged how wrong things were in the world of building houses, but few - even none - of whom were willing to try to do anything about it.
The man resolved to build his own house. He found people to help who felt as he did, and set about to build a new kind of house, different and better than the kinds that other people had built before. It would be small - at least, it would start small, there was ample land nearby for expansion - but it would be his, and it would do right all those things that other people had done wrong.
Unfortunately, his co-builders and he did not get along, focused as they were on parts of the construction process that the man didn't find nearly so important. Rather than finding a way to divide labor, the man and the two co-builders fought and fought, and eventually decided to go their separate ways. The house they were building was split, one half loaded onto one of those "oversize load" trucks and driven away, the other staying on the original plot of land.
The man was happy with this arrangement, but he knew how much work he had ahead of him. He set about mending the pieces of the house that were left, and fixing it up. He worked tirelessly for months and months, until finally he was satisfied.
After all of the man's work, the house was a beautiful one, and aesthetically the better for the division that had cost the man so much work. While it was still small, it was clear to people from all over that it was different, more pleasant to live in, more well-constructed than most other houses. The man was extremely proud of this house, and so he began working on plans to build new rooms, new wings, and perhaps even new copies of the house elsewhere.
The man, however, was asked to help with someone else's project, a giant office building that needed his expert assistance and experience. The man reluctantly agreed, but only after he had contacted and enlisted the help of a young scholar to take care of the house in his absence. The scholar, having seen the house when construction was just beginning, was thrilled. He agreed to maintain and manage the property, and possibly even to make a reality out of some of the man's ideas for expansion.
Alas, shortly after the scholar stepped into the new house, he received news of a storm heading in the direction of the beautiful house. The house was built in a volatile area, and while the weather had been mostly kind to the builder, the coming storm was stronger than anything the house had seen so far. In preparation for this storm, the young scholar put aside plans for expansion and decided to make sure that the house would be secure. His first action was to inspect the foundation. Or rather, his first action was to try to inspect the foundation.
As the scholar tore through every nook and cranny of the house, he discovered that there was no basement, no crawlspace, no way to check on the supports that held the house to the land on which it was built. He began asking questions, trying to find a way to make sure the house was solid, only to discover, to his horror, that the house had no foundation at all. It was a beautiful house, mostly (inhabiting it had turned up some rough patches that needed smoothing other; some mildew stains here, some watermarks on the walls there, and some not ideal painting decisions), but it was a house built without support!
The scholar was appalled, but resolved to do his best none-the-less. He would find the blueprints, close down a room at a time, and drill down and make foundations if he had to. Surely the blueprints would say what should have been! Only, there weren't any blueprints either. Discovering this, the scholar began to panic. He searched and found time and again that documents that should have been easy to find did not exist: materials lists, building permits, records of work done by plumbers and electricians, it was all missing.
Meanwhile, the storm drew closer and closer, and its magnitude increased daily. It had become a veritable hurricane mere days before it was scheduled to arrive at the beautiful house that the old architect had poured so much of his heart and soul into. The scholar was faced with a choice. He could try to weather the storm, save the house, maybe even let it get blown away but use the same land to build a copy, or he could leave, knowing the house was likely to collapse.
The scholar thought long and hard about this decision, knowing that he would lose either way. If the house fell while he was its tenant and maintainer, the blame would fall on him, for few people knew the house had no foundation. If, on the other hand, he left, he would incur the disappointment of the old architect and his friends, and would seem a quitter. When the house fell thereafter, no one would know that it had no foundation, and they would point rather to the lack of a tenant in a storm as the reason for the house's demise.
The scholar saw that neither option was a good one, but that the former was the more dangerous. Better to escape alive and find another house, if necessary in another place, than to be present while the walls and ceiling collapsed onto his head. He left the house as the storm began to descend, frustrated and sad, but very much happy to be alive.
The moral of the story, my friends, is a simple one. For ye who build houses, do not forget to build foundations, too. For ye who rather acquire houses others have built, do not forget to make sure they are what they seem to be before you do.
Once upon a time there was a man who had traveled the world, seen much, studied much, and spoken to countless people. The man was tremendously interested in houses, but time and again found that the homes he visited were flawed. They were too gaudy, on the one hand, or too bland on the other. There were so many overcrowded small houses, and a few very empty large ones. He had spoken with architects, draftsmen, and carpenters, most of whom acknowledged how wrong things were in the world of building houses, but few - even none - of whom were willing to try to do anything about it.
The man resolved to build his own house. He found people to help who felt as he did, and set about to build a new kind of house, different and better than the kinds that other people had built before. It would be small - at least, it would start small, there was ample land nearby for expansion - but it would be his, and it would do right all those things that other people had done wrong.
Unfortunately, his co-builders and he did not get along, focused as they were on parts of the construction process that the man didn't find nearly so important. Rather than finding a way to divide labor, the man and the two co-builders fought and fought, and eventually decided to go their separate ways. The house they were building was split, one half loaded onto one of those "oversize load" trucks and driven away, the other staying on the original plot of land.
The man was happy with this arrangement, but he knew how much work he had ahead of him. He set about mending the pieces of the house that were left, and fixing it up. He worked tirelessly for months and months, until finally he was satisfied.
After all of the man's work, the house was a beautiful one, and aesthetically the better for the division that had cost the man so much work. While it was still small, it was clear to people from all over that it was different, more pleasant to live in, more well-constructed than most other houses. The man was extremely proud of this house, and so he began working on plans to build new rooms, new wings, and perhaps even new copies of the house elsewhere.
The man, however, was asked to help with someone else's project, a giant office building that needed his expert assistance and experience. The man reluctantly agreed, but only after he had contacted and enlisted the help of a young scholar to take care of the house in his absence. The scholar, having seen the house when construction was just beginning, was thrilled. He agreed to maintain and manage the property, and possibly even to make a reality out of some of the man's ideas for expansion.
Alas, shortly after the scholar stepped into the new house, he received news of a storm heading in the direction of the beautiful house. The house was built in a volatile area, and while the weather had been mostly kind to the builder, the coming storm was stronger than anything the house had seen so far. In preparation for this storm, the young scholar put aside plans for expansion and decided to make sure that the house would be secure. His first action was to inspect the foundation. Or rather, his first action was to try to inspect the foundation.
As the scholar tore through every nook and cranny of the house, he discovered that there was no basement, no crawlspace, no way to check on the supports that held the house to the land on which it was built. He began asking questions, trying to find a way to make sure the house was solid, only to discover, to his horror, that the house had no foundation at all. It was a beautiful house, mostly (inhabiting it had turned up some rough patches that needed smoothing other; some mildew stains here, some watermarks on the walls there, and some not ideal painting decisions), but it was a house built without support!
The scholar was appalled, but resolved to do his best none-the-less. He would find the blueprints, close down a room at a time, and drill down and make foundations if he had to. Surely the blueprints would say what should have been! Only, there weren't any blueprints either. Discovering this, the scholar began to panic. He searched and found time and again that documents that should have been easy to find did not exist: materials lists, building permits, records of work done by plumbers and electricians, it was all missing.
Meanwhile, the storm drew closer and closer, and its magnitude increased daily. It had become a veritable hurricane mere days before it was scheduled to arrive at the beautiful house that the old architect had poured so much of his heart and soul into. The scholar was faced with a choice. He could try to weather the storm, save the house, maybe even let it get blown away but use the same land to build a copy, or he could leave, knowing the house was likely to collapse.
The scholar thought long and hard about this decision, knowing that he would lose either way. If the house fell while he was its tenant and maintainer, the blame would fall on him, for few people knew the house had no foundation. If, on the other hand, he left, he would incur the disappointment of the old architect and his friends, and would seem a quitter. When the house fell thereafter, no one would know that it had no foundation, and they would point rather to the lack of a tenant in a storm as the reason for the house's demise.
The scholar saw that neither option was a good one, but that the former was the more dangerous. Better to escape alive and find another house, if necessary in another place, than to be present while the walls and ceiling collapsed onto his head. He left the house as the storm began to descend, frustrated and sad, but very much happy to be alive.
The moral of the story, my friends, is a simple one. For ye who build houses, do not forget to build foundations, too. For ye who rather acquire houses others have built, do not forget to make sure they are what they seem to be before you do.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Storytelling and the Digital Age
I've been thinking a lot about stories recently. What is a story? Why do we love them so much? Does it matter if a story is true? What does it mean for a story to be true, anyway? Some of those questions are at the heart of doing research in the Social Sciences (like Education), but they are also important in the way that we live day-to-day, and the way we communicate with others.
These questions are at the forefront of The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I am currently rereading. The story itself is blissfully inconsequential, full of absurdity and drama, humor and even a little sarcasm. That makes it enjoyable to read, but it's not the kind of book that warrants dissection. No, it's basically a children's adventure, meant to be read aloud, meant to be immersive and silly. But it is punctuated by another story: Goldman's narrative about hearing the story as a child, trying to pass it on to his own child (a son, which he does not have), and finding that he needed to abridge the original. This story is as fictitious as the story about Buttercup and Westley, but it is so believable that myriad forums and websites have discussions about whether or not it is actually true. Was there a Morgenstern (the supposed author of the original story)? Is The Princess Bride really based on true events? How could Goldman simply invent this incredibly elaborate and utterly conceivable back story, and why would he?
Mixed in with this background story is a thin layer of truth. Goldman was married at the time he was writing The Princess Bride, and it was born as a story to tell his daughters, and he did end up getting divorced from his wife (as the background story suggests is likely). He even includes a few parenthetical stories in the various introductions - and there are many - that say "this is a true story," to set them apart.
Why does Goldman tell the story this way? I won't pretend to be able to get into his head, nor will I try. Rather, I wonder why we tell stories at all. I know that they are enjoyable, and engaging, and immersive. I know that most people love to imagine different worlds, to take on different identities and to play with the possibilities those worlds and identities propose. So much learning happens, indeed, from the ability to imagine oneself as someone else, to take on a new identity. So much happiness comes from the ability to imagine a better world, or at least a different one. Perhaps that is why the Waldorf schools emphasize myth and imagination so much.
Learning and fun aren't the only reasons here, though. There's also the story teller, who is not always seeking to teach. Perhaps he is always seeking to entertain, but with what tools, and why? Is there a desire for self-expression, no matter how fictitious the story ends up being? Is there a pride in invention? Is there a sense of community the storyteller becomes a part of?
I think of Homer, and the story of Achilles. So much of that story must have been false, but it didn't matter anymore. It was a story that captured what it was to be a Greek, what it was to be a man, to struggle with the knowledge of your own mortality, to be great and finite all at once. It was also a story of clashing steel and spears and gruesome deaths made poetry. All of those things we find in our modern stories - whether they be movies or books or the innovative blog posts at Cardboard Gods or just a series of pictures. I would argue that some video games are build to tell stories, too, some obviously so - Mass Effect, The Witcher, God of War - some not as overtly, but in a way, more deeply - Fall from Heaven, Europa Universalis, Out of the Park Baseball, PeaceMaker. Stories come in so many forms, with such variety in authorship, reality, and audience.
What was the Iliad to Homer? Who was it for? His audience has turned out to be thousands of years worth of Westerners, even though his audience was originally just groups of interested men and their children who they desired to grow up warriors. Was it for Homer, too? And was his audience also an author? That is the modern trend, where blogs are replacing the page, and interactive games are replacing the TV screen, and people are connected with each other almost always, and having conversations. Authorship and audience are becoming the same thing, and yet, that doesn't seem so strange. It's certainly not a return of what stories used to be, but it is a moving forward that simultaneously looks back. "The human voice is making a comeback," a Professor here at Stanford told me. She's right, and while the story is once again becoming central to what it means to communicate, to think, and to learn, it is a very different kind of story that we are beginning to see. Let me tell a little story, to give a little perspective before the end of this post.
The original movies were just films of a stage play. There was no zooming, no panning, no cut-scenes or splicing or, really, editing of any kind. The movie was shot from beginning to end, because it was just another medium to capture and distribute a whole methodology of storytelling that already existed (and had existed for millenia). It wasn't until much later that film makers distanced themselves from their theatrical roots, and began to take advantage of their ability to mix in music, to cut from one actor to another, to take things out of order (consider an extreme version of this: Memento). Eventually, film makers imagined things that it would have been impossible not only to do without film, but even to imagine without film. Technology is often like that.
The kinds of stories, the kind of communication and co-authorship, the kinds of interactive games computers and the internet make possible are only now starting to become apparent. For a long time, computers have been used to do what we always did before, just faster. Even the name - computer - suggests that it does little except perform mathematical operations. Stories, however, that would have been unimaginable before the internet are now starting to crop up. Games are allowing for stories to be told in a way that was inconceivable not twenty years ago. Authorship is becoming collaborative at a level unseen in history. And the effect is probably going to be greater than what anyone anticipates. The internet is one of the most world-changing inventions of human history, not because of what it has done, but because of what it is yet to do.
I cannot say what exactly will change, and how, and to what degree. But through it all there will be language - of one kind or another - and stories, and self-expression, and communication. Indeed, these things are becoming more and more prominent. Those who bemoan the death of reading fail to recognize that, in many ways, more people are reading more often than ever before. They're just reading blogs and tweets and text messages and facebook walls. That may not be satisfying to we bibliophiles, who cling to the printed page, but it shows a profound potential for art and beauty and good writing even in the digital age. What that writing is, and will be, what stories will be told, who knows? Regardless, the future of reading and writing - the future of stories - is an exciting one.
These questions are at the forefront of The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I am currently rereading. The story itself is blissfully inconsequential, full of absurdity and drama, humor and even a little sarcasm. That makes it enjoyable to read, but it's not the kind of book that warrants dissection. No, it's basically a children's adventure, meant to be read aloud, meant to be immersive and silly. But it is punctuated by another story: Goldman's narrative about hearing the story as a child, trying to pass it on to his own child (a son, which he does not have), and finding that he needed to abridge the original. This story is as fictitious as the story about Buttercup and Westley, but it is so believable that myriad forums and websites have discussions about whether or not it is actually true. Was there a Morgenstern (the supposed author of the original story)? Is The Princess Bride really based on true events? How could Goldman simply invent this incredibly elaborate and utterly conceivable back story, and why would he?
Mixed in with this background story is a thin layer of truth. Goldman was married at the time he was writing The Princess Bride, and it was born as a story to tell his daughters, and he did end up getting divorced from his wife (as the background story suggests is likely). He even includes a few parenthetical stories in the various introductions - and there are many - that say "this is a true story," to set them apart.
Why does Goldman tell the story this way? I won't pretend to be able to get into his head, nor will I try. Rather, I wonder why we tell stories at all. I know that they are enjoyable, and engaging, and immersive. I know that most people love to imagine different worlds, to take on different identities and to play with the possibilities those worlds and identities propose. So much learning happens, indeed, from the ability to imagine oneself as someone else, to take on a new identity. So much happiness comes from the ability to imagine a better world, or at least a different one. Perhaps that is why the Waldorf schools emphasize myth and imagination so much.
Learning and fun aren't the only reasons here, though. There's also the story teller, who is not always seeking to teach. Perhaps he is always seeking to entertain, but with what tools, and why? Is there a desire for self-expression, no matter how fictitious the story ends up being? Is there a pride in invention? Is there a sense of community the storyteller becomes a part of?
I think of Homer, and the story of Achilles. So much of that story must have been false, but it didn't matter anymore. It was a story that captured what it was to be a Greek, what it was to be a man, to struggle with the knowledge of your own mortality, to be great and finite all at once. It was also a story of clashing steel and spears and gruesome deaths made poetry. All of those things we find in our modern stories - whether they be movies or books or the innovative blog posts at Cardboard Gods or just a series of pictures. I would argue that some video games are build to tell stories, too, some obviously so - Mass Effect, The Witcher, God of War - some not as overtly, but in a way, more deeply - Fall from Heaven, Europa Universalis, Out of the Park Baseball, PeaceMaker. Stories come in so many forms, with such variety in authorship, reality, and audience.
What was the Iliad to Homer? Who was it for? His audience has turned out to be thousands of years worth of Westerners, even though his audience was originally just groups of interested men and their children who they desired to grow up warriors. Was it for Homer, too? And was his audience also an author? That is the modern trend, where blogs are replacing the page, and interactive games are replacing the TV screen, and people are connected with each other almost always, and having conversations. Authorship and audience are becoming the same thing, and yet, that doesn't seem so strange. It's certainly not a return of what stories used to be, but it is a moving forward that simultaneously looks back. "The human voice is making a comeback," a Professor here at Stanford told me. She's right, and while the story is once again becoming central to what it means to communicate, to think, and to learn, it is a very different kind of story that we are beginning to see. Let me tell a little story, to give a little perspective before the end of this post.
The original movies were just films of a stage play. There was no zooming, no panning, no cut-scenes or splicing or, really, editing of any kind. The movie was shot from beginning to end, because it was just another medium to capture and distribute a whole methodology of storytelling that already existed (and had existed for millenia). It wasn't until much later that film makers distanced themselves from their theatrical roots, and began to take advantage of their ability to mix in music, to cut from one actor to another, to take things out of order (consider an extreme version of this: Memento). Eventually, film makers imagined things that it would have been impossible not only to do without film, but even to imagine without film. Technology is often like that.
The kinds of stories, the kind of communication and co-authorship, the kinds of interactive games computers and the internet make possible are only now starting to become apparent. For a long time, computers have been used to do what we always did before, just faster. Even the name - computer - suggests that it does little except perform mathematical operations. Stories, however, that would have been unimaginable before the internet are now starting to crop up. Games are allowing for stories to be told in a way that was inconceivable not twenty years ago. Authorship is becoming collaborative at a level unseen in history. And the effect is probably going to be greater than what anyone anticipates. The internet is one of the most world-changing inventions of human history, not because of what it has done, but because of what it is yet to do.
I cannot say what exactly will change, and how, and to what degree. But through it all there will be language - of one kind or another - and stories, and self-expression, and communication. Indeed, these things are becoming more and more prominent. Those who bemoan the death of reading fail to recognize that, in many ways, more people are reading more often than ever before. They're just reading blogs and tweets and text messages and facebook walls. That may not be satisfying to we bibliophiles, who cling to the printed page, but it shows a profound potential for art and beauty and good writing even in the digital age. What that writing is, and will be, what stories will be told, who knows? Regardless, the future of reading and writing - the future of stories - is an exciting one.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Mo'olelo
Mo'olelo is the Hawaiian word for "story," but that doesn't really capture its meaning.
I am wary of endowing foreign words with a magic that English does not have for us, simply because we use English all the time, and so I won't claim that "mo'olelo" is more profound, necessarily, than the words we use. That is different, however, I won't deny. Our word "story" is a contraction of "history," with which it was used interchangeably until around the Renaissance. History comes from the Greek "historia," which means, basically, knowledge gained through narrative or record. Important, here, is knowledge. Indeed the theoretical roots of historia are "to know" and "to see" (which, to the Greeks, were closely related).
Mo'olelo, on the other hand, has simpler origins. "Mo'o" means succession, and "olelo" means words. A succession of words. A story.
And yet, that captures what Hawaiian history was. In an oral culture, preserved by story-telling, a succession of words is immensely powerful. It is a whole mode of expression, and, indeed, the only mode of expression for teaching the lessons that constitute the wisdom that each generation passes to the next.
I mention all this because I've been thinking very hard about where I am, where I'm going, what culture I belong to, and so on into deeper and deeper existential depths. Perhaps I do too much of this, because my beloved St. John's forces its students into such questions throughout their undergraduate lives (and makes it a hard habit to break). Yet, I believe that such questions are never truly answerable, but must be considered and reconsidered time and again. Where I stand now, those questions loom large, and something about Hawaii - what it means to be a Hawaiian - stands at the heart of these questions for me.
Am I a Hawaiian? In blood, certainly not. I'm about as European as it gets. In intellectual heritage? Certainly not, for I am a reader of Kant and Plato and Hume, Europeans all. What's more, I'm a member and, ultimately, supporter, of our modern scientific culture.
I don't see magical power in Hawaiian words, but I do see a language and a culture with profound lessons for the world. Perhaps that's a bit grandiose. Maybe I see a language and culture with stories to tell, and fewer and fewer people to tell them. Perhaps that's too tragic. Maybe I simply see those students I worked with in Kaneohe, pushing and being pushed to think a little differently, to learn a little more, and to speak each other's language. Perhaps that's too personal. Maybe all of these things - and so much more (to quote Eliot) - are true. Perhaps none truly captures the point (Eliot again, "it is impossible to say just what I mean").
No matter where you go, you will always find conversation. Sometimes the conversations we have are verbal, sometimes (these days) digital, sometimes merely implied in the way we gesture or avert our eyes or sigh. These conversations are not always successions of words, and are not always stories, but they can be. What's more, sometimes - more often than we usually realize - they should be. How many stories have never been told that should have been?
What is the point of a story? Must it have one? I don't know the European answers to those questions, let alone the Hawaiian answers. For my part, I suspect that many of the best stories have a point that cannot be communicated, because the point is not itself linguistic. That is where stories connect to music, and where symphonies and sonatas connect to poetry, and where a man comes to believe that he has a spirit that is undefinable, because his thoughts and feelings are inexpressible except through allegory, allusion, and song.
Is this a Hawaiian sentiment? Probably not. And yet the belief that these questions also imply a fundamental principle, the kokua of a shared journey, the malama for your fellow man, the aloha of a shared spirit... these things seem particularly - if not uniquely - Hawaiian, because they are about the way that stories are told, and the simple profundity of mo'olelo, a succession of words.
Sometimes the lessons of a story are blunt and practical, obvious to even a child. Sometimes they are complex and intractable. But lessons that come from stories always belie a belief about what education is, and why it is important. Education is a cultural event, not an economic one, or a political one, or even a personal one. It's about understanding your heritage and your identity and finding the place where your spirit belongs, and who your people are. The stories we tell and the stories we are told define us far more than the facts we can recite, or the equations we can solve. They tell us who we are, and what we know about ourselves.
Perhaps stories are not so powerful as all that, though. Perhaps they are just a succession of words.
I am wary of endowing foreign words with a magic that English does not have for us, simply because we use English all the time, and so I won't claim that "mo'olelo" is more profound, necessarily, than the words we use. That is different, however, I won't deny. Our word "story" is a contraction of "history," with which it was used interchangeably until around the Renaissance. History comes from the Greek "historia," which means, basically, knowledge gained through narrative or record. Important, here, is knowledge. Indeed the theoretical roots of historia are "to know" and "to see" (which, to the Greeks, were closely related).
Mo'olelo, on the other hand, has simpler origins. "Mo'o" means succession, and "olelo" means words. A succession of words. A story.
And yet, that captures what Hawaiian history was. In an oral culture, preserved by story-telling, a succession of words is immensely powerful. It is a whole mode of expression, and, indeed, the only mode of expression for teaching the lessons that constitute the wisdom that each generation passes to the next.
I mention all this because I've been thinking very hard about where I am, where I'm going, what culture I belong to, and so on into deeper and deeper existential depths. Perhaps I do too much of this, because my beloved St. John's forces its students into such questions throughout their undergraduate lives (and makes it a hard habit to break). Yet, I believe that such questions are never truly answerable, but must be considered and reconsidered time and again. Where I stand now, those questions loom large, and something about Hawaii - what it means to be a Hawaiian - stands at the heart of these questions for me.
Am I a Hawaiian? In blood, certainly not. I'm about as European as it gets. In intellectual heritage? Certainly not, for I am a reader of Kant and Plato and Hume, Europeans all. What's more, I'm a member and, ultimately, supporter, of our modern scientific culture.
I don't see magical power in Hawaiian words, but I do see a language and a culture with profound lessons for the world. Perhaps that's a bit grandiose. Maybe I see a language and culture with stories to tell, and fewer and fewer people to tell them. Perhaps that's too tragic. Maybe I simply see those students I worked with in Kaneohe, pushing and being pushed to think a little differently, to learn a little more, and to speak each other's language. Perhaps that's too personal. Maybe all of these things - and so much more (to quote Eliot) - are true. Perhaps none truly captures the point (Eliot again, "it is impossible to say just what I mean").
No matter where you go, you will always find conversation. Sometimes the conversations we have are verbal, sometimes (these days) digital, sometimes merely implied in the way we gesture or avert our eyes or sigh. These conversations are not always successions of words, and are not always stories, but they can be. What's more, sometimes - more often than we usually realize - they should be. How many stories have never been told that should have been?
What is the point of a story? Must it have one? I don't know the European answers to those questions, let alone the Hawaiian answers. For my part, I suspect that many of the best stories have a point that cannot be communicated, because the point is not itself linguistic. That is where stories connect to music, and where symphonies and sonatas connect to poetry, and where a man comes to believe that he has a spirit that is undefinable, because his thoughts and feelings are inexpressible except through allegory, allusion, and song.
Is this a Hawaiian sentiment? Probably not. And yet the belief that these questions also imply a fundamental principle, the kokua of a shared journey, the malama for your fellow man, the aloha of a shared spirit... these things seem particularly - if not uniquely - Hawaiian, because they are about the way that stories are told, and the simple profundity of mo'olelo, a succession of words.
Sometimes the lessons of a story are blunt and practical, obvious to even a child. Sometimes they are complex and intractable. But lessons that come from stories always belie a belief about what education is, and why it is important. Education is a cultural event, not an economic one, or a political one, or even a personal one. It's about understanding your heritage and your identity and finding the place where your spirit belongs, and who your people are. The stories we tell and the stories we are told define us far more than the facts we can recite, or the equations we can solve. They tell us who we are, and what we know about ourselves.
Perhaps stories are not so powerful as all that, though. Perhaps they are just a succession of words.
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