Notes toward a Narrative Future I

Humans sense the world via story. It would be accurate to say that in addition to our physical senses we possess a narrative sense. As our sight and hearing and smell, touch and taste make sense of physical stimuli, our narrative sense connects these and all other impressions into story. Stories, like houses, are both "made" or constructed and "found" or discovered. The house can be built a number of ways. But these ways are not infinite. They are bounded by the nature of the material out of which the house is made and the physical constraints of the environment, from gravity to hurricanes. The house is a negotiation of the imagination, history, material, and materiality. The story too is so constrained. Neither true nor false, and yet both.

Paul Ricoeur will barely be discernible in these notes, and yet he will be part of the negotiation at every step.