"More of an idea than a place"

Rachel Menken says that of Israel in the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men.

True story: the wife of a famous, and now deceased, Canadian broadcaster once told me the story of how her English ancestors' business had gone bankrupt. It was a wonderful story and I believed it. I wrote it up into a nice little piece and you might even find it if you're diligent enough about your research. (It's not online and it wasn't published under my name.) This was about 35 years ago now. Later, I discovered the identical story of a family business going bankrupt in a John Galsworthy novel. So how did that happen?

We all have a personal mythology. Over the years I've read a lot of biographies and I've written a few. There is a recurring problem with the narratives we all tell ourselves. They tend to feature turning points and when you look into these turning points there tend to be problems.

1. Sometimes, and this is awkward, the turning point never happened. The writer researching a biography goes looking for external evidence of the turning point and finds out that, it never happened, or it couldn't of happened or that it did happen only to someone else and not the person who told the story about the turning point.
2. Other times it comes way too early to be of any use. The person the writer is researching continued to express the opinions or do the things that this turning point is supposed to have altered forever for years after.
3. Finally, as you've probably already guessed, sometimes the turning point is way too late. The person who claims to have been changed forever by this experience already had the new attitudes or behaviours long before the claimed turning point. 

My friend Jeremiah calls the story we all tell about our lives the emotional narrative. It's a compelling story in which everything connects and everything makes sense. Psychologically, it tends to win out because the only alternative is a small set of data points that don't connect to anything. It's only when some serious researcher goes to work assembling a comprehensive chronology of a life that the emotional narrative falls apart.

I've written quite a few short bios myself and sometimes I find evidence that the story I've been asked to write is at odds with the verifiable chronology. That, as I say, is rather awkward. In a spirit of fair play, this Lent I did the same thing to myself. I assembled a detailed chronology of my own life. I chased down every verifiable detail. And I compared that with what I believed to be the narrative of my life. It was quite crushing. My personal mythology crumbled before my eyes.

I won't share the intimate details here but, suffice to say, some things I was ashamed of in my past turned out to be nothing to be ashamed of for these things either simply did not happen or happened much earlier than I remembered and were, therefore, not embarrassing. Other things that I hadn't bothered to be ashamed of, on the other hand, now trouble me.

Exiles on Main Street

"Babylon" is the first episode of Mad Men to feature a "flashback". I put that in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's true. When we watch a flashback on video or film we have a tendency to believe it's true. We're watching moving pictures and that makes it seem like it must have happened because, otherwise, "How could it be filmed?" This is different from reading or listening to someone tell us a story. Then we're skeptical.

When we watch Don Draper "remembering" his past it seems to me that we should treat these memories as just that. They aren't films of actual events. And the same is true for my memories and your memories. These are constructed things. Everyone, without realizing we have done so, has created a personal mythology.

That scares us. We think that because we created it—made it up—it has no value. But our personal mythology is not simply something that is not true. We lived with this mythology for years. It's part of us. It's not an accurate account of what we lived through but it is part of our experience. It's more of an idea than a place. We may never want to live there or visit there but it's terribly important that it exists.

This meditation was inspired by the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "Babylon". It is the second such meditation I do here and there will be more such meditations coming.