What I Can Show and Tell

I’ll begin with what I take to be a remarkable understatement. David Gerald Orr concludes his essay “The Icon in the Time Tunnel” (a discussion of secular and vernacular icons) with this remark:

Who is making an effort to logically and consistently archive vernacular icons? Ironically, many icons of our own existence are ephemeral by nature and should be recorded. The alternative is a great cultural loss to generations of future historians and “iconographers.”

I call this an understatement because the loss Orr speaks of is not just a loss to future historians and iconographers, but to all of us. The ephemeral he speaks of, objects of our ordinary experience, are evidences of ourselves. From generation to generation they disappear. At any given moment they are mostly gone, for no one has saved them. With them are gone evidences of ourselves. The past is lopped off behind us. We try to remember, always absent complete archival storage. If there were complete storage of the artifacts of our lives, we’d not be able to use it, for it would overwhelm us. We have to select if we are to see, think, act, or talk. We will select, whether or not we intend to do so.

. . .

Whether knowingly or not, we’ll select what we show and tell, what we have decided through continuing rhetorical transactions is real and can be shown or told. We live in and are continuing contests, some gentle and mild, some fierce and desperate, some entirely eternal, self against self, some external, self against the other, contests in which we select what can be shown or told. Identity is a continuing rhetorical transaction as we negotiate our itineraries through the revealing through finally irrecoverable archives and through structural and stylistic maneuvers by which we select what can be shown and told.

Jim Corder on living and dying in West Texas: A postmodern scrapbook 2008

June 3, 2009 5:25 AM