The need for narrative

These are just thoughts jotted down to be fleshed out later. An argument strung here experimentally to see if it hangs together.

When you know the rational truth about life and experience, you know that life actually is just a series of disconnected experiences, one after another, until you die.

But if you write a screenplay of a film that is just a series of disconnected experiences, it won't sell, because people experience themselves as central, active protagonists who confront challenges and grow.

So, we tend to a narrative understanding of our lives. But do we need a narrative? For sanity, or whatever? (or, lesser, for a sense of purpose or meaning?). And ought we to need one? Should we overcome the desire for what we know to be a delusion using reason? And then, if we succeed, do we only enjoy really crap experimental films, from then on?

Is that a price worth paying for enlightenment?

No, but more seriously - the examples of the patients who can't lay down long-term memories (thanks, D-J). There was one who would fabulate stories that seemed to make sense of his surroundings and what had just happened. But then there was the composer who kept writing in a notebook, "I am now awake for the very first time." He kept having the sense of waking from a coma, but he had this sense every few minutes. He kept a notebook in which he wrote down, "I am now awake for the very first time," and when he saw a previous entry that said the same thing, written in his own hand, he would angrily cross it out. Was that no narrative, because he couldn't have continuous experience? Or was he so committed to constructing a narrative that made some sense of his experience that when he received evidence that went against it, it was extremely psychologically disruptive to him and he had to angrily deny its veracity?

Is this pushing my narrative thing too far, to make it fit to each long-term memory aphasia example?

I need to read some more about this. One day I'll thread it all together properly, with references and etc.

Love having a blog though where I can rough it out in progress.