Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing” – W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

“Voris, you’re like an old man” (paraphrase) – More People Than I Can Count

I have friends who would rather undergo dental work without anaesthetic than have a discussion of what images flashed across the back of their eyelids the night previous.  If you count yourself a member of this cohort, I advise you to read no further.

I’m not a very ambitious person.  Dreams, in the ambitious sense, are not that interesting to me.  I want to do good work, travel, read, at some point have a family, and perhaps one day synch my body clock to the time zone in which I reside.

I am, however, fascinated by the brain, and dreams, in the unconscious gobbledygook sense, rank right up there with music and Modernist literature in terms of shit that I spend far too much time pondering.

Here’s why: I wake up in the morning and my conscious mind begins processing the linear movement of time and space – it’s 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, December 16, 2008; I am 27 years, 2 months and 16 days old; I walk down the 18 steps from my apartment to the street, pick up the day’s New York Times from my stoop and head to my deli, where I get a large coffee with milk, no sugar and a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese.  The process takes about five minutes.  Each second moves like thread through a sewing machine, spooling from unknown future to remembered past via that brief hiccup we call the present.

But the brain doesn’t only exist in the present moment.  Nor does it follow the linear progression of time.  As I walked to the deli for my bagel this morning, I was remembering the cemetery in Chicago on Friday, how flat and spare it was in comparison to Green-Wood.  So while my body was in Brooklyn on Tuesday, at least a part of my mind was in Chicago last Friday, and what’s more, the memories of the cemetery that came to me this morning didn’t occur in the order they occurred Friday: there was the board covering the grave that my grandmother’s casket would eventually be laid in, which was basically the last thing I saw; my cousins and I walking the casket into the chapel, which was earlier on; my uncle Jimmy staring furiously at my cousin Ryan, who couldn’t bring himself to stop crying and walk out into the afternoon frost, which happened in the time between the two preceding memories.

I value my dreams because my mind’s natural tendency to jump across time is uninhibited by the constant flow of the present.  The deep patterns of memory, of what might be called my soul, are on display.  Recurring themes include: The Unfinished Bridge, Tree Cities, Absolute Body Control, Lights In The Distance, The Island That Cannot Be Reached, Telepathy, Resurrected Brother Who Must Die Again, Jimmy McNulty, Star Wars, The Interaction Of Rocks And Sunlight, Neverending Cafe and The Long, Curly Hair Of Various Girlfriends.

I’m not sure what many of these themes mean.  Smart as they were, I have my doubts that Freud or Jung could unravel all the layers of meaning from my life that my brain throws out on busy nights.  I don’t think I’d care to know, because the answers are never as interesting as the questions, and my own belief is that life is best not when understood but when shared.

How can dreams be shared, though?  I don’t expect anyone reading this to have the slightest idea what that list of images above could possibly mean, and yet words are the best means available to me to convey what happens when the barrier of the world is removed and the unconscious takes over.  My friend Kel would argue that film is the best method for documenting the interior life of a person in that film, like memory, can jump back and forth across time and space, is imagistic, and can edit out those moments that are unimportant.  To a certain extent I agree.  I was born in 1981, and so I have spent my life being inundated by moving pictures.  This has an obvious effect on my dreams, in that I almost always dream in the third person (I see myself as if a camera was following me) and that there is a cinematic quality to these visuals (sweeping, all-encompassing landscapes, angles, even zooms).  However, I believe that if I spent my whole life attempting to document my dreamlife with a camera I would give an impression that was muddled at best, inaccurate at worst.  This is because a filmed image is a concrete thing.  When you see a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, that is the image you have.  When I write the words “a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge,” you can probably think of a number of pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This suggestive aspect of words is why they are my preferred means of communicating that which is inherently non-communicable.

My best friend and I call this thing empathetic imagination.  The Unfinished Bridge means something very particular to me, and the image it conjures for you is, in all likelihood, very different.  But by inviting you to have your own definition rather than imposing a specific picture, there is an opportunity for you to speculate what The Unfinished Bridge looks like and what it means.  This affords you the chance to bring your own experience into play and, in essence, meet me halfway.

So what does this have to do with journalism?  The attacks in Mumbai were documented using just about every conceivable method, and while all of these methods successfully conveyed the horror of those days (though how could they not), it was the written accounts that hit me hardest.  Reading about the carnage in the train station was more shocking for me than seeing it on television because the words put me in the station, while the camera is someone else in the station; the blood on CNN is the blood there is – the blood in The New York Times‘ story is as much as my mind will allow.  I understand that, as a matter of accuracy, the image captured by the camera is better, but the nebulous border that divides accuracy and truth is straddled more effectively by the words.  The truth of Mumbai’s suffering came across the less I was spoonfed the information and the more I was allowed to imagine.

It is true that the dreams of one young man are of little consequence when held against the totality of the world and the depth of history, but it’s in dreams that those few things that transcend the world and its history – love, death, timeless memory, the potential of a brain unencumbered by a desire for bagels, a body that is no slave to gravity or insulin – reveal themselves.  They are sacred precisely because they are untranslatable.  You have to imagine.

I meant this to be a light post about how I’ll be glad when the semester’s over so I can get more sleep and enjoy a few good dreams, but somehow it’s gotten away from me and become some sort of manifesto in praise of writing and imagination.

Sorry about that.