In this fascinating clip, filmmaker Ken Burns discusses the nature of story and his attraction to historical subjects. For him, good stories are more than they seem on the surface because “the genuine stories are about one and one equaling three.” Such stories dig at the deeper things in reality because “the things that matter most to us-some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason-is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that’s the three.” And it is this greater something we are all looking for in stories, so much so that we tend to “coalesce around stories that seem transcendent.”
What I found most interesting in Burns account was his self-understanding of why he tells stories in general, and historical stories in particular. For him telling historical stories is a kind of “waking of the dead.” So in seeking the very transcendence he describes, Burns points to a kind of resurrective power in stories, particularly in stories about history. His fascination with such stories stems from losing his mother to cancer at a young age: “It may be obvious and close to home whom I’m actually trying to wake up.”
Beyond the haunting and beautiful resurrection imagery inherent in this statement, Burns, by identifying this kernel in his own experience, describes what Stanley Hauerwas calls an “intuition of meaning.” In his memoir *Hannah’s Child,* Hauerwas reflects on the impulse to tell his own story, and for him, memoir comes not from recounting events for the sake of recounting events. Rather memoir comes from events coalescing around a central intuition, an insight into how these events might be thematically related. Quoting Sven Birkerts, Hauerwas says these intuitions result from “the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” So for Burns, his mother’s early death provides an intuition of meaning, a place to begin his own story. While for Hauerwas, his mother’s Hannah-like prayer of dedication to the Lord provides his intuition of meaning.
So I’m wondering, as I think about my own future, and even as I attempt to write in a more personal vein, what is my intuition of meaning?