The Backstory
Does this blurry self-portrait need a backstory? Nah.
HOBOKEN, DECEMBER 7, 2024. I like hooking readers with cryptic teasers followed by “Here’s the backstory.” See for example my last column. But lately, I’ve been mulling over what, exactly, a “backstory” is, and does.
Here’s the backstory: On a recent morning, I wake up at the house of a friend in Jersey City. She isn’t up yet, so I perform my morning ritual: sipping coffee while scribbling in a journal. My journal serves many purposes: toying with column ideas, pondering death, giving myself pep talks, drawing pictures.
I also like recording newsy events, from elections to lovers’ quarrels. Waking up somewhere other than Hoboken counts as news, so I begin jotting down the backstory--that is, explaining how I ended up in Jersey City.
Then my mind goes meta, as it’s wont to do. It occurs to me that backstory-telling is an essential component of writing, teaching, conversation. Even if I’m just talking to myself, I’m telling a backstory. Of a quantum interpretation, antiwar argument, twist in my love life. Whatever.
Every storyteller, which means every human, faces decisions: How much contextual information, or backstory, is necessary? Sufficient? What should be included? Excluded? Implied or spelled out? Let’s assume an ideal audience, with infinite patience and curiosity.
Here’s the big question: What counts as an explanation for someone else or even for yourself? A good explanation turns the “Huh?” of ignorance into the “Aha!” of illumination. Right?
Experts squabble over what counts as an explanation. A hard-core physicist might insist that only a mathematical model of my body and the forces acting upon it can really explain why I’m in Jersey City.
Socrates pointed out the inadequacy of strictly physical explanations while he awaited death in an Athenian jail 2,400 years ago. A physical account of his imprisonment, the canny old blowhard informed his grieving devotees, would track his limbs’ motions while omitting his plight’s “true cause”: his ethical convictions.
The “true cause” of my presence in Jersey City, I suppose, is my craving for love. But “craving for love” is an awfully broad, vague explanation. Generalizations are fine, even necessary, I tell my writing students, but please flesh them out with specifics.
So I should recall how the craving for a specific kind of love led me, a specific guy, who lives in Hoboken, to go online, where I encountered a specific woman, who lives in Jersey City. That backstory requires mentioning my prior 15-year romance with “Emily,” a Manhattan woman; and my 21-year marriage to “Suzie,” with whom I lived in Garrison, New York, and had two kids.
My marriage doesn’t really make sense unless you know about Darlene, with whom I lived in Denver in the late 1970s. And you can’t grok how I ended up in Denver without knowing about my testy adolescent relations with my parents and with capitalist culture.
You see my point: Backstories require backstories, leading to an infinite regress. To account for my life, I should trace my genetic lineage back, way back, through all its twigs and branches. I should spell out how natural selection instilled the craving for love, or at least sex, in our hominid forebears to ensure their genes’ propagation.
The backstory of human evolution is the evolution of life on earth, the backstory of which is the formation of the solar system and Milky Way. Before you know it, we’ve come to the big bang, the cosmic cataclysm that jumpstarted this whole shitshow 14 billion years ago. Supposedly.
These deep backstories get us into the domain of physics after all. As well as cosmology, geology, chemistry, evolutionary biology, genetics and all the fields that dwell on humans: anthropology, archaeology, psychology, neuroscience, economics, political science yada yada.
I’m going to add the arts and humanities. And what the hell, let’s throw in theology. If you’re laying out humanity’s backstory, with all possible proximate and ultimate causes, every mode of inquiry is relevant.
Caveats come to mind. As grouchy old Thomas Kuhn told me, “One is not one’s own historian, let alone one’s own psychoanalyst.” Yup, everything I say about my life is suspect. Women I’ve been involved with tell different stories about what happened between us.
And even the most rigorous, science-based backstory leaves out a lot; it’s just a cartoon version of what happened. Our best scientific backstories also fail to answer the biggest questions, like:
What triggered the big bang? Is our cosmos one of many? How did life begin on earth? Does life exist beyond our lonely little planet? Is consciousness a feature of only a few terrestrial species, or is it woven into the fabric of the cosmos, as some smarty-pants speculate?
And what about free will? Did I choose to be in Jersey City, or was that predetermined, as some killjoys claim? Is true love possible, or are we all essentially selfish?
A paradox pops up. Good backstories, I say above, transform ignorance into illumination. But the best, most honest backstories, while they might give us flashes of illumination, plunge us back into ignorance again.
The best backstories also acknowledge that even the most humdrum event, like an old guy waking up in Jersey City, is linked to everything else that’s ever happened. Understanding one thing requires understanding everything, which is of course impossible.
And that’s the backstory.
Further Reading:
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
Solipsism, Quantum Mechanics and Online Dating
The Ironic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha