Narratives upon the Chaos

"NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE’S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT" (xkcd, 22 Feb 2013, [online] Available at: http://www.xkcd.com/1177/)

The above is a quote from and a link to a regularly updated webpage that publishes comic strips that comment on life, the universe and everything.  Sometimes one comes along that just sounds right ... know what I mean?  In case you don't quite get it there's also an explanation here.

That's my blog, that is ... narratives upon the Chaos.  Which is odd, 'cos with a little more Googling, I discovered that chaos narratives are a way of trying to explain what it is like to be ill when you only expect to get worse.  However it may be that I am writing 'quest narratives' (same ref) as they, apparently, are about accepting what is happening and making the best of it. Certainly the one I wrote about going to the hospital the other day is the latter, I ended by counting my blessings, I was well enough to actually manage to get to the appointment under my own steam.

As I'm currently re-reading about Castleford's community and their quest for shared heritage (Smith, L (2006) Uses of Heritage) I'm also getting ideas that the whole heritage thing (the topic of my OU module this year) is also about imposing narratives upon life's chaos.  Preserving the past, remembering the past, all the stuff about the experts imposing their values upon the sites, objects and practices that make up our world in making their decisions about what is worthy of being called heritage or not (what Laurajane Smith calls the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD)).  From indigenous peoples fighting for rights to their lands, their culture and the repatriation of the remains of their people which are shut up in museum vaults to the people of Cudworth History and Heritage Group who are trying to record and disseminate images and memories from the past which have value to them as a collection of people who live or have lived in the area, and even the experts and heritage managers in their museums and archives we are all just trying to do something that will resonate after we are gone.

We, the people of the world, are simply attempting to cope with the fact that, as the character in the xkcd cartoon says, "You'll still die eventually ... we all will."