Beez In Da Trap – The Story Telling Trap

by Kris Umali

First of all, I would like to establish that I hate Nicki Minaj. And the LSS on this song is really annoying. So I might as well share this repulsive title (and tune) with all of you to lighten up the mood (assuming that there will be people who will continue to read this after seeing the title)

“Philosophy is an attempt to render intelligible our experience of reality that

 cannot be equated with words”

This was the line in this morning’s lecture that struck me the most. I kind of agree, because I like telling stories to my friends, and I like “sharing my experiences” with them. And at some point, we have all told stories and we try our best when we do so because we want them to experience the same things we went through. We want to show them what happened, who were involved, how we reacted, and what we reacted to. We may get a few laughs here, there and everywhere, even some mixed reactions and opinions, but the fact of the matter is, we can never really capture the essence of that experience in its entirety. And that, I think is the most frustrating thing a person telling a story will ever and always go through. The unexplainable reality of that experience, for the story teller, is a trap.

It is like a trap, a story telling trap. Da beez are the story tellerz, beez in da trap.

When you tell your stories, you want to make it as lively as possible, as if it were happening here and now, as if you were reliving that specific moment. But when you tell the story and the person you are telling it to has no reactions, or worse -- bad reactions, you have failed as a story teller. Not only did you fail in making the experience become imaginable to that person, but you actually ruined it for him/her.

Back to the point -- no matter how good of a story teller you are, no matter how good you deliver a punch line that someone else told as a joke, or no matter how much you exaggerate one teeny tiny detail just to make the experience as live and as fresh as possible, what you say can never really express the actual reality of what you went through and what you felt during that moment. Those events, those experiences, are somehow beyond words. To sum it all up, what you can say when someone asks you about a certain event or moment and you do not know how to tell that story (or if you are just so awful at it that you actually ruin those experiences for them), then you can simply go and answer “you just had to be there.”

On this note, I somehow find it interesting that we, as human beings try to make the things we experience understandable to others. That as much as possible, we want to explain and narrate to them the specifics of certain events, because in truth, we want to (or at least, wanted to) share those experiences with them. Share, not only in the sense of storytelling, but to actually go through those same kinds of experiences; to experience the joy, the despair, the laughter, the excitement (or whatever) with them. We want to share with the people that we tell these stories to, the same feelings and reactions, and in a sense, literally share those same kinds of experiences just so we won’t have to go through the always inadequate “sharing” of these experiences through mere stories.

Because once we’ve experienced these new things with the people we want to, we talk about it with them; we enter into dialogue, we give our own perspectives of what happened, what we felt, what caught our attention; and in return, they give theirs. And it is through these conversations that that experience, somehow becomes more alive in our stories. When we tell these stories to other people, we tell it alongside the ones we experienced them with, and we tell them a little bit closer, this time, to the actual reality of that moment, rather than it being told by one babbling story teller in an awful (but amusing) attempt to share experiences with others through nothing but simple words.