Analogy? If learning to draw means overriding the normal processes of vision so that one’s experience of the object in the world becomes more like looking at a picture of it...
...does the development of a personal biography—“my life, my story”—mean overriding the actual experience of that life so that it becomes more like other life stories one has heard?
Many people never learn to draw. Does anyone not become a biographer?
Can the artist switch modes, i.e. still see a drawable-tree as a tree? Can the biographer?
For the self-teller (the biographer), what happens to the un-tellable? Does it remain intact but untold, un-tellable? Or does it grow more vague and distant, harder to recall? Does it lose its un-tellable bits, stripping itself to be told? Are the stripped bits then forgotten? How memorable is what is unaccommodatable to a story?
Story as aide-mémoire. A story increases the number of points of association between its elements. It becomes more meaningful as it becomes more memorable, as its parts become more available to different parts of the mind. It is a lushly cross-referenced filing system.
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