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We’re talking about a claim to storytelling. We are taught that a valid or useful education is one in medicine, science, bioengineering. That storyte… - Ocean Vuong
" "We’re talking about a claim to storytelling. We are taught that a valid or useful education is one in medicine, science, bioengineering. That storytelling, or the ‘liberal arts’, are defunct or fading. Yet, in the Fortune 500 companies, in the Googles, the Amazons and the Facebooks, they’re obsessed with storytelling. So you can have technology, but it’s moot if you do not have a story to provoke it. We also see this in political campaigns. They’re all about manipulation of story. I agree with you a hundred per cent, the urgency of the moment now is to create new myths.This is also informed by Buddhism, because Buddhist practice is so interested in lucid dreaming. Monks constantly practice lucid dreaming. If you can be aware that you are dreaming, then you can also be aware that you are being foggy or ignorant in the living stage. This sharpens your ability for discernment, and the capacity to look at the world more clearly. Buddhism is very clear to me because it is this feeling, above all else – above even the object – that matters. So reading is not about the book, it’s about the transition of the thought, orchestrated through language, into the brain. That’s why it’s so real to us. I think that’s very true to how we live: sometimes the feeling is much more than the world can support. That’s why myth-making, like you said, is where we’re going. That’s the future.
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About Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong (born Vương Quốc Vinh; October 14, 1988) is a Vietnamese American writer, poet and essayist.
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Alternative Names:
Vương Quốc Vinh
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Additional quotes by Ocean Vuong
The world can misread us, and they will, and they have, and they won’t stop. But we do not have to misread ourselves. We can’t lose sight of what we came here for, which is to write for ourselves or for the people we love. The Western myth tells us to discard our former selves, that we have to constantly improve, move towards perfection. There’s a sort of verticality to Judeo-Christian values. But I think when I am writing I’m going back. I think it’s important for us to go back and say thank you to who we were, to go back and rescue that person and actually invite them into the present. I think writing is a dispersing of selves. When you sit down to write and to do your work, you must gather the phantoms in one place so they can work together.
The stories, at first, were folklore. My grandmother would tell a ghost story, then she would say: oh, that was after the napalm. So through cycles of these stories, that world started opening and as a child I would ask: what’s napalm? They ploughed on. It was almost intoxicating for them to create a mythology of their lives, because they were so powerless. They were all women. The men were gone; they did their harm and were gone. And they were empty hands, had no English, were powerless everywhere else. But when it was time to tell the story, they held everything.
The incredible thing that I can never quite understand was how they were able to kick them all out. The men had access to jobs, money, a patriarchal presence in the world, and even though they had troubles too, as immigrants and refugees, we come from a patriarchal tradition in the old country just as deeply rooted as in the west. In some cases, when men are talking to each other, women aren’t supposed to even be in the room. So that was what they were coming out of. And to think divorce?! These things were still taboo where they came from. And they all really did it.
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