Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water.
After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer
mountains, and water was no longer water.
But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains,
and water is just water.
first attributed to Master Qingyuan in the Compendium of the Five Lamps (Wudeng Huiyuan, 1252). [#]
When I first started interviewing, it was all I could do to just have a conversation, and have the other person tell their story. Following a lead was hard enough, and I could never be sure of what theme I was trying to pursue, even though I had this feeling that I should have one. After all, what use an interview that just meandered aimlessly? What would one learn if one wasn't trying to learn something? But I could never quite measure the distance between what was said to me and what I (should have) learned from it. For a while, all I could do with the interview was to quote bits of it, as a source of fact.
Then I discovered the writing of Clifford Geertz, and was impressed by the notion of writing, and ethnography, as interpretation. Every interview (and every act of doing research) was then an act of interpretation, and was worth doing only so far as it was interpreted, some meaning wrenched out of its atoms, the pace and beat of its sentences. Every phrase or word was, or could be, significant. Stories were ponderous with meaning, begging to be teased out. I would be the curator, bringing out with my writing what a mere quote could not. The words of the other person could not stand with out my foundation. Inevitably, the story became about me as well.
But now listen to Studs Terkel, radio show host and oral historian, interview someone on the American Dream:
I grew up in Paris, Tennessee. People in small towns considered nowhere identified with somewhere. So we were thirty miles from Murray, Kentucky, sixty miles from Paducah, a hundred twenty miles from Memphis, a hundred ten miles from Nashville, forty miles from Clarksville. We were on the L&N Railroad.
...
We were always train-conscious. We used to listen for the train, set your clock by it. You'd say: "Panama's late today. Number 619 is late."
...
[Country] people used to go walking on Sunday afternoons. They go down to the depot to see who's comin' in and who's leavin'. Or just to see the train comin' in. The trains always symbolized mobility. Somebody goin' somewhere, somebody leavin'. We were always aware there was another place outside of this. Somewhere. That you could go somewhere.
When I was a kid, we used to play a game called swinging, with a car tyre and a tree. One would push and one would be the conductor. You'd call off the cities: Paducah, St. Louis, Evansville. Somebody'd say: "I think I'm gonna get off here." And somebody'd say: "Naw, I'm gonna wait". And then everybody would say: "Chicago! Forty-seventh Street!" Listen to a lot of the old blues songs: "How Long, Baby, Has That Evenin' Train Been Gone?" "Going to Chicago." "Trouble in Mind"
Vernon Jarrett, interviewed by Studs Terkel. In American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980). Pantheon Books, New York. pp 83-84.
Something magical has happened here. (In the original text, Terkel's questions, if any, are not printed, so we have no way of telling how he actually led the interview). The interviewee's words stand by themselves again. They form this image, cutting across and connecting layers of meaning: context, history, memory, frame switches, episodes. There's the texture of the particular, the local. We are left with a stark impression of this particular person, and their particular history, but we take away from it an idea of a place and time distant from our place and time. Granted, these impressions have been building up and our sensitivities attuned by the time we read these words, because this is, after all, a book of dreams, of particular dreams of particular people in particular places. But after less than a hundred pages of stories and with barely 5 more of just his own words in the introduction, Studs Terkel wrenches us out of our context and deposits us in someone else's.
Somehow, with his invisible, unreported questions, and perhaps blank, inviting stares, a ready countenance, and - something else? - Terkel has made his interpretations unnecessary. Somehow his interviewees have become so fluent, so expressive, that they capture us. As Terkel vanishes, the stories come alive. This is Zen: mountains once again mountains.
