sto·ry

/ˈstôrē/

noun

An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.
An account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.
A widely ciruclated rumor.
A lie, a falsehood.
Legend, romance.
Matter, situation.
A set of rooms within a space between the floors of a building.

So many stories… Photo by Sindre Aalberg

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

— Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Just like the floor of an apartment building, a narrative is insular to itself.

Once a story is created, its parts exist in perpetuity: no matter how many times you watch MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, that movie will always begin in black and white. Dorothy will alway cry when she’s captured by the witch; and inevitably her ruby slippers will take her home. Complete and encapsulated with a beginning, middle and end — a movie, TV show, or book of fiction can be flipped through and reviewed with discretion. And while the reader may be affected by the narrative insofar that the narrative is provocative; the narrative does no physical harm to the reader. Just as in a dream, the suffering is real only within the confines of the story, where it must feel real in order to be purposeful. The reader/dreamer/audience experiences whatever befalls a character through identification with them; and to this end, despair can be gulped down like cold coffee, passions tasted like a ripe strawberry, and victory sipped like champagne.

“It’s not real, it’s only a story.”

— Sebastian, The Neverending Story

At its root, story telling is an exploration of consequences. When we go to the theater to see a “play,” we watch the actions and reactions of the story play out on a stage from a comfortable vantage point. From our seat in the audience we can view “mistakes” as narrative forks in the road, without which the story would be boring. When characters make choices, whether they are “right” or “wrong,” what follows are the dominoes of inevitability. The hero or the villain mounts his horse in a reactionary effort, and across this battlefield of changing fortunes various players are poised to act in their own best interests — each with a different perspective about what serves their needs. Along the way, more dominoes await the “right” mistakes to nudge them into motion.

What better tool than the arc of a narrative to form opinions and catalyze growth? When we have a complete narrative arc, we can examine mistakes and know that if only another choice had been made, everything would have turned out differently. The arc is effective because it imitates the storyline of our own lives — our lives being complete with beginnings, middles, and ends…

Some of the most satisfying stories are the ones where favorable outcomes are found even though the worst mistakes have been made. This idea that we can put the pieces back together, or rearrange them to make something new and better out of the thing we have broken, pleases the mind because all to often this does not happen in real life. The primary lesson of the manifest world is that you cannot put the cat back in the bag. When the “milk is spilt” or the “dye is cast,” what’s done is done; so it’s understandable that we would generate fantasies in reaction to what cannot be undone.

And yet, whether rooted in fact or fiction, really any happenings of magnitude — whether horrible or wonderful, are candidates for canonization for the sheer interest they generate. Afterall, a story is purposeful so long as it hooks curiosity and enthralls the listener. The word “convey” comes to mind here, with all definitions ringing appropriate… to communicate, to deliver, to move… which gets pretty mind-bendy when you consider that all deliveries themselves must be moved in order to be delivered.

So we arrive at the existential purpose of a story: a means by which we move ourselves.

Now let’s go behind the curtain for a moment and look at the phenomena of writing fiction, and imagine someone like Tolkien or Martin of Rowling, alone in their study dreaming up worlds and pounding away at the keys. As a storyteller, a spinner of narrative, one is tasked with becoming many. In order to create the identities of the heroes, the villains, and everyone in between, a storyteller must embody these characters. Fracturing themselves into the witch, the dragon, the princess, the boy, the crone, the king, the scholar, the barbarian — a storyteller fleshes these archetypes with substance and point of view. In another sense, a storyteller avails themselves as a sort of portal from which these characters can emerge. And once completed, a good narrative can reveal the interwoven threads of these characters’ perspectives playing against each other across time.

And this is where I get all mystical and misty-eyed:

Storytelling is yet another beautiful example of the polar relationship between nothing and everything, and revealing the holographic nature by which the divine cloaks itself in the form of many for its own entertainment, curiosity, edification, and satisfaction. As Anne Lamont describes in her book Bird By Bird, “some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.”

And whether or not we are storytellers ourselves, or simply consumers of content — we each live within the story of our own lives. Simultaneously, we also live within the story of human beings, the story of the earth, the story of the solar system, the story of our galaxy… the story of the universe exhaling. And we go on gossiping and making up stories within the stories of our lives to pass the time. And again my wheels start turning and I find myself wondering like the rest of you, what is the point?

The pattern of this behavior is the point. As consciousness continually replicates infinite points of view within itself, stories are the trees that bear the fruits of perspective and awareness. Consciousness cannot help but be what it is, create what it is — just as you cannot help but be who you are, and I cannot help but be me. The point of the story, is the story. Your story, my story, every story — real or imagined, from the mythical to mundane, forms the bedrock of experience. And as long as curiosity is hungry to roam the valleys of emotions and vistas of experience, the intangible form of the story will retain its value, its firmament. For whether inside our dreaming minds or the lives we are living, we are bound in perpetuity to exist within the state of a story.

Mechanically speaking, the existence of stories demonstrates the means by which the manifest world reciprocates the unmanifest, and precipitates more consciousness.