On stories

Welcome, storytellers and readers, to the new blog.

While I was tweaking and fiddling with the settings and layout, a few different ideas presented themselves for the opening post. But it seems right to begin here, at the heart of the craft and the soul of the art.

Because a story is so much more than an arbitrary plot peopled with characters-as-devices, much more than a vehicle for an idea, and much greater than the genius of its author or the imagination of its readers. A story itself has its own reality; it is a vast mental extension, an idea unto itself. It has physics, telos; it grows and changes and manifests its own discursive space.

A story is a social consruct.

This construct extends from the pen of the author, into and through the reader. The prose is the medium, and through it discourse, internal and interpersonal, is realized. Through a story a person is opened to an intimate relationship with not only the author but himself as well, and some stories, aged and sage, connect us with the past, with the people who told them and heard them and wrote them and read them, to entire epochs, cultures, and ideologies. And this relationship is not founded on the mere topicality of the setting nor the particularities of the plot. It finds its source between the lines, in all that is left unsaid, in what is assumed and understood.

The mind is an unfathomable thing. It synthesizes the manifold sensations of the body into a single experience, linear, when all is anything but that. It comprehends by recourse to context, to coherency, all founded on the fundamental assumption that this makes sense. Drawing on all possible information, including the all-powerful meat of history and precedent, it blithely makes its own truth from what is essentially meaningless and void.

The mind draws a line through all things, tracing the path of truth and reality as the single answer. That which Is.

The truth of the mind is a linguistic construct.

And assuredly there are different types of language at play here; no one would claim that the language of music or dance is selfsame with the language of spoken and written word. This latter is rigid, nearly dead in comparison to its cousins who move with the fluidity of life itself. These letters do not dance, and they do not have colour. They speak to a part of the mind that is set, rational, analytical: the reason, whose constructs have a certain general form—they all, without exception, have as their object the determination of truth. This is implicit in the base grammatical form itself, the clause. Yet reason takes the mind beyond the simple* creation of truth; reason wants to understand and control this truth.

Verbal language, that which is comprised of clauses, subjects and actions, deals in these constructs of reason, is in fact the codified expression of reason's inner processes. We trade these constructs as tokens, with ourselves and others, and this is the creation of discursive space. And just as gestalt is realized in the mind of a man, so too is it found in the relation of men in discourse.

A story is a line drawn by another, another or many others' truth, that a person can follow, that he experiences as his own line, his own truth. A good story, one that will stay with a person and have an impact, profound or humorous or neither or both, is able to be made real in its comprehension.

The best story tellers, whether contemporary authors or ancient shamans, make the story real, or rather they create something that has the potential to be so. They effect a converse action in the mind, whereby rigid truth statements, these grammatical constructs, are translated into feeling and visceral reaction.

A story is a social construct.

What it allows is something truly remarkable, something that would otherwise be impossible—it allows people to share the same experience, communicated in language and become real in the mind. And while of course no two people will perceive a story the same, it is this very disparity that allows for the social relation. People are brought into the story; they manifest a unique perspective, their own line through it. Themselves they become unique aspects of it, part of the discourse, within its space.

Of course this is where stories derive their ability to alter the way we see ourselves and our world. We see ourselves from a different perspective; if but for a moment we see the world through the eyes and context of the story. This power is more than the intention of the author or teller; these simply cast light into the space of the idea. It is the perceiver, the reader and listener, who defines what lies therein.

It is when a story, any idea really, circulates among people that it realizes telos. For just as each person draws his own line through it, so too does the story draw its own line through each person, creating a space and discourse formed by its own necessities and possibilities, independent in its objectivity.

It is the nature of truth, really, that it be acknowledged and powerful. Like some weak-force of the discursive universe, truth asserts itself as a matter of course, only kept at bay by acute purpose and subterfuge, lies. Truth is as such when it finds a context with which it is coherent, and thus when a person engages fully with a story he changes himself to effect this coherency. Thus too do stories and ideas realize telos and spirit, moving matter without corporeality of their own, moving from soul to soul with the ease and speed of, literally, a word.

We all have stories, and we all relate them to others. Whether they be simple anecdotes or more elaborate constructions, we present others our stories in the hopes they will understand where we're coming from, who we are, what has happened and what it all means. We seek community, and we seek truth; we seek to share our truth with others. The gestalt of the discourse demands nothing less.

There is no real point here. As I say above: much ado about nothing.

Indeed.

But still I am compelled to share a few of my thoughts, a little of the world from my perspective.