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Stories Can Save Us

a look at the human proclivity for storytelling, from Lascaux to Gallifrey

By pj bradleyPublished 4 years ago 15 min read
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Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story [...] But this too is true: stories can save us [...] In a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."

– Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

“Some people believe if we repeat stories often enough they become real. They make us who we are. That can be scary.”

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

“Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.”

– Neil Gaiman, Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

The first time I read Jane Eyre, I was six years old. I was, as far as I can remember, a fairly happy and normal child, but try telling that to me at six years old. At six years old, I thought I was Jane, miserable and maltreated but fiery and determined, and her happy ending was my hope for the future.

Everyone knows the archetypal, cookie-cutter, introverted nerd, the kid who has trouble connecting with other kids, who hides their nose in a book and escapes into their fantasies because the real world is cold and lonely. Most everyone knows logically that most of these kids grow up to be relatively normal adults who can connect with other adults who were once introverted nerdy kids. The conclusion to be drawn here is that while I was running away in my daydreams and you were running away in yours, we could have been friends instead. But the past is the past, and we cannot change the escapist tendencies of our childhood selves, so let's connect, bond over the stories we read and the stories we told ourselves and the lives we yearned for, and we can be friends now.

In order to properly convey what stories represent to me, I should start by specifying what I mean by “stories,” though I can no more precisely define the word than I could define “humanity,” or “compassion,” or “hope.” A novel is a story, but so is a poem. A play is a story, but so is a symphony. A grocery list is a story. A look exchanged across a crowded room is a story. A tattered pair of shoes abandoned by the side of the road is a story. Stories exist to be told and to be heard, to be given and to be received.

The reason stories are so versatile, so dynamic, is because a story is constructed in the mind. Whether it is constructed deliberately by a storyteller or constructed from bare bones by an observer, it is about taking the building blocks and shoving them together to create a narrative. Humans are frighteningly good at connecting those blocks.

One might assume that in historical study, stories can be discounted and underutilized due to their lack of factual credibility; we assume that in studying the past, we should sift through the fiction to reach the truth. This is true, of course, to an extent: we certainly do not want to be flaunting mythos as fact or taking unreliable narrators at their words when parsing sources for information. On the other hand, it is important to remember that the stories produced by a culture give us a wide open view into the hearts and minds of the people of that culture, regardless of the reality of the stories themselves.

The Florida House of Representatives passed a bill in 2006 that included a section dictating that public schools were to teach American history “as factual, not as constructed”; the bill went on to define the relevant period of history “as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Apparently, it escaped the notice of everyone who wrote and read this bill that its definition of American history was, in fact, a constructed narrative supporting a specific partisan view, not a factual account of the events that took place. It is doubtful whether the people the Founding Fathers pushed out of their homes, the people they murdered and enslaved, or indeed the people they were rebelling against, would have seen it in quite the same way.

Case in point: the Revolutionary event that we Americans call the Boston Massacre was known to the British as the “Incident on King Street.” Both terms are biased and present two distinct narratives of the event, one in which British soldiers killed Americans in cold blood and another in which a small upset occurred for ambiguous reasons. The American view is overwhelmingly accepted over alternative perspectives, at the very least indirectly demonstrated by the prominent modern use of the Boston Massacre nomer. One has to wonder whether the Florida legislature would consider this version of events to be “constructed.”

There is no history without a story, because there is no humanity without a story. Presented with a series of facts, the human mind will almost always create a narrative to connect them, even if one is not apparent on the surface. This is why we have issues like the conflation of correlation and causation: when we see a trend, it is easier for us to assume a relationship or a purpose or an intent, rather than the unlikelihood of random chance.

When the ancient Mesopotamians struggled with the disastrous and highly unpredictable flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, they attributed it to their deities, whom they perceived as humanlike, petty and vengeful. In Mesopotamian stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh, these gods were in constant conflict with each other, going behind each other’s backs to give humans contradictory orders, causing disaster and distress, and it certainly makes sense. Existing within natural surroundings which were complex, unstable, and ungovernable, they concluded that there were many powers working behind the scenes to control their world, and they came up with stories to explain how those powers fought and how it impacted the world around them.

The stories of the Mesopotamians are similar to those of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Chinese and the Jews. Over and over again throughout history, humans have found ways to conceptualize the universe through stories, even across barriers of time, borders, languages. A series of cave paintings depicting men with spears and various game animals tells the story of a hunt, real or imagined, past or future. A series of emojis sent in a text message tells a story just as well.

A dance, a painting, a sculpture, a series of facial expressions: these things require no elaboration, no explanation, in order to be perceived and interpreted as stories. We tell ourselves that Edvard Munch’s figure is screaming for whatever reason seems most poignant to us at a given moment. We see the “blue-black fjord” and the “blood and tongues of fire” and we hear the “infinite scream” just as he did, and somehow entirely differently.

An exercise: look up The Scream of Nature, find images of each version of the piece, and read them. Munch painted the piece four times, with each version varying in color, material, and composition. He also wrote a journal entry about the evening that inspired him to paint it, which he later adapted into a poem and included with one of the paintings. It is one of the most ubiquitous images in modern art, discussed and interpreted and dissected by scholars and laymen alike for over a century. No two people see it the same way, but it is widely perceived as a symbol of the anxiety of humanity – an ambiguous term, and a universally relatable term. The Scream is screaming for all of us, for all of our anxieties, for nature and for technology and for politics and for love, for any story that we build around it at that point in our lives.

The propensity for storytelling bleeds into every aspect of our lives, with or without words, with or without prompting. How many of us have looked up at the clouds and seen a knight fighting a dragon, a chicken laying an egg, a camel or a whale or a weasel, and how many of us have tried to point out these shapes to our friends? How many of us have perceived a story in something so delightfully disorganized and immediately, reflexively turned to share it, to say: This is my world, this is what I see, won’t you see it with me? Won’t you hear my story?

The clouds and the Rorschach test and facial pareidolia and the insatiable tendency to ascribe human features and emotions to anything and everything – these are all stories. It doesn’t matter that your furnace is not actually angry; it doesn’t matter that those two ducks at the park are most likely not in love; it doesn’t matter that the driver of the BMW that cut you off on the freeway was probably not in a rush to get to the hospital. What matters, in all of this, is finding these ways to connect to the world around us, and in turn to connect to each other. Each time we weave colorful characters and plots around the frames of our lives, we are creating a tapestry, to gift or to lend, to keep to ourselves or to display proudly in our homes, and these tapestries define us. They make us human.

When I sat down in my first college history course, uncertain and without a declared major or a projected degree path, the professor gave his spiel for the first day of class. I have heard that spiel many times since then, and could practically recite it in my sleep at one point, because that first day was the day I decided I wanted to be a historian, and I went on to be a supplemental instructor for the course for five semesters. It was a good spiel.

The spiel touched briefly upon administrative details and grading rubrics, college resources and important dates, attendance policies and participation points, but it was overwhelmingly different from any other first day of class spiel I've heard. One part of it stuck out more than any other, which I came to affectionately refer to as the Schrödinger's Ant-Man Paradox.

This was a freshman class, a survey level world civilizations course that was a requirement for almost every degree, and the professor dedicated some time to discussing exactly why it mattered to anyone who wasn't going on to study history. What he told us was that history teaches us perspective, and studying five thousand years of history in fifteen weeks is a highly effective method of learning just how small we are in the grand scheme of things. It's difficult to have an inflated sense of your own importance when you can breeze through the Qin dynasty in less than two hours.

But the other side of that coin, he said, is that history shows us how significant one person can be. I think of Dora Miller, a Union woman living in the Confederacy during the Civil War, whose diaries are a wealth of information that historians look to in studying the war. She was one woman, not at all pivotal in the war itself, but the fact that she wrote down her thoughts and experiences made her invaluable to scholars decades later.

Thus, Schrödinger's Ant-Man. We are at once unbelievably tiny and undeniably huge. We can never know or control whether our stories will be significant in a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, but we can decide whether we tell them. The story that you tell could be forgotten, but it could be the inspiration for the greatest scientific advance of the millennium. The story told about you could be nothing, but it could be the legend that motivates entire civilizations.

People used to dedicate their lives to memorizing and reciting pieces of literature. They were historians, biographers, musicians, storytellers. And although the tradition of privately hired bards was not a universal phenomenon, oral tradition in some form or another has always sustained civilizations, long before and long after widespread literacy and mass printing made it functionally unnecessary.

Functionally unnecessary, in that the oral repetition is no longer required for the transmission of information, but that isn’t to say that oral tradition no longer serves a function in society. Old wives’ tales and folk stories and urban legends thrive on repeated retellings, like an extended game of telephone across generations. Even with the advent and growth of the internet, the tradition hasn’t lost its essential character. You read a story on a blog one day, internalize it without intending to, and months or years later something reminds you of it, at which point you recount the story as best as you can.

The tricky thing about it, though, is that your retelling of the story will be different than someone else’s, even if you heard the same story verbatim. We remember what we feel is important, and discard details that don’t seem to matter. We absorb the things that apply to us, and forget the things we can’t relate to. This is why there can be so many variations on the same urban legends with the same morals. The significance of the tradition, and the significance of each story in itself, is not in a flawless recitation of events, but in the fact of its repetition.

In my opinion, while many pieces of media make good use of storytelling as a theme or a motif or a plot device, Doctor Who remains one of the most effective examples. In 2007, the show wrapped up a season-long arc with the Doctor – wildly intelligent, alien, functionally immortal, the titular character – entirely powerless and his companion – Martha Jones, a young woman, an actual doctor in training, criminally underestimated and undervalued throughout the series – saving not only his life, but the entire world, by only telling a story.

She told a story and she asked for the story to be passed on and, because it is science fiction, she took advantage of a psychic network’s telepathic field to turn the thought of the story into tangible power that saved the day. It may be slightly on the nose, for her to stare down the big bad and tell him how she bested him with “no weapons, just words,” but that’s part of the beauty of it. Science fiction isn’t about spaceships and laser guns, and it never has been; it’s about humanity, and Doctor Who is loud and unashamed about it.

There are two back-to-back episodes in series two of Doctor Who that directly address the line between story and truth. In each case, a minor character dismisses a legend as "just a story," and the Doctor insists upon hearing it. The stories turn out to be true, which is unsurprising to the viewer, who knows that impossible things are going to happen in the show, but equally unsurprising to the Doctor, who knows that impossible things are often the truth in fancy dress.

After all, the Doctor is just a story himself, in many ways. Anyone who meets him even briefly has a story to tell from it, and very few of them ever know him as a person. He's a fantastical character, a hero who swoops in to save the day and is never seen again, whose face can be seen unchanging throughout history. He's a wanderer, the man without a home, the lonely god, the oncoming storm, a great warrior, a mortal enemy, and everything beyond and between, depending upon who's telling the story.

Also in the way of poignant and powerful stories is the 1990 cult classic novel Good Omens. Although there is a rousing cast of humans and supernatural entities alike, the story focuses most closely on the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who have been on earth and living among humans for so long that they simply can’t stand to let the apocalypse happen. They’re comfortable in their lives and they have formed a bond with humanity and with each other that can’t be overpowered by blind loyalty to their respective authorities.

The real gem, however, is in their utter incompetence; they don’t save the world at all, in the end. What saves the world is humanity. What saves the world is the antichrist, an eleven-year-old boy who has an even stronger connection to the world and its inhabitants. He has been raised as a completely normal human boy, and the earth is his home, and humans are his people. He doesn’t want to rule the world or be worshiped, not if it comes at the expense of his friendships and his family and his romps in the woods and the trees and the whales and his dog.

That’s what it boils down to, after all: whether we’re surrounded by angels and demons or aliens and spaceships or monsters and ghosts, we are always with each other, and we always have a responsibility to one another. None of us is ever alone, and stories serve to remind us of that, to help us connect and relate with each other, to show us what matters.

The power of the story is paradoxical, illogical; that we should take real life lessons from bits of fiction, that we should feel real emotional responses to fabricated events, that we should gain real character from fantastical narratives seems inherently contradictory, but it’s the truth. This is the bottom line of science fiction, fantasy, horror: through the lens of the impossible, we can see ourselves more clearly than ever. Our fears and our hopes and our dreams are the foundations of our lives, and the stories we create from them build us up and up, constructing who we are, demolishing and rebuilding pieces of ourselves forever.

We are never complete. We can never tell every story. It matters which ones we choose.

humanity
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About the Creator

pj bradley

twitter @friendlyhag

insta @thestrongerword

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