A Guild of Storytellers: Humanity.
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” - Muriel Rukeyser (“The Speed of Darkness”)
The idea of story has been taking up a whole lot of headspace for me recently. In a sense, our lives are a chronicle of stories woven together to create one small plot in the epic of existence.
What isn’t a story? Or at least, what isn’t influenced by a story?
For example, all my life I’ve said in response to the social-anxiety-inducing icebreaker question, “Tell me a fun fact about yourself,” that grape ice cream is my favorite flavor. (Don’t judge me; it’s good. I promise.) My mom used to get grape ice cream with her mom at this tiny little shop in her hometown. So, when my grandma asked me what flavor I wanted to get for the first time, of course, I chose grape. Like many of you reading this, grape ice cream did not scream, “THIS IS THE BEST FLAVOR KNOWN TO MANKIND,” but because of the stories my mom had told me of her childhood, I wanted to interject my own life into this narrative of maternal love and ice cream cones. (author’s note: grateful I did, because it is WONDERFUL!) Without my mom’s storytelling, I would have never chosen that flavor and had my dairy-treat horizons widened. In short, had she not won me over via narrative, we may have never shared this common ground.
Okay, so I’m aware that my little grape ice cream anecdote is a bit of an odd point to begin an essay about storytelling, but it at least starts the process of putting words to the thoughts in my head. (Also, I just kind of want grape ice cream.) Seeking to make sense of my place here on Earth, I often console my mind with the comfort and familiarity of story. During my early years, I created a vast world that my sister and I could venture to in order to escape the monotony of the day. When curious about a topic, I picked up the nearest book on the subject (the Who Was? series had a faithful reader in me). My core beliefs about the meaning of life are consolidated in one overarching narrative contained in the Bible. As I have been in college and in an environment that inspires reflection and thought, I seem to be dwelling on why narrative is so entrenched in my life. Along with that, is this entrenchment proportional to the rest of society?
As of right now, my worldview is that most people, whether consciously or subconsciously, use narrative to quell mental or soul refrains of instability. The only constant I am sure of is change.
In her case study regarding narrative in the industrial age, Barbara Benjamin gives some etymological history of the word story:
“The root of the word ‘‘story’’ is found in the Indo-European word ueid. For the Indo-European tribes, this word meant: look at; see; an object of vision. Making its way east, into India, this word appears in Sanskrit as veda, meaning knowledge, as in the sacred books of the Hindus. In Greece, the same word appears as eidos, meaning: form; idea formed in the mind; ideal. So storytelling is a way to transfer knowledge from the storyteller to others, a way to help people look at reality and formulate ideas and ideals.”
I love that last line. The story is all about transfer; it’s about giving. There is something magical in the notion that what we know now has been passed down via narrative to each generation in many cultures. It’s a unifying beacon of thought amidst the dark sheet of divisiveness. Humanity is a guild of storytellers.
The stories we tell are not always helpful or healthful, but they do hold weight. Story changes trajectory. Currently, I am reading Fitzgerald’s novel “Tender is the Night” for a class on the American novel and night optics. (SUCH A GOOD CLASS) The leading player of the novel is Dick Diver, an aspiring psychologist, and what I view as a case study on the restless, longing heart. My reading of Dick is that he longs to be worshipped. He needs to feel admired, unique, and desirable. (This is seen via his desire to produce a work of note, be the world’s greatest psychologist, his romantic relationships, the list goes on.) Even if he does not fully believe it, Dick has constructed this narrative around his whole life that he is almost godlike in his ability to woo and win people. Many of the characters succumb to the fallacious inflated sense of self that, when paired with other confounding factors, leads to their ultimate demise. To see if our temporal reality aligns with our narrated one, it’s imperative that we check on the stories shelved in our minds and souls.
However, an interesting question emerges. What about the ineffable parts of the human experience? How does the human psyche cope? Do we craft more narrative? Do we depress it? For, how can we put words to the wordless?
Further Reading: Tender is the Night, A Street Divided, The Case Study: Storytelling in the Industrial Age and Beyond, Storytelling and Ecology: Empathy, Enchantment and Emergence in the Use of Oral Narratives
