Stories

History and myth articulate the human condition. We're all compelled by ethics, by adventure, by journeys... We're all cushioned in the grand narratives that seat us somewhere within humanity, goodness and evil constantly punch each others noses in pantomimes which play themselves out in literature and art. Stories about ourselves get formed out of ideas and comments from others, and the texture, size, mass and colour of your physical body also becomes a framework for a certain story about you. I begin to hear a story or write a story and somehow I end up believing it.

Stories are dangerous because they condense experience into some sort of language, they codify knowledge. They may be beautiful mirrors of life, but they are not life. Storytellers are sculptors who carve out a theory from the solid block of being. The stuff which was the negative space surrounding that theory gets thrown to the wayside, despite it being of the same substance as what is kept. In the end I wonder why the story itself isn't considered the off cut. 

Maybe it's the distance between stories and reality that allow us to feel comfortable. Without stories, maybe we could see reality without any filters. We're all authors, and I recall writing stories in my mind about things I don't really know just to make them familiar. Most often stories about people. If you parcel them up then you'll know how to unwrap them.

But when I stop telling myself stories, the world expands. 

I love ingesting and on occasion chiselling out stories, but what I love even more is letting the story die, like any other living thing in the creation, and watching that narrative as an arrow, which can be located within space and time, shooting in one direction towards reality. It has it's particular trajectory, but its path and the many diverging paths of stories all aim towards something so large that it is all pervasive.

Believing stories about yourself.