“It has begun!” -Shang Tsung, Mortal Kombat
Here’s a story about the beginning of stories. It might even be true.
At the dawn of consciousness, when humans emerged from the fog of the ancient past — before writing, before fiction — we awoke in a world of action without understanding. There were structures within which we lived: families, communities, etc., but nothing that gave guidance to our lives. We were like birds, migrating without knowing why.
Mankind began to observe itself carefully as soon as we developed the capacity to do so. We watched, with our ancient curiosity and newly acquired awareness, the lives we had been leading for millennia before anything resembling understanding dawned.
As we watched, we learned, and we described. We described what made us happy and what made us sad. We described what made us bitter and resentful. We described what made us joyful and we described what made us murderous. We described the ways of acting that we observed to be viable solutions for the hardships of life. Like children struggling to explain our emotions generation after generation, we built ritual and dramatic accounts of our existence that encapsulated what struck us as dangerous or admirable.
These were the first seeds of the first stories. They were not invented. They were not fiction. They were deep representational truths about what we observed existence to be composed of.
“Remember who you are.” -Mufasa, The Lion King
Rituals and dramas evolved into narratives and mythologies as stories proved valuable to those who heard and told them over long periods of time. They became the foundations for civilizations the world over, and provided a basis for behavior that allowed large groups of humans to exist together without devolving into chaos in the form of shared culture. Equally importantly, they allowed individual humans to exist within their own minds, without devolving into internal chaos, by describing patterns of actions and their probable results.
The underlying patterns that permeate the great stories of the world, and which are observable in microcosm in almost all fiction, are the accumulation of mankind’s obsessive cataloguing of what behaviors led to destruction and which led to triumph. Anyone who has watched a movie and resonated with the character arc of a person completely different than them in every superficial way knows the extent to which our appreciation for that narrative pattern is a part of us. We have very little control over what we fear or admire, and stories tap into that often unconscious part of ourselves.
The human mind sees the world as a story primarily, and it seeks them out unerringly. The multi-billion dollar industries surrounding their continued generation in the forms of television, books, and movies is proof of that. But while we are entertained by stories, we are also drawn to them for the same reasons our ancestors were: for inspiration, and to gain insight into ourselves.
Stories, especially well crafted stories, aren’t describing what we should do. They describe what we are doing. They describe the ways we act that yield acceptance from those around us, and they describe the ways we act that render us untrustworthy and undesirable. They describe how to get out of bad situations and how to, unfailingly, get into them. We understand stories without willful effort: always admiring the heroes, and always despising and/or pitying the villains. Their actions summon that understanding from within us, as do the actions of the people in our lives.
To exist is to play a role in a story. Stories are descriptions of what we fundamentally are.
“It is all around us.” -Morpheus, The Matrix
In older times, when many civilizations were formed around mythological frameworks and few stories not related to that framework existed, it was the work of a lifetime to understand the messages in stories passed upwards out of the past. Now it is the work of several lifetimes merely to consume a fraction of the stories vying for our attention.
The massive proliferation of stories, all so different on the surface, has made it harder to explore the themes that underlie them. Not all stories are told equally well or conform to the narrative structures that resonate with us most (think of the last bad movie you watched). They also come at us in such great number that one must search hard for good examples and pay close attention to glean any knowledge.
But all stories evolved out of those first human dramas and narratives, and the same messages are still there underlying all significant stories. They ignite something more profound than what is produced by the spectacle of special effects, the distraction of modernity, or the veneer of provincialism. Actors, setting, and timeline are all just facets of the great, immortal, trans-cultural story.
“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back…” -Quaithe, A Dance With Dragons(Game of Thrones)
Modern people are swift to impeach ancient wisdom as antiquated and outdated. We see reverence for stories as a relics of a distant, unrelatable, and ignorant past, before we outgrew our more destructive inclinations and became enlightened. The very idea that we would need quaint parables to guide our actions is laughable — offensive even. Such things are for children.
It is an extremely recent phenomenon that stories have not played a conspicuous role as the stable underpinning for both societies and individuals. Our often knee-jerk disdain for the idea of their importance is often tied to our modern belief that their value is unquantifiable and therefore nonexistent.
Unfortunately, our desire to exist meaningfully must take some intangibles into account.
Stories are indeed for children, but we are all the children of the past and, as the enlightenment progresses, our need for stories INCREASES rather than decreases. Our current access to information, and accompanying pace of technological and intellectual progress combine to breed new existential crises with each new discovery, and our suffering is lessened not one iota by our cleverness.
It is at times like these — times like now, when we cannot out-reason our pain — that stories provide a way forward by showing us a way back to what matters.
