“Promise me you’ll tell my story” my friend captioned a short video clip he recently shared of his mother speaking to a room full of
elementary school students. She was introducing her father, an eighty nine year
old former Navajo Code talker and medicine man and advising the students to
listen well with a subtle air of urgency, saying “… And to always, always keep
it in your heart and in your mind because Grandpa’s getting old now, he’s going
to be gone soon, and he won’t be able to tell his stories…” Her father, Samuel
Holiday, travels to share his stories and will share them with anyone who wants
to listen. He knows the importance of sharing the collective wisdom one regains
in a lifetime, and he doesn't want it all to be lost.
Everyone’s heard the stories. Whether from
grandparents, teachers, older siblings or friends; we've all been told and
touched without hands in some way at some point or another in our lives. I hear
stories all day long at work and though the names of clients often elude me, I
can always remember something important about or to them. Veterans and farmers,
mothers and volunteers; everyone has a story, though some are assuredly more
interesting than others, and most people seem almost eager to share their
experience. Stories relay information in a way that makes them relatable,
leaving a permanent impression on the listener and giving them a nameless
something that they can keep with them for the rest of their lives. The stories
themselves seem to have an inherent wisdom about them that supersedes any
analytic relation of the same notions. Or as Lewis Carroll more simply put it,
“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time”.
The things within stories seem to run
through our bloodstream just as naturally as water cutting through the side of
a hill. Stories make us feel and connect us to each other; teaching us things
through our entire being in a subtle but powerful way that keeps us from
forgetting, like we do so many of the lessons we learn with our brain and not
our whole bodies. Stories allow us to lose ourselves in someone else and return
home with a little piece of their wisdom added to our beings. They breathe life
and motion into us in places where we did not even know we had never been
before. We are, it seems, only an accumulative sum of our experience and our
reaction to each; and stories allow us to gain experience which we otherwise
may not have access to, or which we do not desire to experience. A good story holds
within it some piece of the very essence of life, making it resound within us
for an extended time after, the way only a truly illuminating tale can.
Once you swallow the story, whether it’s
true or not doesn't even matter anymore; what matters is that you are forever
changed. At this point the line between fiction and reality seems to lose its
importance. There can be truth in the story whether the story is true itself,
and perhaps it can even be said that it is often easier to find the truth in
fiction than in reality, as reality can tend to be a complicated assortment of
messes.
So through the real or imagined adventures
of another, you can acquire one more memory to add to the collections of
illusions you've accumulated inside the attic of your being. The sum of these
experiences makes you who you are today, who you were yesterday, and who you
will be fifty years from tomorrow. And whether you remember where you picked up
that bit of knowledge fifty years from now won’t matter, whether from a friend,
a dream or a novel. It will just be a little piece of you that you can share as
well.
It seems to me that the most important
things in life cannot be explained in any other way than through story.
Non-narrative words often fail when trying to illuminate the sentiment and
meaning behind our movement through the erratic force which is life; but a good
story rings as true and pervasive as a storm peeling itself off the mountains
and pushing across the valley, commanding everything in its path. Stories keep
us present and empathetic, giving us meaning and relevance in a harsh and
tragic world. So what is the moral behind our mythological heritage? What do we
learn through the punishments of the jealous or negligent gods? Through the
feats and misdeeds of our heroes? Through the tangled web of tragedy that we
call mythology. Is the purpose really as simple as “because the gods get bored with
men who have no stories” (p. 387, Calasso)? As Yeats says, “Things fall apart
the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed
tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned” and so we
find ourselves in the middle of it all. And that, I suppose, is why we keep
walking; keep moving, running from room temperature as it means nothing but a flat-lined
heartbeat, and anything, at least, is better than that. And I suppose that’s
why we find solace in our stories and mythologies; because, like Harmony, we
learn that we “need not fear the uncertain life opening up before” us. As she
realized, “whichever way her wandering husband went, the encircling sash of
myth would wrap around the young Harmony. For every step, the footprint was
already there” (p. 383, Calasso). And what do we ever really have to fear if
someone else has already gone through it before us?
Life is but a myth – the volatile and ever-changing veil of
perspectives and reactions which we choose to believe. It seems that in the
end, we all die. And along the way, of course, we all experience love and loss.
And the things that stick with us ‘til death are the things that moved us,
changed us, shaped us into whatever forms we allowed them to make of us. And
that, it seems to me, is the essential truth in any myth. The often shocking
and appalling truths which make life as we know it, because life for us is as
it is for the Machiguengas, in that “history marches neither forward nor
backward: it goes around and round in circles” (p. 240, Llosa).
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