And God Created Story…

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.  – Henry David Thoreau

Everything is story. Everything. After I had graduated college, I lived on for a summer in Pittsburgh. At the time I was renting a small room in an attic of an older woman in a quaint town off the Allegheny river. I was cramped and worked as a waiter at a nice restaurant down at Station Square, and frankly I loved it. Once while I was living out there, I went to lunch with an old neighbor of mine who was a graduate student at University of Pittsburgh in the literature department. I would often spend time with him and ask him about his studies, his workload, ideas, and what he was reading. While sitting in this little diner together I asked him, “Why is theory so important?”, and he replied, “Because everything is theory. Everything.” I thought about that for a long, long time. Eventually many years later, I came to realize that he was correct. Everything is theory. Everything holds an underlying meaning, a deeper purpose. A greater truth always lies further within.

More recently as I was learning how to write fiction, I studied a lot about story and the function of story for us as humans. It was fascinating for me to, in a sense, re-learn everything I knew about stories, literature, and books from the standpoint of a writer rather than a reader of literature. The dynamic process of the text came to life before my eyes. Learning first hand the process of creating fiction is, to me, absolutely fascinating, because it winds its way through a natural, instinctual, and fundamental passageway that is a root to our humanity. And that passageway is story. For humans, just like my old graduate school friend told me about theory, story is everything. Everything. But let me explain this a little further. In Wired For Story, Lisa Cron states the following:

Our brain developed a way to consciously navigate information so that, provided we have the time, we can decide on our own what to do next. Story. Here’s how neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sums it up: “The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick – was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution – storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly…[I]t should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.”

As writers we intuit that this to be true. It drives the purpose behind our writing and our struggle. I was just recently speaking with someone who shared with me that they only liked listening to classical music that allows them to imagine a story is taking place in the music. When I was in college I toured the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the tour guide was describing a painting that had a “narrative structure” to it. I asked her what she meant by that, and she proceeded to describe how the painting depicted a scene in a small town where people were active, things were happening, and life was bustling. In contrast, I suppose, a painting by Monet of impressionistic lilies floating on a pond does not have a narrative. Or more extremely, a Jackson Pollack painting would, perhaps, be devoid of story. This is where I interject and submit to you, dear readers, that in Monet’s lilies and even in the random colored lines and splatters by Pollack, a story does exist. In fact many stories exist, which is exactly why we love these paintings so much. They are speaking to us in so many ways. They are telling us something, perhaps it is a faint whisper that brushes past our ears, but it is indeed a story all the same. We as humans live for story, both literally and figuratively. Lisa Cron continues in Wired for Story:

Stories allow us to stimulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them. This was a matter of life and death back in the Stone Age, when if you waited for experience to teach you that the rustling in the bushes was actually a lion looking for lunch, you’d end up the main course. It’s even more crucial now, because once we mastered the physical world, our brain evolved to tackle something far trickier: the social realm. Story evolved as a way to explore our own mind and the minds of others, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the future.

This is absolutely fascinating, because we see that story both simultaneously helps us survive as well as evolve. And interestingly, when we chart the history of story through the ages, we see if not an evolution of story at least the historical nuances of how stories have been told through ages and cultures around the world. But no matter what age and no matter what culture, stories were indeed told, retold, and often created the bedrock for building communities, shared values, and larger, deeper meanings for life itself.

What does this mean for us today? I think that no matter what side of the proverbial “aisle” you fall on in today’s political world, we can all agree that it’s definitely one of the more divisive times we’ve ever lived. I suspect that the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were also similarly divisive perhaps even more so, but the main point I wish to make is that everywhere we look we see stories heaped upon us from all angles and sides and positions. Whether it is a “story” about why the stock market is or isn’t doing whatever it’s doing, or why our President is or isn’t doing whatever he’s doing, or why this or that “catastrophic” event is or isn’t happening today. On a brief aside, doesn’t it seem to you like everything is pitched as a “catastrophic” event these days? And yet here we are apparently living through all of these “catastrophes” each day rather easily relatively speaking no? Anyway I think you see my point. Everything around us revolves upon stories. And perhaps you’ve noticed how the stories you tell yourself about the world we live in today shape and alter your perception of yourself, your life, and the world around you. Have you noticed that? I know I most definitely have! Story is so powerful, and one of the main reasons it is so powerful is because we are literally wired and designed for it. Again to quote Lisa Cron in Wired for Story:

Our brain comes equipped with something they believe might be akin to X-ray glasses: mirror neurons. According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, who pioneered the research, our mirror neurons fire when we watch someone do something and when we do the same thing ourselves. But it’s not just that we register what it would feel like physically; our real goal is to understand the action….Mirror neurons allow us to feel what others experience almost as if it were happening to us, the better to infer what “others know in order to explain their desires and intentions with real precision.” But here’s the kicker. We don’t just mirror other people. We mirror fictional characters too. A recent study, in which subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while reading a short story, revealed that the areas of the brain that lit up when they read about an activity were identical to those that light up when they actually experience it…As lead author of the study Nicole Speer points out, the “findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally stimulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.”

Our brains and bodies are hard-wired to learn, to absorb, and to seek knowledge and understanding. This, perhaps more than anything else, is the reason for our existence on earth. And story is a primary mode by which we are able to obtain and attain these experiences and understandings, our greater human purpose. Throughout history writers and artists have known that art and meaning was linked to our bodies, our memories, and the world around us. Even before science could prove it to be true neurologically, writers knew their craft was found in creating worlds full of life, using the senses and description, and layering all of it with deeper meaning and significance. In 1897 Joseph Conrad wrote the following regarding what is art and how to write literature:

All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

For Conrad then the senses are the foundation for art and expression. Similar to Wordsworth’s notion of poetry being the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Conrad perceives literature’s greatest purpose lies in “reach[ing] the secret spring of responsive emotions.” Both men knew story was tied to our bodies and all of it led inwards to powerful and real truths rooted deep in our past experience and memory. But they didn’t know all of this because science provided data about it. Oh no! They knew this was true because the power of art spoke to them profoundly. Today we know this is true biologically as well, but science, reason, and data do not drive artists, emotion, and life. At best they further elucidate what artists already sense to be true and real, powerful and alive within all of humanity.

Both psychologically as well as neurologically, we gain so much knowledge and information whenever we see anything happen to anyone or read about it or view it on a screen. From basic pieces of information like how to drink a glass of water or how to sit down on a rock to more complex issues like how to communicate love or why we feel an urge for revenge or justice. Our stories shape our morals and our ethics, the values and principles we hold dear in order to live our lives. This is a profound reason why the First Amendment in the great United States Constitution is so vital not just for building a great society but for our very survival as a species. Without freedom of speech we cannot have freedom of thought. As we limit our freedom of thought and association, we limit the stories we can tell and share together. As we limit the stories we can share, we limit the stories we are exposed to, and that means our exposure to life and the possibilities of experience are diminished, our mirror neurons aren’t as activated as they could be, and all of that means we just aren’t learning, experiencing, and evolving at the fastest rate possible. Again to quote the renowned novelist Joseph Conrad brilliantly describing the struggle and purpose of the writer:

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest.

Stories are designed to lead us to what Conrad calls “all the truth of life.” And we, my friends, are designed for stories. They are a means and a method for our very survival and evolution. As we free our speech, we liberate our thoughts and allow for a multitude of stories to abound and life to thrive. Each of us then are called upon as humans to look out upon the world and to take it in, to seek it out and attempt to understand others, ourselves, the world and universe before us all. The more we explore, the further we experience life and observe life being experienced by others, and in so doing we naturally build stories. Indeed stories are built around us. The stories we choose to tell ourselves and others matter a great deal. We must be mindful, aware, and alert. Books of course help show us the way. As we read, as we write, as we create and imbibe art in all its forms, we immediately activate life within us and all around us. This too in itself is a greater meta-story for all of us as humans. By exercising stories in all their possibilities, we can live in freedom, in love, in truth and understanding. We are designed, perhaps even destined, for such incredible, transcendent experiences from the very marrow of our bones to the misty heights of our soul.