Stories, hey? We all love ‘em. From the earliest Aboriginal Dream stories to the latest escapades of your friend who really should know better by now, the ubiquity of stories across the history of humanity is undeniable. Stories are told to us fresh from the womb (oftentimes before) and follow us about long after we’re dead. But what the hell are they? Why are they so central to the human experience? Why do they matter?
What’s a story?
Let’s start by defining the word “story”. In short, stories are events and information neatly presented in a way that makes sense. They’re a framework for compiling data and themes into structured packages that walk people through meaning - they help people understand who was involved, what happened, in what order, and why it was important.
Stories are made up of five essential components: characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. Think of every Tom Cruise film you’ve ever seen: highly skilled individual in a high-pressure environment gets betrayed then pulls through by learning some new tricks.
Story and narrative
So that’s how you build a story. However, stories as a framework need two crucial things: a person who collects the various important bits of information together, arranges them into a logical sequence then shares them with the world - let’s call this person the narrator. They also need someone to tell their story to - an audience. No narrator, no story. No audience outside of your own head - your story becomes something different. A secret.
Narratives in story
Narrators form narratives. Weird, right? Narrative is the subjective prism through which stories are viewed and then shared with others. If Luke Skywalker was telling a tale, he might choose to talk about a young moisture farmer who joins a space wizard on a journey to deliver construction blueprints to a gang of freedom fighters after his step family was murdered by techno-fascists.
The Emperor might see things a little differently. After a long campaign to unite the rag tag bunch of planets under his rule so he can finally get things done (he even created a whole bunch of jobs with the biggest civil construction contract of all time) his plans fell into ruin when the angsty son of his employee of the month teamed up with a bunch of terrorists to blow shit up.
Both narratives are part of the Star Wars story, yet both select the viewpoint, interpretation and events they feel best serve their particular narrative arc. The relationship between story and narrative can get quite complex, so from now on, we’ll stick to the story.
Stories in spacetime
It looks like stories are a crucial tool for forming meaning out of the apparent chaos of existence. Why? Well, as chaotic and random as the universe may seem, there are some absolutes common to everyone. Time progresses forward. Sure, it may well be experienced at different paces, and we might even miss whole chunks of time (from time to time), but it’s rare we wake up and it’s yesterday, not tomorrow. So, things tend to point forward, to the horizon.
What else? Well, things fall apart. When was the last time you woke up one day younger? The last time you saw a loaf of bread go from stale to fresh? All things age, all things experience more life and happenings, all things get a little more battered and bruised each day. If you were kind, you might say a living universe gains a little more experience and knowledge as time passes.
Life finds a way
There is no such thing as a living, non-sentient or inorganic piece of this universe (you and me included) that has remained in stasis for one unit of Planck time - ever. Life pulls meaning out of these experiences, tries to understand its import, predicts what may happen next - and what it should do next to gain an advantage in the future.
Sentience goes one step further away from reacting and predicting - it subjectively (that word again) experiences the universe it inhabits, using its own perspective to guide its probings towards what it finds useful, interesting, and inspiring. In a way, you could say the subjective viewpoint of sentient beings like us makes us view the story of the universe using narrative structures we create. We experience reality in story format framed by our own internal narratives.
The next chapter…
Yep. Stories are useful. They’re basically how we make sense out of reality, both individually and collectively. As the nature of existence is to journey through space and time, we need to look at the parallels between stories as journeys, and the journeys we all are on in greater depth. I’m gonna dip into The Hero With a Thousand Faces in the meantime to see if this will help clarify the connection even further.
More on the horizon…