It's Just a Story

"I mean, why bother getting so passionate about it?"  My classmate, Jasmine*, gave me the sort of look that usually indicates one has sprouted extra appendages.  "It's just a story. None of these people are real."

"Man, you get so into your fake stories.  Why don't you watch football, or somethin' real?"  Two years didn't change the look any, nor did seeing it on a different face.  It's a look I'd grown up with and, by the ripe old age of eighteen, I would have found its familiarity reassuring if it wasn't so blindingly frustrating.  These were nice people...okay, well, the co-worker was.  They just had different hobbies and interests and that's wonderful, since a homogeneous world would redefine bland.

This didn't make it any less frustrating.  How on earth did I explain to these people, casual acquaintances with whom I worked on a daily basis, why one of the most important things in my life isn't as silly as it sounds?  Perhaps more importantly, how could I do so without sounding like the sort of pompous nitwit whose explanations backfire horribly and make everyone involved feel like a tool?  At last, I've found an answer!



The answer is "I have no freaking idea, but this is my blog so I'm going to talk about it anyway."  This is because I'm a kind and considerate soul who knows just how much you anticipate reading all about his many weird opinions.

Stories are important because they're what really mark us as sentient beings.  Whether or not they elevate humans above so-called dumb animals, I've no idea.  Maybe crows tell each other stories.  I'm pretty sure my cats do, and there are a lot of species with more brain power than cats.   But if you think about it, even in intelligence research on non-human species, a lot of the big revolutionary findings have to do with how these animals learn, not from instinct or direct experience, but from one another, from observation or, in the cases folks seem to find most mind-boggling, communication.

Communication is storytelling.  At a basic, direct level it's really simple nonfiction; nonetheless, it is an individual or a group of individuals telling another individual or group of individuals about an occurrence, a thing, or an idea.  Telling them a story. At a slightly less simple level, the teller might use a figure of speech to explain a more difficult concept, setting down a layer of abstraction and the first step toward fiction.

The most definitive step is lying.  Not all stories are lies, even the fictional ones, but all lies are stories and the capacity to lie demonstrates the ability to communicate things that originated in one's own brain.  That's some pretty high thought processes right there.

So, communication is pretty key to being an advanced life form, and communication is storytelling.  Why the passion about fictional stories, then?  Why do people like me get all defensive of people who don't even exist outside of our brains?  Why do we devote hours to thinking about them, the worlds they live in, the words that make up those worlds?

My totally unscientific theory is that it's a branch of mythology.  Mythology, essentially, is stories told to explain the world.  All religions are mythology; so is science.  This does not invalidate any of them, it's just what they are.  Ancient peoples explained changes in the weather as the whims of the gods, just as some modern folk explain life's mind-boggling diversity as the result of a single divine being's will.  For millennia, religion explained everything.  Mythology was monolithic, or at least nearly so, as there have always been folks searching for empirical explanations.

Once globalization got earnestly underway (along, unfortunately, with a whole boatload of imperialism,) mythology branched as the empiricists gained momentum.  Suddenly there were two ways of explaining the world, which some people found compatible and others didn't and either way a whole lot more just plain stories started popping up - stories that didn't seek to explain why the sky was blue or why rain falls, but stories that were about mortal people and their interactions with themselves, with one another and with their world.

That's the crux of it.  Stories are about us -  not you and me, specifically, but a well-written story says something about people.  It may not be physically real, but it's relevant.  It presents ideas we care about, in a way that isn't our own lives, blow by blow, reiterated, and because it is written, or filmed, or recorded, we can share it.  We can lend someone the book or the DVD, we can ask them to tune in on the radio, we can give them the CD, and then once they've read or watched or listened to the story we can talk about it.  We can tell stories about the story, and in so doing, about ourselves and one another.

*Name changed because I'm not THAT much of a jerk.