Once upon a time, I wrote an autobiographical journal entry on paper with a pen. The writing was full of my recollections and memories: the subjective truth, from my point-of-view. Between one paragraph and the next, a different narrative voice took over. That voice began telling their story. The writing transformed from fact to fiction without a pause for breath.
The core of that story was the subjective truth told from my experience, but transmuted into fiction. The truth made the story believable and helped the reader to suspend their disbelief and become complicit in the telling. It’s the telepathic alchemy from writer to reader: remembrance to imagination, generated language to muscle movements, printed word via vision to the brain, and then, hopefully, to understanding.
The stories are always there, in all of us. We are immersed in story from birth: in books and fairy tales; in cartoons, television programmes and films; in our familial retelling of our histories. We cannot elude them.
But what if we had no tales? What if we were free from all that storied heritage? Would we continue to make stories of our own?
Think back. Can you remember when we were in the caves, or further, in the trees? Do you remember how we learned to communicate, to make ourselves known and to know others? Have you remembered how we made sense of the world with language?
With language, and without even trying, we told our stories: about what to eat, what to hunt, what to run from, what was safe, and what was dangerous. These stories gave us an enormous survival advantage, so, of course, we propagated them.
As time passed, our languages grew with the slow accretion of novel words, phrases and meanings. We added embellishments and nuances to our tales. These edits made the stories more useful and more powerful. Each story communicated the information within it more effectively and became more memorable.
Civilisation’s memes travelled across the world.
Had all the original stories already been told by the time we dispersed out of Africa? Did these stories become hard-wired into our genome and brains? Is this the origin of Jung’s Collective Unconscious? Would you still hold these images in your head if someone denied you your culture’s stories? Would you feel the need to re-invent those stories for yourself?
We tell ourselves stories all the time, in our attempts to make sense of everything around us. Creating and telling our stories is an inherent outcome of being self-aware: a function of language and cognition.
What came first? The chicken or the egg, or the story of the chicken and the egg?
What came first was being able to express the idea of ‘what came first?’. What came first was the ability to reason, and to tell ourselves stories about how we thought and how we imagined the world to work.
Without the ability to imagine, reason, and tell stories, we would still be in those trees, in those caves.
And I could only write things that had happened to me instead of being able to imagine something new.