Nonfiction | On Stories

It’s trendy to say things along the lines of the world is made of stories or we are a story or we need words for a new story.

What does this mean though? Are we talking about Hollywood re-inventing itself? Are we talking about the need for new ideological stories? What is a story, and what is the rather elusive demand for a new one?

I’m just going to throw a flashlight over the terrain as it seems to me.

So, firstly, where do we get our stories from?

Netflix, Amazon, Hollywood, the telly, the media, blogs, websites, books and magazines, in print and online. We also get stories from each other, in person. There are also lots of stories shown to be, somehow, not relevant To Us, unless we are intellectual – official seekers of knowledge, and of course this means, we feel we have to be worthy enough to enter the corridors which lead us to them. The stories of the religions often remain shrouded if it is not our own, stories from other cultures are Othered, and then become prey of greater narratives.

The loss of stories within the Colonial narrative is terrifying. It is one of the clearest examples of how a story of gross force obliterates the subtler, authentic stories within us. The Colonial story and now its children, globalism, consumerism, the pandemic of Othering, consigns us to live with the unconscious heart-break of holding our own broken story within us. Not so long ago, we knew them. We each hold an unlived memory of the full story of our own meaning but we have lost the vehicle (the original story) on which we may return and become whole. This is the longing which is captured in our great literature, this is the stuff of redemption. The obliteration of the wholeness of being produces our need for stories to remind us how to get back.

A fractured story, once the original parts go missing, requires the sacred to become complete again, a journey not across lands, not the reconquering of space or multiplication of zeros in a bank account, but a sacred remembering and the sacrifice of everything physical, in order to become whole. This, of course, is some journey. And it isn’t going to be done by those who get personal gains from the stories they give us. Our authentic stories are rarely found in the narrative which has been destroying them (despite the likes of Fleabag and Bojack Horseman).

So who are the most rapacious story tellers? Who are the ones we should be weary of? I am terrible with films and TV series, but I will say this: they are the stories where there is a goody and a baddy, a hero, a princess, an ending, any group conquered by force, any evil, savage character slayed and order restored. Any unsuspecting individual plucked from ordinariness and sky-rocketed to happiness due to a set of circumstances and consequences, simultaneously miraculous and secured by a self-seeking iron will. A true story of being has no such edges.

We go into debt as we consume these stories, we are paying the creditors - the owners of the screens, with our cash and our peace. We know in our hearts that the world is not like that, the themes leave us desperate for more, or unbothered having experienced an empty enjoyment, which, because it indicates that we are no longer even recognising our own deadening, is the most worrying reaction of all.

What are these stories preventing us from doing? The stories that give us a goody and a baddy, the stories which show the victory over life after some incredible act of will, the stories which show the overcoming of the evil group by the force of good, are preventing us at looking deeper into our hearts and our humanity to approach a way of being that presents a solution. That way of being is so CLEAR to all of us that we are dropping into addictions, depressions, escapisms, confusion, anger, loss, simply because our spirits are tired and broken from the persistent act of voluntary blindness. It's hard work to keep pretending you don't see the thing before you, the thing searching for your gaze.

What our hearts tell us might be true, is often the opposite of what we are living. And so our problems begin. Many of our hearts are far more beautiful than the work we do. Why are we obsessed with ‘bad police officers’: what is this story? What do we need to understand to realise, were we the 'bad police officer', born and brought up in his or her story, that we might have behaved in the same way? Where does everyone get the idea that they are the goody and the other person needs to be condemned? The horror of a bad police officer is a product of the story we too partake in. Where is the texture to our social being? Can we recognise that we live in a moment where we are conditioned to revere the use of force? Why have we not initiated ourselves into the world on a surer footing?

Our political systems are based on binaries. That one group will eventually be right and fix whatever issue is in front of them is simply never, ever evidenced in our real lives is it? Whenever we get truly honest with ourselves, the stories of our lives are wonderfully complex, enemies become friends, our long held beliefs can be turned over, victory becomes a bitter pill, we apologise when we never thought we would, we break the rules and realise we never cared, the thing which we thought would buy us freedom, starts to kill us off, we forgive.

The stories we are now being given are feeding destructive political systems and propelling the idea that we are all separate beings in some grand moral hierarchy, where for most of us, we have decided we are on the top point of ‘good’ on the right side. And we are full of fear. Put simply: You think Trump is a deranged maniac? You fall into that category.

The left can Other Trump; victory over him will be his removal and the destruction of his ‘stuff’. But this is not it at all. Looking deeper, if you were born into a society that rewards the self-seeking accumulation of material wealth (the West), into a family crippled by trauma, and you had the traits, resources and mind that Trump has been bestowed, which clearly allowed him to succeed and be rewarded in the system he found himself, would you be 100% sure you would have acted differently?

If you were as good as him at creating money from money, would you have decided at a certain point not to do it? Can you be sure? I am not condoning Trump, I am simply saying he is conditioned by the stories around him to make the choices he has. But just because we are conditioned to make certain choices it does not mean we have to make them. This is where he falls short. But do you see, this is a far more human question. How many of us rock up at 40 asking: I’m not sure how I have ended up in this job, in this life? Well, you were making choices based on the reward system in which you found yourself. Same patterns as Trump.

Stories which lack texture, community, discourse, psychic change, transformation without losing the totality, stories which have endings where the ‘bad’ exits or is removed, are ultimately killing many of us off. It produces violence, anger, and confusion. It creates riots and arguments. It leaves Britain generously auditioning Kier Starmer for the new role as ‘hero’, a role which cannot be fulfilled when his task is to be the hero of 60 million or so people. Stories which lack texture lead people to pull down statues, to prove they are on the side of the good, and obviously, leaves the world hot-spot for reductive story lines – Twitter – ablaze with hate.

The most destructive aspect of the stories which rule our world today is the fact that we want to know the ending. What is the purpose of that experiment? You’re anti-capitalist? So you’re a Marxist? No? Well what are you then? These questions are dangerous and useless, because they destabilise the journey into the sacred before it is ever allowed to begin. What if the answer is more like the discovery of Penicillin, that it comes from doing the next right thing? What if all we have to do is be open to outcomes we never dreamed of?

And The Next Right Action is in our hearts, so close to the surface we have to really work hard at ignoring it. We are manically consuming self-help books, starting yoga classes, wondering about how to get our skin to glow, all these things are the symptoms of our unease, and that unease will be relieved by noticing that the world does not end if you make a change because it feels right but doesn’t have an end goal. Changes of this nature can simply be in service to life – it is that big and that small. It’s metric is within you.

Perhaps the new story is about principles of living rather than outcomes - and I see too that this is ideology if we wish to name it. One thing that blows my mind is that we feel so good when we do something for someone else, and yet the idea of service has now been tidily compartmentalised and capitalised. We need to take back our right to serve life and love it. This change feels necessary. This story is new. You do not have to name it yet. That you feel an urge to help, to knock on a neighbour’s door, to leave your desk, your job, to speak out, to find out how join those working to save the Amazon, heal the rift in book club, heal the broken, stolen stories within our communities, to hug your partner in the middle of a fight. Do it.

Let yourself change, and our stories may become sacred, they may teach us what we need to do next, they may gift us an unlived memory of what we did next.