On Stories

Day 44

What is a story? I can have a great deal of information about an object or an event, and yet be unable to construct a coherent story out of all that information if I don't know how it is all put together. A story about something is not just a bundle of information about that object. It is a bundle of ordered information, not necessarily in time, but with a logical ordering of some sort. The story by itself is a single thing, like the story of the hobbit, the story of the first man on the moon, and the story of why I'm writing this down. However, each story is also very complex, because each story contains a great many things within it. Not just information in the abstract, or information about what is in the story. The story also often contains information about what is outside the story, information about the teller and the reader of the story, as well as a sense of completeness or incompleteness. To hear or know a story is also to know about many other things, because almost no story is entirely self-contained. Stories build upon other stories and take place in worlds. A story can include allusions to something else, remembrances or traditions, references or clever remarks which can be interpreted in many ways. A story can be understood in many different ways, though this is just what we would expect from a story being a thing, a gem., However, a story can also influence how you interpret the things in the story; who you understand to be the bad witch, and whom are the poor lost children. We might say that this is giving one side of the story – we might also imagine that the witch really was kind, the children were sociopaths, and what actually happened in the tale is entirely different, and yet agree on the majority of the bare facts of the tale, the exactly what happened. The way in which the story is told, and the words used, the order of information passed on, and how the characters in the story are related to each other can all effect how we understand and feel about a story.

Investigating stories is a wonderful way of learning about different aspects of things. Go take a look online at the latest news story, and try to find the most biased news sources that you can. Preferably ones which oppose one another. I feel relatively certain that you will find two very different versions of the story. Sometimes these various versions come about because of differences in beliefs about facts between the two sources, and this case is the hardest to deal with because both sides end up talking past one another. However, there can be several layers to this. For example, imagine a fight that breaks out – who started it? Imagine a confrontation – who was the aggressor? Imagine a series of mutual accusations – who is telling the truth? Bare physical facts might be able to tell you who swung the first punch, but is that really who started the fight? After all, insults or threats might have just as much of an effect on the start of a fight as physical belligerence. In polite society, we say that words don't have the force of physical violence, but in practical life words can hurt just as much as stones. If there is a fight or a shooting, often your opinion of the whole case hinges on who you think was the aggressor, one, two, or many of them. Isn't this just an interpretation of the facts? Yet this aspect of a confrontation is often treated, in my experience, like an actual fact of the case, a source of reference and support for an opinion. We form these opinions because bare facts often aren't enough to gain an understanding of the whole of an event.

We like to not just know what happened, but also how and why. To be able to fit the entire thing into our world, we want for that thing to make sense from multiple aspects. We seem to want to be able to have a intellectual opinion, an emotional connection, and a mode of reference. We want to know the tale as well as feel something about it, because if we know something but do not feel anything about it, then it is almost like we are missing something. Is it possible to not have feel an emotion about a story? It certainly seems like for many of the stories we know, we don't have a great deal of feeling about them. Most of the information we have, say about the fact that a door can be shut, isn't of importance to us at all times. The information is far away, so built into our tale that we don't even see it, or it appears inconsequential. It doesn't matter for our understanding of the tale, or our understanding of anything whatsoever, at least not in a way that we notice. However, it can suddenly come into focus, for example in a scary tale, a door that shuts by itself suddenly has a great deal of importance and emotional impact. The information that a door can shut, and the attendant information that a door doesn't shut by itself but is always effected by a person, wind, gravity, or a ghost is not come to the forefront. The story, by a particular point or event, reveals something in the world which was not apparent at first, or at least not obvious and in our conscious awareness. Yet, somehow the information has got to be somewhere. After all, the story didn't explain to us what a door is and that is can shut – did we know it before hand, and did the story need us to know that in order to understand the tale at all?

I don't think so – the majority of the story is, presumably, quite comprehensible if we don't know anything whatsoever about doors. I'm making an assumption here, for it could be that the story is absolutely filled with doors or that the shutting door is an important plot point, but bare with me for a while. Think of a horror movie you've seen recently for example – can you remember a specific point in which a closing door had a great impact? I can't, and yet I can certainly imagine that one could, because I've seen the like somewhere, in some story, even though I don't precisely remember which one. In this sense, there is background to the story. The story is complex, and yet filled with simple things, simple events and information. The sense of the story lies in how that information is put together, and while some information is necessary to have an understanding of a story, like knowing ghosts are scary, other information like closing doors often isn't. It's not unreasonable to imagine that we could have a horror story filled with ghosts, and yet not filled with a single shutting door. One set in the middle of the doors perhaps. Although, there are many ways to understand a set of shutting doors. For example, we could imagine that to say that something isn't possible is like shutting your eyes to a possibility, or shutting the door an a piece of reality – walling it out. There are other was to imagine this as well, to understand how a shutting door, not a physical door, might be incorporated into a story.

There is a almost always more to say, more ways in which I could say 'perhaps this', or 'imagine that', or 'it could be that...', and so on. Even once a story has been given to us, we can always read it again from a different angle, understand it in a different way. In this sense, a single story from a single angle is almost always a lie. It is a lie because there is another way to interpret the story which makes the story false, which makes the version of the story we have unstable, which fills us with doubts about the truth, validity, comprehensiveness, or meaning of the tale.

A story is not just information, but also a series of logical relations between things. A story is facts and interpretations, and sometimes those facts are interpretations and those interpretations are facts – or treated as such. That is, a story is much like a logical field, and a world which contains many logical fields is like our ability to understand that there may be many ways to tell a story, to understand a thing or event, and yet have none of those stories be entirely right, entirely complete, and entirely free from bias. In this sense, most stories, like most logic fields, and most points of view, don't stand up very well under certain conditions, but do stand up very well under other conditions. Those conditions are the state of the world.

Stories are rarely direct. They don't give you information as often as they show it. You follow a story from beginning to end, though the time in the tale doesn't always match up with the order of events the story is about, and it is in the following of this journey, that you understand the story. Sometimes you are drawn into a story, and sometimes you manage to get into it, to suspend your disbelief for a moment. You can start to question a story of course, start to put together your own understanding of that tale and deny what you're being told. This is to start to create another story.

One of the greatest stories we tell is the story about ourselves, to ourselves. We also tell stories to ourselves about other people. I think we like to have an understanding of what goes on around us that which is in the form of a story, because we think of ourselves as characters in a story. We came from somewhere, we are somewhere, and we're going somewhere. We want to know how things fit together, because if we have a logical picture of the world we are concerned with, a story, then we have an idea of what to do, how things fit together, and what can happen. This might be called the area of care.

The entire world is the basis of our understanding of what is, but we are not always consciously present in the world. It's where we stand and what we are made of; when it becomes unstable we are unstable, when it is strong we are strong, and the world is how we can describe us and what we are. However, even if we disregard the solipsistic theory, we are not often even consciously aware of most of the world, or most of us. We aren't always angry, sad, or happy. We aren't always afraid or selfish, aren't always one thing or the other in neat and definable way. Rather, we are a being in transition, in partial form. That is to say that while we exist as a part of the world and understand ourselves as a gem in the world, we are often only aware of some aspects of ourselves.

This aspect changes and moves, is the shifting angles of a the gem in the world, and is the story we tell about ourselves. This story doesn't only include us, but can also involve other people, ghostly fears, and bright hopes. Thoughts and ideas flit about in our heads, appearing and disappearing, connecting and disconnecting. We might not be thinking of something like a shutting door, but suddenly it appears to us and enters our conscious awareness. The part of the world which includes things like shutting doors is now the concern of the logical field of the story we are in and of. We also have an unconscious mind, a person who is us and not us that has a story to tell as well. We are sometimes suddenly surprised by the extent of our feelings or reactions, to realize that we are in fact jealous or sad – we admit to ourselves what we are, and yet we were often already that thing before we thought it or named it. The jealous, depressed, lonely, or daring self was always there and was always telling a story about the world and the things in it, always had an interpretation or an idea about what to do, rather Cindy was being kind or mean, whether we could or could not climb that mountain, and whether we had the energy to go out tonight or not. That is, we always had these parts in us, but they were as parts of a story which were not important at the moment. They always effected the tale, but we often weren't aware of them, only learning later upon reflection that if the door shut, of course it was because the ghost entered the room. We often connect things after the fact because the story we are is now bringing them out, or they can be deduced form the events of the tale when before they weren't.

These alternate understandings of what is happening that we have and that we are aware that we could have, which are like the different forms a story can take about a set of facts and interpretations, are alternatives of us. They are actualities and possibilities that were always there, and always effecting us, always judging the world, but weren't part of who we thought we were at the moment, weren't a part of our consciousness awareness or our recited tale yet. Just like a story can surprise us, we can also be surprised by ourselves. We can become more aware of ourselves, become more aware of the various aspect of ourselves in the world, or the various stories that we have. This is becoming a more complete person and integrating our aspects. Thus, we can learn more about ourselves, and also more about other things in the world as well. To know an aspect is not to know simply a piece of information, but to know a story, which includes many things. As you recognize various characters in all their various guises, you can perhaps gain a better understanding of their aspects as well. This shows that knowledge of an aspect, a side of a gem, is different from knowledge of a shard because gems are always complexs well shard can sometimes be simple. As the story we tell ourselves about ourselves becomes more and more like the world and less and less like a story, though the extent to which that is possible is still an ongoing question, we grow as a person. Growing not necessarily in the sense of improvement, but in the sense of integration and self knowledge – of just not fighting against ourselves as much – To tell a more complete story, to know ourselves better, and to know the world better.