Storytellers

 

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that it is possible to transport oneself out of the ordinary and into realms untold? That one can visit a past now moldering and decayed, and see it gleaming as if not a moment had elapsed? Do you believe that the future isn’t something that happens to someone else far from now, but is instead something to be explored here, and now? What about angels, and demons? How then monsters and heroes, queens and rogues? Deadly secrets, sacred texts, and pirates. What about pirates?

I believe that all these things are imminently possible, and in fact I dare you to deny it. I dare you to prove that I don’t experience every single one of these things, and more, within the course of a month. Magic, mystery, and wonder are afoot. Right here, right now, I’ll tell you a story.

Tell us a story, that ageless request, as old as humanity itself. Gathered together after a long day of the required survival tasks, early humans faced each other across a fire pit and together they contemplated the dark and all the forces within it. The women held their babies close and eyes shifted towards the night, blinded by fire, that impenetrable darkness must have surely seemed limitless in it’s vastness. The men would have struggled not to grip their weapons a little tighter at the call of something wild and hungry. It is left to the storyteller, the repository of all known myth and legend to lift them out of themselves. His job, both sacred and practical, to take the unknown and unknowable and make them real would be safeguarded for thousands of years. He was holy, the living history of an oral people.

So moving is the urge to record and share the stories of our lives and the legends of our peoples that eventually ideas became symbols, and symbols became words. A secret language known only to the elite few, written first on stone, then tablets, papyrus, and parchment. The power in the written word and its ability to transcend the every day long after the writer is gone is epic. Books written before the birth of Christ are still read to this day, held up as magnificent examples of ancient literature. Even then, the hero got the girl, even if it took him a really long time. It is said that the burning of the Library at Alexandria set back the intellectual evolution of man centuries, if not more. Enter the Dark Ages and behold the power of the written word and collected knowledge.

The course of human history changed forever when words were made cheap. No longer was book learning the pursuit of only the rich. Now the common man, if not the peasant, could afford the textual pleasure of the turned page. The press brought the word of the Lord and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry to the world. Politics, literature, current events and how they were reported, all trembled with the promise of seemingly instantaneous content. Such power, words in the form of books. Power both dangerous and heady, that would both inflame dark hearts and uplift the purity of the human soul.

Tell us a story, and so they did. They told tales rife with flowery prose, delicate and genteel. Tales fit for kings and tales for paupers. Stories written for the every man, full of hard knocks and hope that things could be different. Stories to delight and mystify, with heroes to whom no mystery was too obscure. The people were entertained as never before, but it didn’t stop there. Words were powerful beyond the ability to awe, the written word could also change the world. Tracts on religion, politics, and morality all flooded the civilized world, food good or evil, and couched as truth. At least some of them found a home, like intellectual darts, inside the hearts and minds of people who’s paradigm might now suddenly… shift. Books are banned for a reason, spiteful and fearful though that reason may be. Books can be dangerous, and a single story can shape nations.

And so, we return to the ability of the written word help us transcend our singular selves into something more, to places we’ve never been but might like to someday. We give of ourselves to people, places, and times we’ve never seen but are so real that for those moments we are lost, and happily so. Books, stories, give us worlds to explore and other people’s lifetimes to do it in. For the span of a few minutes, hours, or a day, we are expanded beyond ourselves. Our histories are now not only our own, but everyone’s, anyone’s, and they reach past the dawn of man as far back as science will take us. Our futures are limitless, terrible and wonderful. From cover to cover we uncover fantastical tapestries woven for the pure delight of young and old.

My challenge to you is this: turn off your talking heads and glowing screens. Unplug your fingers from plastic keys and remotes, and step away. Do something radical, something dangerous. Turn the page and see what lies around the bend and beyond the horizon.