A Letter to Myself from Myself on the Subject of Why Stories Matter

Escape by Drowning

Sometimes we call literature an escape. Sometimes we say we get “lost” in our craft. Lots of us claim to make things and read books to avoid dealing with reality, with how reality stings and never says thank you and seems more intent on making a buck than coaxing out smiles. Reality overflows with unpleasantness, and we makers and doers and consumers of invented things, we prefer our imagined places to the half-broke, glowering, itchy world where we had the mixed-fortune to be born.

In our deepest selves, we know that’s just a story we tell. People ask us why we focus on these fictions when there are “real” things we might experience instead. And we often tell them that we’d rather our fictions than the crudeness of a reality both unforgiving and seeming malicious.

We tell them that, because it’s an easier story to tell than the truth.

We need to make it make sense.

All of it. We need to make sense of it all. We need to make it make sense. Make the dichotomous toolery make sense. Make the heart-shaking inconsistent balances of pain and pleasure make better balance. We need to believe that, somehow, there is sense to it.

To make it make sense, we look for sense that’s been made of it by other people. Life is lonely. Thinking makes it so. We think, and other people think, and we make barriers between us all. By our natures, this mode of affairs feels unnatural. We’re naturally social creatures, even if we sometimes hate other humans. It’s hardwired into us to be tribal animals. In the grim-ful face of all the barriers we all create, we try to find ways through. Surely, we think to ourselves — though not always so verbally — there is, somewhere out there, someone with better answers to explain this mess than we have ourselves.

Shamans. We want Shamans.

People who’ve been to the other side and come back with stories to tell.

There have got to be people out there who made sense of it all. There have got to be wise adventurers who found out that, in spite of all this nigh unbearable roughness, there’s a point to it. There’s got to be a justification for all of this, and someone out there has it figured out.

With rushing joy in it, we think we find those shamans. Shamans that they had, in the depths of their wisdom, produced beautiful things. They produced directions and road maps that, at first blush, seem careworn with marks of enlightened. The truth dances at our fingers and capers above our eyes as if it had always been there.

Then, inevitably, and partly with the help of our shamans, we grow wiser. Then, inevitably, and partly with the help of our shamans, the magic dims. The magic doesn’t entirely go away, but we find an odd source of pain: the magic itself grieves us.

The message of the Shamans is the same as the message of that voice somewhere in us:

They don’t know any better than we do.

Which devastates us. When we inevitably discover that them we thought were Merlins are as much Warts as us, it usually leaves us crippled. Stumbling shades of ourselves, wondering how to heal our innocence and joy and rediscover the magic we can’t see anywhere near as well as we remember.

If we’re lucky (and by “lucky” I mean stubborn and attentive), we discover the moral of this tragedy, and we rewrite the ending.

The moral:

We Can Strive to be Stumbling Mentors too

A most potent revelation can arise by interacting with our mentors. In their unforgivably human way, all our mentors implicitly cry out an invitation to us.

Join us, they say.

The work won’t be easy, they say, it won’t necessarily yield anything clear or very many material things. It will, in fact, be hard work, made especially hard because you won’t get encouraged a lot. It will rarely be rewarding, although those few of the rewards can balance the difference for a lifetime.

Facing that, they say, please join us. We can’t fix everything. We might not fix anything. We can sure as hell try. There’s some nobility in that, at least.

They might speak this invitation loudly, or in a way that only you can hear. They might sound as if they’re saying the opposite, or they might never get around to inviting you at all. Maybe it’s the amorphous powers of muse and marvel that invite you. Maybe you’ve got no interest in holding to any outside forces inviting you into the fold. If you’re member to that shambling crowd acting on a compulsion to give voice to the void…you know who you are.

It’s cold here, standing with our backs to the fire and looking out at the dark, trying to find meaning in it. It’s also electric.

The Dalai Lama says that the world has no voice.

We must give voice to the void.

You say you’re escaping into your fantasy world, but I’m onto you. You’re not escaping. You’re letting it all in. You’re drowning in it. You’re letting it swallow you because you know there’s some good reason for it, and you know you need to fall deep into it. You know it’s worth the work.

In spite of the pain-riddling that’s forged this world holey, you see something magical, and you can’t quite get your head around it. Where everything’s unreasonable and sad, you can’t find where the magical thing fits.

So you’re making a place for it.