Stories upon stories...

 

ON the local beaches of northwest Prince Edward Island, I’ve been fascinated by the variety of small stones and pebbles: their colours and textures and shapes. And, magpie-like, I often pick them up.

Each has a story that’s tantalisingly just out of reach. The pointed stone at the top right of the picture above is chert, and it has been flaked: someone once held that in skilled hands, worked it for a bit, then discarded it. It’s an unfinished hunter’s tool. Or perhaps it was an apprentice piece… a practice exercise, or an experiment, using an inferior piece of stone? I found it on a beach within a sheltered bay, among a scattering of flaked and un-flaked stone of the same sort — none of it native to Prince Edward Island. The pebble to the left of it is the same, semi-translucent material.

Was this once a Mi’Kmaq workshop?  A place where, perhaps, a young hunter learned a necessary skill from an older expert? Why was so much un-worked stone lying around? If it had been imported, probably from deposits in New Brunswick, surely it had some value to whoever worked it? What happened that it was left there?

Most of the pebbles on these beaches are fallout from the glacial morraines that overlaid the area at the mouth of the St Lawrence River during the last glacial… more than 12,000 years ago. They’re now eroding out of the soft sandstone and you realise that they were smoothed, not on the beach here, but on long-vanished shores and in rivers many thousands of years ago. Others arrive in the spring with ice that formed on, then was washed from beaches further north, probably the Labrador coast. When the chunks of ice ground on our shores and melt, they leave little mounds of the pebbles, shells and the other beach wrack they’ve brought with them.

IN most cases, the mother rock from which they came is likely to have been formed billions of years ago in the vast volcanic plateaux of “Arctica”: the highly mineralised sheet of rock that, as well as laying down the Canadian Shield, contributed to the landforms of present day Scotland, Greenland, Siberia and eastern Antarctica.

Many experts think it could well have been there that life as we know it began (see Creation Story: http://nosretap-ekim.blogspot.com/2010/10/creation-story.html).


The biggest stone pictured is decorated with patterns I imagine to be the result of some sort of fossilisation: I’d love to hear from anyone who can tell me more. And that finely-grained, shiny black pebble (on the right in the top picture), naturally buffed to a tantalising sheen, fascinates me: there are so very few black pebbles on these beaches, one like this stood out. Much more common are quartzes and calcites like the snowy-white smoothed pebble at the bottom left corner of my picture. The little deep-red one? Iron? Volcano? Earth’s core? Maybe.

 

I have no geological training and little knowledge — this’d be more interesting if I did —but I do realise that each small pebble I pick up is its own, remarkable story: story on a timescale so far beyond first-hand human experience that it’s humbling, and even a geological explanation would not dispel the feelings of encounter-with-enormity I get from holding one of these pebbles in the palm of my hominid hand.

In fact, we all occupy our own measures of time, even though there are all sorts of unresolved questions about what, exactly, “time” is. In many ways, WE are time; in many ways, we generate time. And, when we see ourselves this way, we realise that each of us is an unfolding story: a story we graft on to all the other stories around us in ways that we, individually, can shape.

We respond to story in a deep, primal way. Stories connect directly with our emotions as well as our intelligence and reason. As every charity fundraiser knows, we “feel” stories, and fall for them, while any amount of raw data can leave us utterly unmoved.

This sense of story, this need for narrative, is deeply implanted in our human way of understanding things. We’re adept at finding patterns, order and uniqueness, and excerpting from patterns of experience “our” stories and “my” story.

We’re born with the magical power of finding meaning in particular interactions with all that’s flying by, sweeping past and around us, and carrying us along. Once we have found that meaning, we’re enabled to create places to live and ways of living in company with others, even though we can never come to know them fully. But, thanks to the new stories that begin to include them, we generate resonances between “me” and “you, “us” and “them”… and the stories bring us feelings of companionship, predictability and control: we are NOT alone. We are a “community” that, as time goes by, continues to grow its own repertoires of reassuring narratives.

As our dread of the chaos falls from us, we claim for ourselves the power to act, to analyse and to shape destinies we’re able to believe are of our own making.

Intuitively, we compose and tell stories all the time. We see events and experiences as stories. Story is THE art that seeds all of our other arts, all the way back to their origins. Stories shape our political and moral evaluations. Stories are also the stuff of daily conversation, whether it’s the quick sharing bit of gossip about some acquaintance we saw at the mall the other day, or the thoughtful telling of our hopes, or a description of some activity we’re engaged in; they regularise “our” worlds.

Shared stories establish and maintain relationships, build communities and define cultures. When we hear a story, it enters the world of our experience and changes, perhaps in just the smallest of ways, the way we appreciate and think about the world — and this, in turn, changes us. It’s all cumulative: we are shaped by the stories we hear, just as we are shapers of our own stories.

THE “magic” elixir is meaning.

Information gets useful and available to us when it can be related to what things mean, when it can be seen in the context of a story or theory (and a ‘theory’ is just a good story in an academic gown). Information that stands on its own, alone, is hard to see as anything but intellectual litter. If we can’t find any place for it, we’ll disregard it altogether. At the same time, entire, coherent narratives can form around hardly any facts at all, if there’s a mite of meaning to be had there: phrenology became “science”, Loch Ness hides a monster in its depths and failing to win a lottery improves your chances the next time… for example.

The power of a narrative to manipulate information into meaning — and thereby to make it considerably more persuasive and memorable — applies to everything. An e-mail or letter that’s sensitive to the principles of narrative (by clearly linking new information into an existing story), will be better understood and remembered than any unorganised downloading of data. Computers need software to systematise the data that’s put into them; we need a story.

It’s revealing to deliberately start looking at all the “things” around you as moments in a continuing story. Nothing around you has always been the way it is now. Everything was once something else and, right now, is gradually or rapidly becoming something else again.

Think about your clothes: those synthetic fabrics were made from hydrocarbons that came out of an oil well. Chemically, they originated in some vast, dripping, decomposing prehistoric swamp. Once they were plants, waving in the sun and wind, beaten by rains of long, long ago …or creatures ploughing around in the primeval muck.

The wool you’re wearing was once on the back of a sheep. Where? Some sprawling Australian sheep station? A moist, misty Scottish hillside? Some coyote-threatened threatened flock in North America? Can you imagine the particular sheep? What hands sheared the sheep and graded the wool and baled it? It was dyed and milled and woven. People did that and many of them are probably doing the same work today.

Your genuine cotton grew on a plant … where? The Nile Delta perhaps, where Mark Antony once made his fated way? Or was it Uzbekistan, the world’s second-largest exporter of cotton where children as young as seven are conscripted to help bring in the annual harvest. Where was it processed? In Turkey or the Phillippines, both notorious for sweatshop labour practices? Your leather? That was once the hide of a cow or bull, or some other animal that grazing pastures you may never see.

Everything you touch, smell or see is like that, a moment is a story that has yet to be concluded.

And, once upon a time, every atom heavier than hydrogen was formed in the cataclysmic collapse of a dying star, then flung out into space to coalesce into the shape of the world we inhabit. Everything — a person, a place, an object — nudges everything else and is poised, ready to catapult us into experiences we don’t have time to consider … unless we choose to enter into them.

Categories — the way we’re inclined to name experience with the most obvious, habit-formed label — can trip us up because they can hide our own experience from us, they can hide, even to us, the true, personal measure of an event or ongoing experience. Few categories are as clear, as consistent or as closed as we routinely assume. We get a most of our categories from our culture and, when we stop to think about it, it’s all pretty obvious, but our culture — by way of our routines — ensnares us in habit-formed ways of thinking so snugly that it seldom occurs to us to re-examine them. Who has the time?

We all, and each of us, are surrounded by constant opportunities to rediscover, reshape and refresh our world. Taking charge of “my” story frees me to lead “my” life without loads of wanton baggage. Taking charge of “our” story helps us to shape the community that gives us our courage.

We don’t need a press campaign or massive social networking effort to do that: we simply need to express and present our essential values, insights and discovered meanings by telling the stories that are “true” to us.

The narratives we make, shared in our regular contacts with friends and the people who matter most to us, have the power to transform our lives, and our communities. It’s something we can do as we go about doing whatever it is that we do… just by sharing OUR stories.

As a way of living, it stands to extend our freedom, gain us respect… and inflame our hopefulness.