The Story Never Changes

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Shakespeare was talking about “life” in Macbeth, but that’s because he didn’t have social media in the seventeenth century.

The election is over (or is it?).  As always, it depends on the telling.

Social media has become a vomitous stream of nothingness.  Opinions fly this way and that like bothersome gnats that are swatted and promptly ignored.  Sometimes one comment or post might bite and itch for a while, but you scratch a couple of times and it fades.  But nothing changes.  Society screams out into the void and the void ignores.  Not even an echo.

For the last four years (maybe longer, but the last four years seems like a reality unto its own), I have watched Trump supporters attack the left and Trump-haters belittle the right.  Names were called.  Insults were hurled.  Arguments were made.  By the billions.  And not one mind was changed during the course of that avalanche of babbling and bickering. 

Not.  One.  Mind.

Yet it goes on.  Drones on.  “I’m always right and you’re always wrong.”  “I’m always smart and you’re always dumb.”  “I always know and you’ll never learn.”  Half the world thinks those on the Red side are a bunch of idiots.  The other side thinks those on the Blue half of America are a bunch of idiots.

I think they’re both right.

So take some time to read a post on social media and reserve comment.  The author is regurgitating misinformation and outright fallacy.  They don’t know what they’re talking about.  It’s just a story, full of fiction and drama and fantasy.  The person writing the tale is an idiot.  But before you reply with certain wit and scathing “facts”, remember, so are you.

We all tell our tales.

And that, friends and foes alike, is my tale, full of sound and fury.  

And nothing.

The Story of Science

When I was young, I was as interested in hard science as I was literature.  That was when I used to believe there was a difference between concrete information and interpretative narration.  As I grow older, I wonder if Physics and Chemistry are just tales told without characters, a series of information without a protagonist to give context.  

Freytag’s model details drama as breaking down into Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and the Denouement.  Consider the science of Medicine and a visit to a doctor’s office.  The Doc enters.  “How are you feeling?” acts as the Exposition.  The symptoms, the next worse than the one before, are the Rising Action.  The Climax comes from the dire diagnosis: something terrible is killing you.  The Falling Action might involve tears or a solemn phone call to your loved ones.  The Denouement is whatever course of treatment is prescribed.  The doctor told you a story and created a catastrophe. 

Doctors give you list of information and come to a conclusion.  But the story is sometimes wrong.  The scientists and experts just guess based on whatever information is at hand.  Or whatever agenda leads to the desired conclusion.  They tell the story they want to tell.  Data may be spun into a fantastic yarn or dumbed down into a ho-hum bedtime story.  

The evidence of facts as just more fiction are evident everywhere.  Explore cable news or online sites and check ten different talking heads on ten different channels.  Same data, different conclusions.  Same genre, different stories.  Science as unsolid as a gaseous state, someone trying to turn it solid by virtue of the way the story is told.

The world is changing.  There are experts everywhere, one for anyone.  You can always find someone who might write a story with an ending that you like.  But like a Doc’s diagnosis of dire destiny, I always recommend a second opinion.  Maybe one that has an ending different from the one you expect.

The Story is Fiction

High on any list of nonsense words ought to be “nonfiction”.

There really is no such thing as “nonfiction”.  Even medical journals and scientific papers are just conclusion based upon hypotheses.  Stories borne out of conclusions based on study and information.  A meteorologist gives a story of tomorrow’s weather based upon information and turns it into a (oftentimes farcical) narrative.  We understand that science is not the same as nonfiction.  But a doctor gives an opinion based upon information and everyone takes it as fact.  We like to believe in hard truths, but really the hard part is to accept that everything we experience is just a story that someone is telling us.

Recently, I asked a few people to name three timeless “nonfiction” books—it’s harder than it seems.  Even prominent works like A Brief History of Time is fiction—information as interpreted by Stephen Hawking.  His speculation is based on information.  As nonfiction as The Shining. 

Biographies, autobiographies, technical manuals.  None truer than a Shakespearean tragedy.  The histories of the Bard take details of the lives of kings such as Richard III and Henry VIII to play out as high drama.  The result?  A timeless lesson on conflict and power that has survived for four hundred years.

So what relationship “nonfiction” self-help book will survive the test of time like Romeo and Juliet?  What episode of Oprah will still speak to relationships in four centuries like Much Ado About Nothing?  Fiction gets to the heart of the matter, whereas folks telling facts fail in the interpretation.  Because the real story is always the human one, how we react to the world and how it changes around us.  What does a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird say about human nature that a hundred studies on race relations fail to report?  What insight does Pride and Prejudice give us into social norms and relationships between people in the 19th century?  Fiction gives the human story behind the mutable information, and that is a truth that is truly timeless.

            

The Story in Fourteen Words

“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Just a few words thrown into the wind to be plucked and pruned.  What new meaning can be construed by a limited bunch of letters?  Information in limited form can be given new beginnings, new endings, or made into something it never was.  Either side can make it mean opposite things depending on agenda and experience.

A story is more than just the last line of the novel.  The whole tale cannot be contained in a random passage plucked from the middle.  An ominous beginning may lead to a brighter end.  The story is more than one single chapter.  More than one paragraph or an especially interesting quote.  The story needs context, history, nuance, mystery.  Don’t believe you can know the whole story by just a few words.

Lately, we are given just a few words of the story.  A single picture from an extended video or a few words from a long speech or a sampling of data without regard to relation or method.  New stories form from this nucleus, and may be something entirely unrelated to the original intent or its actual genesis.  Too often, the story is construed into something fantastical from very limited information. 

“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” In Catcher in the Rye, what did those last words by J.D. Salinger’s convey about the whole story?  Fourteen people would take those fourteen words and tell fourteen different tales.  We cannot know a novel by its end, nor a whole story by just a few words, nor glean truth from snippets.  The world has been rendered soundbites and memes, a whole fiction based upon just a few random bits of information.

As always, I challenge us to ask questions.  Doubt before deciding.  Wonder instead of settling on a set story.  Don’t believe that you know the whole story by just skipping to the ending . . .

            

The Story of Fickle Fictitious Facts

We live in fictitious times indeed, my friends.

The story is everywhere right now.  Larger than life characters with fascinating backstories and mainstream melodrama.  Big names for big personalities—TRUMP, COUMO, FAUCI.  Constant suspense, harrowing cliffhangers, high stakes.  It is a story for the ages.  Playing now on screens everywhere.

Be not mistaken—this is not a biography of 2020.  This isn’t a true story.   The historical record of the last two months will not be found in the nonfiction section.  Instead of revisionist history, this is the revisionist now.  A fictionalized take set in present day.  I keep looking for a footnote to denote sources, but we are living a story.  Stories don’t have research.  They don’t have sources.  No footnotes.  We are getting information, but do not mistake fiction for facts.  Information is simply a collection of words absent source or circumstance or conformation.

Information without context is not a fact—it is an agenda.  

A story.  A script.  The players recite their lines in gravitas worthy Tom Stoppard or Arthur Miller—endless Shakespearean soliloquies over Twitter—fatality count in place of page numbers to pass the unfolding drama.  There’s danger, death, and drama.  We’re living in a science fiction with questionable science.  

Question everything.  Always.  Because you never know where the answers are coming from...

            

The Story of Now

So there are moments in life when I’ve had to pause and look around to see if I’m living in a movie.  Check the mirror and see if it’s Eddie Newton being played by Bruce Willis or John Malkovich.  Once, someone broke into our house and the next thing I knew I was prowling around with a steak knife, prodding in closets and under beds like Liam Neeson.  But it wasn’t a movie.  Or the phone call that came when I was least expecting with news that changed everything forever.  Not a movie.  September the Eleventh.  Not a movie.

I know now how those other stories ended.  But what about when you’re in the middle of the situation, and you pause and look around and wonder if someone had a script for this?  It just seems made up.  Who are these other characters in this tale?  A lot of them aren’t acting like they used to.  This is Wonderland, where fiction and facts are muddled and mimsy.  Brave heroes are scared - good guys are wearing masks - left has become right and right becomes left.  We’re in the middle of the story, or the middle of the beginning, or at least middler from the start than the finish.  What I don’t know is where the story is leading and how it is going to end and what it all means for our main characters.  

We’re through the looking glass, folks.  Things might go from worse to worser.  Folks aren’t happy on either side of the aisle  - in fact, we’re all mad here.

             

The Story of Story

I am currently obsessed by the idea of “story”.  Not the novels of Twain (in awe, not obsessed) or the latest Tom King run on Batman (impressed, but not obsessed) or the timelessness of Shakespeare (maybe a little obsessed).  It is the idea wherein each of us creates our own story of us - an autobiography of ourself that is written by a unique author and a biased researcher.  Each of those stories throughout history is entirely unique, not one the same as another.  We write our own chapters, every perspective unique to the individual protagonist, with a climax that always finishes with THE END.  History is rewritten to fit the narrative that we want and the chapters are arranged to make us each the hero of our own tale.  Facts are obscured and characters rewritten to revolve around a central theme of self.  Each tome is tailored specifically to the teller.  What a grand library - what a fascinating tapestry of tales.  In every narrative, there may be adventure, drama, romance, misery and mystery, tragedy and comedy.  And always, ever, a story that is worth being told.
               But before THE END
                               ...before the EVER AFTER
                                                         ...there is a ONCE UPON A TIME...