The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part III)

Stories Make Humans:

Imagine this: story is not only a noun but a verb. If it is a verb, then what does story do? One answer might be this: it makes humans.

“… schools were not valued by the Travelling community. Instead, stories were told and retold and passed on. Stories were the education which gave you the lessons you needed to grow up to be a good person.” — Duncan Williamson, The Flight of the Golden Bird

To come at this from another direction, humans have a mind the shape of a story. That’s why we love stories so much. They are the shape and texture of our psyche. This is why listening to stories makes us better, more responsible humans. Each plant and animal requires different kinds of foods. One of the main foods our mind’s need as humans is story.

To say this all differently: The bigger the story you can see, the more human you become.

Spells seek to make humans the center of the universe because spells are an expression of the human will, and our justifications for it, but our humanity is found in our lived relationship to the rest of life not in being in the center of life or at the top or in control. It is a strange mystery, in the anthropocene, humans are now everywhere and have touched everything but have never been more lonely (or less human). Humans are not the pinnacle of anything, we are the most dependent creature.

In his book Returning to the Teachings, Rupert Ross writes:

“Basil Johnston speaks of the Ojibway hierarchy of Creation in Ojibway Heritage. It is not based on intelligence or beauty or strength or numbers. Instead, it is baed on dependencies. It places the Mother Earth (and her lifeblood, the waters) in first place, for without them there would be no plant animal or human life. The plant world stands second, for without it there would be no animal or human life. The animal world is third. Last, and clearly least important within this unique hierarchy, come humans. Nothing whatever depends of our survival. SO much seems to flow from that focus on dependencies. Because human beings are the most dependent of all, it is we who owe the greatest duty of respect and care for the other three orders. Without them, we perish. Our role is therefore not to subdue individual parts of them to meet our own short-term goals, for that may disturb the balances between them. Instead, our role is to learn how they all interact with each other so we can try our best to accommodate ourselves to their existing relationships. Any other approach, in the long run, can only disrupt the healthy equilibria that have existed for millions of years and which, obviously enough, created the conditions for our own evolution.”

Humans are new to this world. Though we deeply belong here, we are the closest thing there is to a guest in this world. We have been welcomed into something. Even in Genesis, the world was here before us. We were born into it. It was not born from us. It is not here for us.

First there was the soil.

Then animals discovered how to carry the soil within them so they could move.

Then humans came — the forgetful and foolish little brother — and seemed to need to craft another type of culture that could remind them how to be human; a kind of culture that could remind them of the Big Story.

If you can only see a small part of the story and this small story doesn’t include in it the deep and vast mysteries that you don’t know yet (or worse that little story includes the belief that you should know or, even worse, that there’s nothing else to know) you’ll likely find yourself trapped in quicksand of grievance but, if you can let in the bigger story, that is likely to melt your hardened places back into the healing cordial of grief.

Stories might be understood as a sort of a kinship building bridge between ourselves, our ancestors, the natural world and the unseen. Spells are this same function — the bridge of language — in collapse. Its bricks and timbers are used to build walls.

Stories seem to live in the ‘weld’ — that ring of land between the village and the wild where our love of the world and its love of us meets and leaves a flower on the stone to mark their encounter. Stories are that flower — the residue of their love for each other, a small sign of a much bigger story Stories somehow give voice to both and offer food to both. Spells seem to live right downtown and look out past the city walls with suspicion.

Stories deepen kinship and help humans locate themselves in the world. Spells leave us increasingly lost and confused.

Spells & Seduction:

Spells seem to bully, demand or seduce. But stories are courtesy.

A spell is a seductive woman standing on a porch luring you, with immense promises, inside a barren house and then locking the door. Ah spells. They offer you free admission but you have to pay to get out. They promise paradise but they deliver a prison and the bail is costly.

Spells are fast food, empty calories and a smooth drink that goes down way too easy. As the old Gaelic proverb goes, “The wine is sweet but the paying is dear.”

Stories offer real food, home made, grown in that garden just out there, kinship fashioned over time and earned from time in the saddle together.

Spells ask nothing of you. They seems to be offering something to you but, all the while, they are like the handsome man who come close and seems to be giving you all the love, contact, camaraderie and flattering attention you could ever want, all while he is picking your pocket and leaving you poorer than you were while you smile and wave farewell, hoping to see him soon. You won’t realize your wallet is gone until you need it and then it will be too late.

Spells’ entire art seems to be in hiding, deception and duplicity. They promise one thing but deliver another.

A story is an old one, some unassuming grandmother or grandfather, sitting on their rocking chair on the porch of their modest but ornately decorated house and offering you tea as they say, “I made it so beautiful because I knew you might be coming by.” If you sit down for tea, more of the detail emerges upclose — the carving into the wood, the timber frame construction, the wrought iron door knocker made by hand, and the beauty deepens. “There’s more inside if you’d like to come, but, if not… well the outside’s not too bad too look at is it?” You can come and go as you like. No coercion. No seduction. You never need to go inside.

Stories let you go as far as you can go but you pay as you go.

“Throughout the genre of Traveller folk tales there is a distinct lack of moralizing. Lessons are intended, but the teaching of a story can be subtle. Awareness of meanings often comes later… when you look to yourself!” — Linda Williamson, Jack and The Devil’s Purse

As Hannah Arendt put it, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Spells tell you what you want to hear. Stories tell you what you need to hear.

In Lord of the Rings, Frodo says to Aragorn, “I think a servant of the Enemy would look fairer and feel fouler.” That’s often what spells are like. And stories can often seem foul and yet feel strangely comforting and settling inside us. Spells often offer us an immediate, sedating, surface easing of pain and don’t ask much of us. Stories seem to offer us a deeper comfort while asking much of us (but without imposing anything).

Prejudice is inherited without any labour. Spells are one of the main vectors of that inheritance.

Wisdom is an earned thing and stories are one of the places we can earn it. Storytellers are birds willing to sit on their eggs until they hatch.

Spells are the press releases sent out by the corporation and published, unedited by the media that is owned by the same people who own the corporation. Stories are the investigative report into everything that wasn’t included in that press release by the independent journalist.

Spells whisper to you, “You’re right.” Is there anything in the world that looks more fair and fine to us than someone confirming our take on things? Spells seem to simplify. What we call memes today could be a kind of spell that whispers, “This is all there is. There’s nothing more to know and there’s no alternative, ”(the spell at the heart of most spells). Stories shrug and say, “Maybe so. That could be true, but it reminds me of this one time…” and share some of the ‘more’ that there is to know that you didn’t even know existed and how much bigger the story is than we might ever know (or be capable of knowing) without ever making you wrong for what you said.

Spells traffic in certainty, knowing, conviction and absolutes. Story traffics in mystery, complexity, questions, revelation and wonder. Stories evoke curiosity. Spells end it.

Spells are a drug offering a quick hit of satisfaction. Stories are more often a kind of slow release medicine where the medicine might appear in stages over years.

And, in that slow release mechanism, stories shield you from the full consequence of their magic and potency by the way they carry it — stitched into the fabric of their shawl — however ornate or simple it appears at a distance. Stories tread so lightly on our psyches. They are oblique. They have depths that are hidden from the casual eye and unthoughtful approach. Maybe stories know how blundering and greedy humans can be and, out of their love for us and to protect us, they decided to protect us. It’s not that stories are hiding anything, they just don’t reveal them to everyone. It’s there to be seen, for those with the eyes to see and who are willing to engage in the prolonged courtship they, and we, deserve.

It could be something like that.

Spells traffic in seduction. Stories are the practice of courtship.

And lingering over the differences between those two — seduction and courtship — for a moment might be of use. Courtship is so faithful to time and place. Courtship seems more indigenous, based on incredible attention to the particulars of the moment and the ways of the one you are courting.

Seduction seems to traffic instead in human psychology and biology. Courtship seems to move attention to the soul. Seduction is formulas and flipping switches and courtship is building a fire by hand with a bow drill you made by hand as well. Seduction aims for the predictable. Courtship aims for the profound.

Spells Harden The Mind:

The end result of a lifetime being fed spells is a calcified mind.

A spellbound and hardened mind can no longer discover the world as it is. The world must fit into the concrete categories and boxes the mind has established for it. It can’t meet another person as who they are or be undone by them. To be undone is terrifying to the spellbound mind.

We see this with Merlin — his mind hardened and sharpened into a spear of deep suspicion that he keeps between himself and all other humans.

And so what do we become when our minds harden? We become less human as Merlin did — willingly giving up one of the strands which makes us most human — our kinship with other humans. For another person, the spell might have estranged them from nature (and many modern spells do) or from the Unseen world.

The end result of a lifetime being fed stories is a supple mind (and to be human in a deeply achieved sense is to have a supple and curious mind).

As Garrison Keillor put it, “You get old and you realize, there are no answers, just stories.”

Spells are the freezing winds of prejudice that harden things into an existing form. Stories are the crucible of wisdom the can melt the previous forms into something new, beautiful and useful for the world.

Spells are the acorn trying to be a bigger acorn. Stories are the oak inside that acorn.

Spells are the ending of imagination. Stories are the evidence of the great act of imagination that our universe testifies to.

Spells are poison carried in a secretive way. Stories are medicine carried in an old wicker basket you could see if you got close enough to peer in.

Spells have no depth just uncontrollable, wildfire consequence. Spells seem easy but quickly become unmanageable like a genetically modified organism, unrecognized by nature, blowing out on the wind far beyond the field in which it was planted.

Stories As Food:

Spells are cotton candy we eat directly. It tastes so good but leaves us starving.

Stories feed us, but indirectly. The story is not the food. The troubles we bring are not the food (no matter how much we try to eat our pain). We bring our troubles to the story and, like the good bacteria in our bellies, they metabolize those troubles into nourishment that can feed us.

Spells seem to cause us stress. Stories eat our stress.

Spells eat medicine and spit up poison. Stories eat poison and spit up medicine.

It might be something like that.

Also Worth Reading:

A Conversation With Stephen Jenkinson: On Stories & Spells