The First Story: Introduction
May 22nd, 2010 by Micah Tillman | Start the Discussion |
[I wrote a book a few years back about Genesis 1-3. It's doing nobody any good, just sitting on my hard drive, so I'm going to start posting it in sections. Here's the Intro. Hope you enjoy it. -MT]
[ Intro | I: Intro | I.1 | I.2 | I.3 | I.4 | I.5 | I.6 | I.7 | I.8 | I.9 | I.10 | I.11 | I.12 | I.13 | I.14 | I.15 | I.16 | I.17 | I.18 | I.19 | I.20 | I.21 | I.22 | II.Intro ]
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THE FIRST STORY: Introduction
1
We can no longer read our most controversial Story. The ability was lost when our Storytellers stopped telling it. They began to recite other Tales under the same name.
The Other Tales contradicted each other. They gathered in groups and waged war. Worst of all, some pointed to the Story and called it a lie.
“Which Tale will win?” was all we could think. Or is there a way all Tales could come to peace? The Story was buried under conflict and possibility.
In the storm’s midst we began to feel something missing. We saw the peoples around us and their Stories. We heard of ancestors who had Stories.
We wanted our own Stories.
But “story” meant “fiction,” and “Myth” meant “falsehood.” We knew this because we had learned to know it. The Other Tales told us so.
Yet there was a deeper knowing. We felt it when we saw the Stories we could not call our own. And we grew angry at those who had taken ours.
There was no beauty in the battle amongst the Other Tales. The Storytellers had disgraced their own art. We would have to revive it for them.
But could we? Can we forget the Tales and find the Story? Or is it too late?
2
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien prepared the way for what we are about to do. Between them they have returned a sense of hope to those who yearn for Myth while being uncomfortable with belief. Through their writings we have come to learn the power and role of Myth. They made stories respectable again.
In his An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis wrote that there are different kinds of readers. The best are those who can involve themselves so thoroughly in piece of literature that they seem to surrender to the Storyteller. To truly read you must allow the Author to do something to you, to take you on a journey.
What makes a story true literature, and not something less, is the worthiness of the work for such surrender. We are enriched by the guidance of some Writers, impoverished by others. But to find out which is which we must either seek out witnesses or risk it ourselves.
We have become very much unwilling to “risk it” when it comes to the Story in this book. There is simply too much at stake in the war of Tales to lay down arms for a moment and return to the Original. We are afraid we will betray our side.
But what if we are impoverished by turning to Other Tales? What if the Story was worth our surrender? What if it could be the Myth we’ve been missing?
3
If there is one thing that separates a Myth from other kinds of stories, it is the use to which a Myth is put. A Myth is a story we use to reveal the structure and meaning of our lives. Myths are the stories we use to fill out such sentences as: “I feel like [Character] must have felt when [Event] happened,” or, “This is like that time when [Character] [performed some act],” or, “Then I realized they were trying to pull a [Character/Event] on me.”
A Myth is a story we treat like a simile, or even metaphor, for our lives. They can, therefore, be either true or false, fact or fiction. Whether a Story “actually happened” often makes no difference to whether you can use it to interpret your own life-story. Non-Fiction can fill the Myth role just as well as Fiction. We compare our situations not just to the Siege of Troy but to Crossing the Rubicon and the Battle of Normandy.
A certain world leader recently called the Holocaust a “Myth.” If he understood that Myths can be true, and are often better at fulfilling their function when true, then he might be credited with a philosophical insight. The Holocaust is emblematic of the Jewish experience, and therefore provides a Story whereby the world’s Jews can put the structures of their own lives into relief. The difference between the Holocaust and many other Myths is that it is not only an important story, but it actually happened.
Some have called the Story in this book a Myth. But they always mean the word like that world leader meant it. A Myth, they say, is a Story people used to believe; “but we know better now.” We know better now because we have better Storytellers, they say.
Though we yearn for Myth, we are not lacking in pretenders. We still use Tales to give structure to our world. Our Storytellers are Scientists, and our Stories are “experimental proofs,” “double-blind trials,” “peer reviewed articles,” and “scholarly consensus.” We know the Story of what happens to us when we digest food, how lights turn on and off, and what neurons do. We were taught these Stories in Monday (through Friday) School.
These are our Myths; these are the Stories we use to help ourselves understand what is going on. Whether they are true does not change the function they serve. And whether they are Stories does not change their truth-value. To call Science a “Myth” is not to denigrate it. It is to recognize its role.
The good reader, following Lewis, will ask, “Which of the Stories available to us is worth ‘reading?’” To which should we surrender for our enrichment? Which brings out the patterns in our world most vividly? Which brings life to our lives?
The answer is that we cannot know until we start to read. We have to risk it.
4
What makes our Story controversial is the question of how it relates to the Tales we tell in its Place. But we cannot know whether the Story fits or does not fit those Other Tales until we know what it says. And we cannot know what it says until we purposefully put the Other Tales out of play.
This is nearly impossible for us to do, because we constantly feel driven to ask, “Is this Story true?” But if we examine this question closely enough we will find that what we mean, in practice, is, “Does this Story fit with the stories I already accept?” (This is what William James calls the “pragmatic” definition of truth.) But we cannot know whether this Story fits the others until we discover what it actually says.
So as we dare to risk the Story once more, we will ask one question and one alone: What is the Story telling us? We will not live in the struggle between stories but within the Story itself. It was written for a purpose; its author has something to say. Once we have listened we can return to fray.
But for the moment let’s just listen.
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[ Intro | I: Intro | I.1 | I.2 | I.3 | I.4 | I.5 | I.6 | I.7 | I.8 | I.9 | I.10 | I.11 | I.12 | I.13 | I.14 | I.15 | I.16 | I.17 | I.18 | I.19 | I.20 | I.21 | I.22 | II.Intro ]
