The Power of Stories

I have three beautiful little girls whose ages are five, seven and eight, and whose names are Jaden, Trinity, and Grace, respectively. It amazes me, the endless supply of life and vitality spilling out of them, and it is a gift to be able to witness them growing from babies into little girls. I have been given a different perspective on time, watching a baby grow into a toddler, into a child, into a little girl. No longer do I fix my gaze ahead, on the path of time stretching itself beyond the horizon. I tend now to stop and look behind me, or to rest and enjoy the moment I am in. I hear my girls say thing like “when I’m older, I’ll eat all the candy I want…”, or “I’ll have a hundred pets…” I wonder sometimes if it is possible to pinpoint the time and place the change occurs, when a soul realizes the brief period in time their life encompasses, and start to look back upon childhood in reminiscence. It seems there is a paradox that occurs in this shift—the harder I try to slow down and enjoy the time I have, the more elusive that time becomes, slipping from my hands like smoke. Yet my girls seem to view time as a lifelong enemy, like something to be conquered, and a year for them inches by like an eternity.

            I have found release from this curse of swift time. It comes upon opening a book and smelling the familiar scent of ink on paper, of time bound and sealed between covers. With the opening sentence I am transported to a different realm of time and reality, whether it is “Once upon a time, in a faraway land…,” or “Call me Ishmael.” I can read a story and be taken through a hundred years of fulfilled dreams, of hopes and tragedies and endless adventures. I can witness the span of a character’s life, see them as a baby and watch them learn life’s many lessons, be there as they have children of their own and watch them as they are burdened with the troubles of life and grow weary and old, and I can try not to cry as they die and their children lay them to rest. And when the story finally ends, I come back to the place I am, and realize I have not aged with the characters I have been following. Hundreds of years have not passed by as I passed through the story with them. For that brief period of time, I was enchanted, cast into a world of illusion, and experienced those years as if they were my own. You could say I stole that time. That is just one of the gifts of a good story.

            This hunger for stories keeps growing within me, and has been doing so for many years. As a child my father read to me from the children’s Bible, stories from the Old Testament toned down for young ears. I would lay in bed and listen in rapture as Samson tore apart lions and slayed Philistines by the thousands, as Noah gathered all the animals into his ark and God sent rain for forty days and forty nights, as young David felled the giant Goliath with a single stone. I have not yet asked my father if he knew then, as he read to me every night, the great gift he was giving to me. Perhaps he was unaware that he was planting a magical seed, and the tree it grew into would bear much fruit.

            A child’s mind and heart are naturally able to receive a story as it is meant to be received, their ears tuned to the real gifts behind the words. I have been reading my girls fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, and as I read, I feed off the spellbound look in their eyes, drinking it in like the water of life as I enchant them, changing my narrative voice dramatically to capture the souls of the characters in the stories. I do this because I know they hear something beyond what most of us can hear from these stories as adults caught up in the grind of life, burdened with too much “reality”—bills and work and never ending responsibilities. Our imagination is dulled and we are farther removed from seeing the world as an infinitely huge, magical place in which anything can happen. A world in which dragons live and fairies hide themselves from our eyes, in which animals secretly talk to each other and mermaids can be spotted with a keen eye. Do you remember believing in these things? These young, innocent little minds are not blemished with doubt and non belief; they can easily accept that a frog would talk to a princess, sing her poems, and upon winning her love, turn into a handsome prince. If I read them Hansel and Gretel, they are not skeptical of a candy house and how it could be built, but rather comment on how nice it would be to have a candy house that they could nibble on whenever they wanted. It is a beautiful thing, witnessing and being a catalyst of their growing imagination, seeing the sparkle in their eyes as they are given these pieces of information and believe them.

Every story they hear is like a piece put into the giant puzzle of life and what it means to live, and nourishes their imaginative understanding of life as one complex story manifesting itself. From these tales and stories they experience not only the magical aspects of life, but also the base aspects—they learn of villains and treachery, of failed dreams and lost loves, and they see through all of this the valiant resolution of the characters. They are in the process of learning that they are the main characters in their own story, and that their own life will hold peaks and valleys, just like that of the characters they read. “‘It is not true,’ says Nietzsche, ‘that there is some hidden thought or idea at the bottom of myth…but the myth itself is a kind of style of thinking. It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in a sequence of events, actions, and sufferings.’ This is why we may look into it as into a mirror or fountain full of hints and prophesies, telling us what we are and how we should behave amidst the bewildering sequences of surprising events and happenings that are our common lot” (Zimmer 310). Thus my girls are learning the unpredictability of the world and the universe, the dual physical and spiritual existence making up their reality, which is a shifty thing. A strong emotional foundation coupled with an imaginative mind can get a person through the toughest of times. Looking at life in this manner will help them cope with whatever fastballs are thrown their way, help them to see the tragedies and setbacks they will surely experience as a necessary part of their own adventure.

            Another reason I love to read my daughters these stories is not only because I enjoy them myself, and don’t mind reading them over and over, but also because these archetypal stories are screaming to be read out loud. The simple language they use upon the opening lines speaks to the very idea of a story—it could go anywhere, be any kind of story that has ever been told. Infinite possibilities are laid out before the reader in the simplicity and timelessness of the language, born in the oral tradition of storytellers enchanting their audience through the power of voice combined with the power of a story. Take Rumpelstiltskin: “By the side of a wood, in a country a long way off, ran a fine stream of water; and upon the stream there stood a mill.” Immediately the time, the place, the details, are all wiped away and become inconsequential. The story exists in its own time and place, outside of this world but also encompassing it entirely. The rhythm of the words begs to be spoken, to be told, and the story itself becomes more powerful as it is spoken. A special kind of bond, a certain connection, is created between a storyteller and their audience, as if the very process of creation is awake and in the room. It is easy to imagine, reading these lines, a tenor-voiced bard speaking slowly, clearly, mystically to an instantly spellbound audience. When I read these stories to my girls, I become that bard, the enchanter, casting a spell over them and transporting them instantly into the story where anything is possible.

         Heinrich Zimmer talks about the dilettante in the first part of King and the Corpse, defining a dilettante as anyone who has taken a class under Michael Sexson, or more specifically, “What characterizes the dilettante is his delight in the always preliminary nature of his never-to-be-culminated understanding” (Kind and the Corpse  4). This person will look at life as a tapestry of riddles woven together, forming the most beautiful image that changes, like that of a Rorschach ink test, with the psychology of the perceiver. They may see stories as mirroring the eternal mystery of life and why we are here, may hear them with the ears of their ancestors and beyond, back to the first spark of creation. And this dilettante will understand that no matter how much of a grasp he thinks he has on the story, no matter how smart and concise his interpretation, it is all smoke in the wind. Written into these stories are the experiences and dreams and myths and interpretations of uncountable generations, changing not only with the patterns of the world but also with the unpredictable lives of the people reading them. Zimmer says of these immortal tales: “They are everlasting oracles of light. They have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age, each age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding, its own set of problems, and its own inevitable questions. For the life patterns that we of today have to weave are not the same as those of any other day; the threads to be manipulated and the knots to be disentangled differ greatly from those of the past” (K.A.T.C., pg. 4). The dilettante, then, knows he takes with him into a story his own biases and emotions and stupidity which get mixed into his experience of the story, like ingredients thrown into a soup. But he will not cease taking joy in rereading texts and each time discovering something new in it, and he will know that there will never be an end, to his learning and to the great riddle of life, to beauties and discoveries lying in wait, because these things are made immortal in the characters of these stories, and in the stories themselves. Like T.S. Eliot wrote about all dilettantes in life:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

         Time is liquid, it can be dived into. We read today stories from thousands of years ago, and characters from these stories live on today, will live on for forever. How does this happen? Arthur and his knights of the round table. Were they real, or mythic? It doesn’t matter. They live on through us and our delight in reading about them. What is really interesting is, where did they come from? It is as if they came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, so immortal are these tales, these knights. As if they have been around since the beginning of time, waiting to be discovered. Perhaps they have no author at all; perhaps they came into existence from some other place, evolved from primordial soup in the great ocean of stories. Upon reading them there is a harmony we feel within the story, as if, somehow, we are reading our own story. The story lives on separate from any author, as if it was already with us when we were born. Heinrich Zimmer says:

And yet the generations that fashioned these romances are not merely our spiritual ancestors, but to some extent our physical too. As we read, some dim ancestral ego of which we are unaware may be nodding approvingly upon hearing again its old tale, rejoicing to recognize again what once was a part of its own old wisdom. And if we heed, this inner presence may teach us, also, how to listen, how to react to these romances, how to understand them and put them to use in the world of everyday. (K.A.T.C., pgs. 97-98)           

The Power of Words

Masaru Emoto, a Japanese doctor of alternative medicine, conducted a series of tests on water, freezing samples taken from different sources and taking pictures of the crystals that form. In one of the tests conducted, he typed words or sentences filled with emotion onto pieces of paper, and taped the words to jars holding samples of water taken from the same source. He wrote words harnessing the beautiful side of life and emotion, such as “love”, “friendship”, “harmony”, etc., and words harnessing the bad, such as “hate”, “Demon”, “I want to kill you”, and other negative words. He froze the samples and took pictures of the crystals that formed, the results of which are truly amazing. All of the crystals are unique in their own way, seeming to mimic the emotion behind the word attached to it. All of the words with good intention formed symmetric, beautiful crystals which are pleasing to the eye, bringing a feeling of harmony. As if touched by the divine. The crystals formed from words with bad intention were ugly and deformed, curdling the stomach upon sight, as if drawn by an evil finger.

            How could this happen? How could the printed word have such power? The spoken word is one thing; the vibration of sound waves could plausibly alter the composition of water once passing through it, but how could shapes formed by ink on paper taped to a jar with water inside alter the composition of said water? How could words have such power?

            Water accounts for about 65% of what we are made up of. If a written word can make the composition of water harmonious and beautiful, it can actually change the composition, somehow, of our bodies. And how much more powerful to show something, than to say it. We can let the word “love” spill from our lips, or we can read a love story and experience the ups and downs behind the word, the turmoil of emotions that come along with it, and in the end, the resolution, whereupon the closure of the story brings our souls so much closer to that emotion, that spiritual side of ourselves which is love, than one word ever could. At that moment, if we were to freeze the molecules within ourselves and examine the structure of the crystals, the sight might just take our breath away.

            Experiencing the words put down on paper that come together to form a story is like taking a sip of the wine aging within that author’s soul. Just as the words we hear every day and the signifiers we attach to them affect our brain, the words an author chooses to form sentences are a direct correlation to the psychology of that author and their emotions at the time. When we read the words put down by that author we are in a sense stepping into their shoes, trying them on for size. Reading the words of another can be like a fresh perspective on life, coaxing us out of the rigid structures of perception we as individuals can become tied into. This is one of the many lessons that can be taken from Abu Kasem’s Slippers, stated metaphorically as “change your shoes.” J.R.R. Tolkien addresses this issue in his essay, On Fairy Stories:

We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.

                        (On Fairy Stories 19)

            The ultimate goal is to never cease looking at those things that are locked in our hoard, to take them out continuously and examine them in a new light. To never cease marveling at the simple things in life and the magic they hold. Whether it be folklore, myth, a fairy tale or a fictional story, they let us look at our world in a magical sense, show us there is magic in all things. Tolkien goes on to say: “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine” (On Fairy Stories 20) Words are indeed potent, for there is no limit to the signification and history behind each. Take “stone,” for example. We could think of man’s first rudimentary tools thousands of years ago, a land of saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths and ice-ages. We could think of them, our ancestors, picking up a stone with a sharp edge and seeing for the first time the possibilities in it—the first steps of an infant imagination. We could think of this leading to fire and farming and civilization as we know it. Or we could pick up a stone and think of the rise and fall of mountains, the vast geological processes that stone took shape in. Pockets of molten lava cooled and crystallized, slowly crushed and melted, welded under such immense pressure of this self-cannibalizing earth. The earth tearing itself apart and diving back in. We could think of asteroids crashing into the earth from space, from our endless galaxy in an infinite universe that is expanding, that could be part of an infinite amount of universes strewn out there like the dice of the gods. We could think of the elements making up this rock as all formed from that spark of creation we call the big bang, in which every element that exists was created in fractions of a second. Who says there is no magic in this world, no mystery? It is stories we can go to to be a part of this great magic lying in wait, to get a fresh perspective and awake our minds that have so much potential. Stories are a displacement of that magic we all seek to know, to harness, and that just might have too much power for us to possess.