Allow me to tell you a story – and I say allow, because you will have to give consent. A story can't be told without the audience participating in some way, even if it's simple suspension of disbelief.
The written and spoken word require a little more effort, because that kind of story requires the audience to use their imaginations, and we've already spoken of how communication and storytelling actually require – and produce- a kind of bizarre neurological entanglement.
(If you've not been following this blog long enough to read it, or need your memory refreshing, it's here – Red Riding Hood: Narrative, Neurology & Storytelling. Go on, I'll wait, because it really is essential to what you're going to be reading next, and will help you see where we're going.)
One of the interesting things about stories is that they build on each other – they provide a referential framework. A story is not just one event, it is in fact an arrangement of events. Story, as a word comes from the same linguistic roots as history:
As you can see, it's quite literally a recounting of events – an order of experience conveyed to you.
- history
- late 14c., "relation of incidents" (true or false), from O.Fr. estoire, estorie "chronicle, history, story" (12c., Mod.Fr. histoire), from L. historia "narrative of past events, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative," from historein "inquire," from histor "wise man, judge," from PIE *wid-tor-, from root *weid- "to know," lit. "to see" (see vision). Related to Gk. idein "to see," and to eidenai "to know." In Middle English, not differentiated from story; sense of "record of past events" probably first attested late 15c. As a branch of knowledge, from 1842. Sense of "systematic account (without reference to time) of a set of natural phenomena" (1560s) is now obsolete except in natural history.
That same earlier post you will have read was collected in a best-of Modern Mythology 2011 – a selection of our work last year. It's a peculiar thing, because it ends up giving you a snapshot of events which may lead you into looking back on 2011 with new eyes. Certainly, many of those posts were inspired by events in our lives and the wider world.
Those events spawned those pieces, which even now are spawning this piece, folding in current events, reacting and changing in accordance with circumstance and stimuli. No story, no myth, no recounting of events is immune to this.
Not even the Bible – or at the very least, the interpretation of it.
