Storytelling

Consider the idea that wine signifies sacredness, or theories about correspondences between external characteristics and intangible qualities, or the story of the hero’s miraculous birth.  How marvelous that such ideas, theories, and stories travel to us through eons!  Each one’s itinerary is a unique sequence of routes through and stopovers in cultures, locations, people, and institutions.  These itineraries fascinate me.  Sometimes the itinerary includes points of transfer from one genre to another, as when a poem becomes a play, or a sermon becomes a scripture.

Whether play or scripture or whatnot, each such tradition encloses its past.  It has not always been what it is now; in earlier manifestations its appearance, sound, or meaning to earlier audiences was quite another thing.  An item’s transmission through time becomes part of its essence.  Whenever it crosses our path, it harbors the complexity of its time travel.

This fact about how time and human lore interact is sometimes easy to overlook, especially when something has been around a long time.  Shakespeare’s plays or Goethe’s masterpieces become so well known that their iterations of Antony and Cleopatra or Faust become standards, become enshrined.  An even more telling instance presents itself in the collection of texts known as the Bible.  The New Testament has been in its current form since around 400 C.E. (A.D.), and although people are vaguely aware that there have been versions and translations, they tend to think of it as an established, static, understood object.  While overlooking the past in such cases is easy and natural, it nevertheless involves us in peril.

When we overlook our heritage’s transmission to us through time, with all its changes in view, we abdicate our responsibility to interpret.  As we all know, the human condition involves from infancy onward the absolute necessity of interpreting our experience.  If in certain instances adults delegate interpretation to others, they must accept the risks this entails.

To my mind, ignoring the rich itineraries of cultural artifacts is tantamount to submitting to the imprisonment of the mind.  There are in our world abundant dogma-based authoritarians ready and eager to imprison and manipulate minds.  When one walks through their gates of intellectual arrogance, one leaves behind the pains and the joys of interpretation.

On the other hand, to attend to the wondrous journeys of humanity’s stories, with their twistings and turnings through additions, omissions, and contradictions, is to reject dogma and to take up the burden of making meaning.  Further, it is to walk carrying that burden on the messy, rocky paths of history.  On an adventure through a landscape of actual transformations of fact, we encounter the marvels of time-bound interpretation.  We tell stories.