“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of
fragments and chaos… We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there is more
important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.” – Hayao
Miyazaki
Why do we tell stories, you ask? We tell stories as a means
of finding meaning in the meaningless and hope in the hopeless. We tell stories
to splash color into a grayscale world, to illuminate parts of ourselves that
would have otherwise remained in shadow. We tell stories to transport ourselves
to places with people who are like our own children – paper and ink replacing
flesh and blood – people who possess the brightest and the darkest aspects of
ourselves. We tell stories to awaken the child that has begun to drift asleep
within us, the one who fills our dreams with dragons and waterfalls and wings
and magic. We tell stories to build worlds of our own with the pieces we have
been given, constructing a clumsy jigsaw puzzle of memories and mayhem, composed
of that stranger in the corner of the cafe and that sign we glanced at on the
way to get groceries and that conversation we overhead in the back of the bus
and that piece of the dream that clung to our consciousness. We tell stories
because they are the straw through which we breathe the air that keeps us from
sinking into seas of despair, the rope we cling to when the quicksand is
pulling us deeper and deeper into the earth. We tell stories because they are
an inherent part of us: embedded in our bones, coursing through our veins,
flowing in and out of our lungs with each breath we take.
We tell stories because we are stories.
While working on my project for this class as well as
reviewing my classmates’ projects, my definition of storytelling has slowly
grown to include more than the traditional word-of-mouth or pencil-to-paper
idea of stories that I’ve clung to for so long. Of course I knew that storytelling
wasn’t strictly confined to these particular methods, but I did have a more narrow
view of the way stories could be told – or, at least, the way I could tell them.
By exploring the concept of dreams and figuring out how to convey the story of
my dreams in a way that makes sense to my audience, I’ve begun to understand
and accept that fact that stories don’t actually have to make sense. Dreams
themselves are a perfect example of this. We can analyze and interpret them
until we’re blue in the face, but will we ever really understand or make sense
of them? Do any of us dream in perfect, Academy Award-worthy narratives? Of
course not. Our dreams are composed of fragments: fragments of people, places,
fears, desires, and memories shoved deep in the recesses of our consciousness...
yet they are stories all the same, and they are stories worth telling. By stringing
together random video clips along with words that may or may not have any relevance
to said videos, I am closer to recreating a dreamlike state than I would be if
I was only using footage that “made sense” with the words being spoken.
*On that note, any footage that involves the beach, palm
trees, and/or airplanes (minus the skydiving one) belongs to me.
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