“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 are 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 breathe life into characters who are like our children, 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 fairy wings and pixie dust. 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, that sign we glanced at on the way to get groceries, that conversation we overhead in the back of the bus, 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. We are pages overflowing with words, torn and tear-stained and smudged with our scars, our crow's feet, our stretch marks, our smile lines. We are bound with the skin that houses our spirits and our spines are marked with the stitching of our bones. Our blood is ink and our flesh is paper. We are, each of us, waiting to be read and cherished by another story. We are waiting to be loved the same way we love our favorite stories, cradling them to our chest and comforting ourselves by breathing in their bookish scent.
Storytelling is more than word-of-mouth or pencil-to-paper. Stories don’t have to make sense. Dreams 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.
I absolutely love the quote that you start out with. The first part really emphasizes the complexity of a story or even just words by themselves. I also like the way you repeat the phrase “we tell stories.” The parallel structure works really well in your philosophy of storytelling. I thought it was great to see how you were able to incorporate your project into this piece as well. I never really thought about it, although dreams can be a form of storytelling. Almost like we are telling ourselves a story. Great metaphor between us and books by the way, it’s really effective.
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