story shapes

i find myself thinking about story again, the power of narrative and it's function in human perception of the world in which we live.

I've been working at a community garden and something about pulling weeds and an encounter with a small snake brought back visceral memories of my childhood working in the field – or perhaps it was the rear forested area of the garden, like a grotto under a tall green canopy not unlike the areas i played as child, in a world of my own imagination yet very much influenced by the stories that I watched in movies and read about in books. Curious to me now how a vacant lot with tall trees could entertain me for hours and hours, how i could see it as something fantastical and full of adventure. From the stories of Indiana Jones to the Swiss Family Robinson, narratives, characters, events and landscapes all blended together to shape the way I saw and experienced the world.

The stories I knew as a child laid a structural foundation for the ways i engaged the world around me. This leads me to believe that stories are the framework for the way humans see the world and how they engage it. As we grow older the stories become more complex in relation to the development of more complex emotions and ability to reason. Science is really just a story, a way to explain the world, and when we believe these explanations they shape the way we see the world.

I think of certain tribal cultures whose world view was shaped by the oral stories passed down from generation to generation that shape the way each human member experiences the world... and i wonder how the world must have looked through their eyes and their mind, through the stories they knew and believed in.

Then i think of the power that story has, the power to shape the way humans see the world. A dominant story can rule the world, hence the spread of religion and political ideologies. Hollywood and the mainstream media in the USA indoctrinates the populace with story: this is how it happened, this is what it means. And you either believe it or you don't, because you compare it to a different story you read/heard/saw elsewhere – OR – you experienced it firsthand and have your own narrative account based on personal experience, which is what all story originates from anyway. We cannot imagine things that we do not have some sort of perceived experience with. All stories, no matter how fantastical are based in human experience, either first or second-hand, with the world.

I feel like i've written about this same subject a hundred times and perhaps am constantly repeating my words and arguments, but for some reason it comes back to me and always astounds me – story and the power it has on the way humans see the world.

How would my life be different if i had known and read different stories? If I wasn't indoctrinated with Christianity and Capitalism? Or, in my case now, super-saturated with diverse and competing stories from around the world? What if i only ever knew one story, just one?

unloaded

this body spills out off the shelf of reason, boxes of cereal and canned vegetables

this body is a heaping pile of things consumed for breakfast lunch and dinner, eyes licked clean the television screen and hours of sucking down the streaming digital feed

spilt like milk on linoleum floor peeled back and brown at the edges, water stains and food residue that no one wants to clean, will never be cleaned

everything let loose with the hounds
out to wander and sniff about
a world out of bounds and limits
running through fingers
flooding rivers and roll out to sea

tossed like a crew with no vessel
formless and free
over sunless days spilt into starless nights
twenty eight legs kicking in the moonlight
strewn out upon the endless bobbing tide

now they're just shoes without connotations and questions without lamentation.
rationality evades action and everything unloaded to ebb with the wind and the sea, without an american dream to sew up the seams.

...and if the world is ours for the shaping then give me a hammer and thread and i'll give up my head for dollars or cents so i can pay the rent and my credit card debt, eat breathe sleep in condominium sleaze and walk the boulevard of corporate greed.