What is Story?

Story is an engine that combusts our sacred objects. Memories, beliefs, fears… Everything we hold and cherish in darkness, burns brightest there.

Story is a physical event. There are some things you cannot recognize from a distance. Some things you only know by touch, and, if you could see them clearly, would never pick up to begin with.

Zen Buddhists tell a Story of a caterpillar who suddenly becomes conscious of his many legs. What happens? He stumbles all over himself. The human mind is a fragile thing; it is a language machine that works best when you’re not looking.

Story is transparent. The best meta-fictions are still fictions: environments we enter into. And the best poetry is that which is still carried by the breath.

I am being contentious.

Story is contentious.

Story is greater than literature, it is greater than language, in the same way that a human is greater than flesh and bone. It is these things, but it is also something more that can only be grasped in darkness.

Storytelling is a carefully-constructed accident.

It is the Zen monk who wakes after thirteen hours of meditation and cannot say where he has been. It is the werewolf who rises in the morning in tattered clothes, his mouth all smeared with blood. How many hours did the monk spend staring at the wall, waiting? How many nights did the werewolf spend watching half-moons drift across the sky, until finally a full one arrived?

Story is alive. Story is life.