Given the current climate on Arelith and the situation we're finding ourselves in, I think it's really important we all just take a minute, take stock of what is and what is not, and consider the actual value of what's here. A reminder, maybe...
So I thought that a year and a half or more late, I'd share what I wrote. It can be considered a thank-you letter to those of you who give, no matter your position of authority, satisfaction with how things are, or the lack of it...
To the storytellers.
Ever since I was very young, I've always loved stories. Twisting, turning, hair-raised-on-the-back-of-the-neck adventure... An escape – A means of vanishing into the pretend, the unreal, the fantastic, using something as simple and real as a few lines of text. Small things, delicate things, constructed in the minds of their authors, and shaped into something that can be consumed by a reader. As small and frivolous as stories are, the story and the act of telling a story is a beautiful thing – Generously given.
But as much as we can see these stories as “mere” escapism, there's something else going on too. Everything that stems from our imaginations, as vivid and varied as they are, finds its source in an equally vivid and varied experience of life. Everything we create stems from an insight, an understanding, an emotional or intellectual construct, which we abstract into narrative form, give a different context, a new universe, and then produce for others. When we share a story, we share ourselves – Our experience, our lives, our personhood.
I don't claim that we can intimately know one another's minds from the stories we tell. The experience people have of their lives is their own, and that is something that extends beyond our capacity to express in words. But every word of the stories we tell here, comes from a real and lived experience, and is capable of transporting us into a world beyond our own, opening our eyes onto perspectives, standpoints, and ways of being that were previously unimaginable.
Here, we take that sharing and generosity into a slightly different form. Rather than a novelistic “author and reader” dynamic, we create collaboratively. We leave space for one another, give room, allow our story to be molded and shaped by the stories of others – And that is something extremely special. It places our creations – inspired and born out of our own experience and insight and understanding of life – to be held in context with others. The author is the reader, the reader is the author.
As such, the people who tell the greatest stories, are those who listen and respond. And when things fall silent, they listen to those silences too – Because where words and narrative can't communicate ideas, where something can't be rendered into our symbolic universe, silence can still carry a narrative. Those gaps communicate something which is shared, collaborative, and beyond our ability to tell it.
I am lucky enough to have managed to make storytelling my work. In theatre, mostly... And despite that (it is so easy to find yourself resenting your work), I choose to do so here, too. Over time, I've come to appreciate the art of a good few here – Storytellers, who breathe life into their own creations, and when that is fully fleshed, do not stop breathing. Instead they give the same life to the creations of others, too. Giving them the room to grow, and carefully constructed situations and circumstance to which they can respond. That, I believe, is an astonishing gift, and something we should be thankful for.
Walter Benjamin said that storytellers draw their ultimate authority from death. I don't think this is the case. I think it is drawn from living, as temporary and transient as that may be. So to those of you who share your insights and your experience, indirectly through the things you create...
Thank you. Genuinely.
