Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 3

with you.
Writing is metaphysical, spiritual cosmic exploration, without never a need to worry about the vice squad a'calling.
Unless, that is, you like to wind down with the old prohibited stuff.
Me, I'll just stick with the words.
December 2003

Hunters Of The Untamed Idea
The invention of writing might have domesticated the story, but the beast can still bite...
BEFORE the written word there was only the spoken word. The attempted domestication of the story is a mere blink of an eye in the history of storytelling. Scarce a few thousands years old, writing has far from tamed the story. They are as wild and free as they ever were, and the author is still a hunter-gatherer tracking ideas across the dreamscape.
So we can capture them in words, pin them to the page like insects in a museum collection, but the breed goes on. It grows and shifts in the same chaotic patterns that enthralled our distant forebears. All we have done is shift the balance, for the story still evolves - along with us. The story lives feral in our imaginations, skulking in the shadows of our darkest fears, or soaring high on the thermals of our greatest dreams.
The world is reflected in our dreamscape. As we change the world, it changes us, so too does the visionary stuff of fiction shift under our fingertips. What writer hasn't felt the story fight back, twist and wriggle to become something else? Fiction is a living thing for it is nothing less than an idealisation of ourselves, of our world in all its sordid, nihilistic complexity.
Fiction is the place where reality and imagination merge. This is the dreamscape. Ideas are derived from the world around us. They are fashioned into shape, spliced with other notions and fermented in our minds, only to be frozen in time on the written page. In that sense our modern stories are dead things, yet like fossils they can reach out beyond their own age to tantalise generations unborn.
Like all storytellers, we are rooted firmly in our age. The tales we weave are dependent on the world around us, and what we know of the world that went before. We may fantasise the future, but the truth is tomorrow is forever unwritten. Our future-shocks are a product of present day fears and hopes, projected onto our children and their children. Yet paradoxically, by envisioning the future we can shift consciousness towards realising at least something of that vision.
So our stories are rooted in time. Yet the very best can reach out, become timeless by capturing the eternal essence of what it is to be human and to convey the very spirit of the age in which it was written.
In a sense that gives us a far greater power than our forebears who wove their words only in the transient human mind, through the medium of the spoken word. Their stories were timeless in the sense that such peoples rarely had any notion of linear time. To them, time was cyclic. The present was simply the here and now on the way to future, which was itself merely a foretelling of the past. Divorced from a sense of history, their stories could only shift and change as they and their world shifted and changed.
Yet for these people, these ancient hunter-gatherers, or simple farmers, who existed on the edge of the war-zone that we call civilisation, stories possessed a far greater power than their modern descendants. For them, stories were a powerful rendition of their daily lives. The storyteller possessed an almost magical gift to walk with the Gods in the mythic realm. He wove great heroes, gave his audience an expanded sense of their own lives. In this way, he expressed the values and provided the living links with one generation to the next.
Through the story, our ancestors learned who they were - not just as individuals but as families and communities. Stories expressed the relationships between humanity and nature. They strove to make sense of the world at the dawn of time. Reality and fantasy intermingled in these stories. Heroes became mythologised into demi-Gods, the ills of the world were given shape as the beasts and demons that made us shiver from their hideaways in the shadows. They explored the limits of their world and inscribed on the mental map 'here be dragons'.
As they entertained, so they informed. These storytellers taught the ways of the world, transmitted culture, gave meaning and a sense of belonging to the people sat around that ancient blazing fire. Throughout the millennia, the story has reflected our lives and our existence. As with our ancestors, the search for meaning still lies behind our urge to tell a story - even though we seek to preserve the words on the medium of paper, or even of quantum