Blessed are the Storytellers
My next stop along the Camino a Ítaca op-ed blesses the storytellers and their less than satisfactory translation into Spanish as narradores de historias, though I do have to say I rather like the ring of bienaventurados. Click over here for the original.
It should be a general maxim. Particularly in times like this,
when the world outside my window is stranger and more remote than any fiction I’ve
ever known. Blessed are the storytellers.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that the merciful battling this
tiny beast should be replaced. Their struggle is far more sanctified than any book
of creeds. Nor can we disparage those who mourn when the very efforts of those
same superheroes without capes, or protective gear, fail. Real tragedies of
stories cut short. Blessed too are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
in the deluge of untrammelled cynicism that flows from those responsible.
Perhaps not the official, sanctioned version of the blessed,
but I’d wager there is still an undiscovered scroll or two preaching them in
some dusty cave in Sinai. And even if my bet doesn’t pay off, well before those
iron-age scrolls were written, storytellers braving Palaeolithic hyenas were
leaving their mark and telling their tales in dark cramped caves like those
here in Caceres. We’re made for stories and blessed are those that create them.
They’ve kept me going through this seemingly endless
nightmare. When time melted, days blurred and the month of April was cancelled,
there they were.
From my window, I tried to make sense of what was happening.
Looking back at the text messages I was sending in March and contrast them with
how the world looks now and it’s like looking at another life, a life full of
others. The world now reaches us through the distorting lens of social media
and the information journalists are able to glean.
Truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in
life and long ago I became convinced that it is rarely if ever told during
working hours, especially when politicians are concerned. ‘Facts’ now change by
the minute and even the number of the dead is no longer sacred or true. As
Faulkner once mused, facts have very little connection with the truth, so rather
than looking for understanding in fact, I found it in stories.
From my bookshelves, I’ve explored plagues in Syria with Ibn
Battuta and the criminally unknown Spanish traveller and spy, Ali Bey. Through
stories I revisited places I have been and sounds I have heard, reminding myself
that they weren’t only a dream. Stories also feed the dreams I still have, of
experiencing the Uzbek Mountains, the beaches of Sao Tome and the depths of La Codosera. Things that can still happen
when this is over.
The slow creep of the calendar has also meant time to create
stories with my family, time I never seemed to have before and that I will
probably never see again. We’re creating anecdotes which will remind us of how
we experienced this crisis far more clearly than dubious facts would.
Hunter S. Thompson once said, ‘yesterday’s weirdness is
tomorrow’s reason why’ and tomorrow will see more twisted facts and cynical attempts
at explanations. Blessed indeed are the storytellers’, the real oracles that
help us see though this fog, shaping reality so that it resembles truth.
