The Age Old Conflict - Everything Old is News Again

Story and denial, fact and counter-fact, news and fake news - the call and response of society and politics in this world of hi-tech, high-speed communications is loud, complex, and confusing.

While the truth rests on the editor's desk, scrutinized by the fact-checkers and the lawyers, the rumours, spin, and propaganda are already spreading like a blizzard of termite queens seeking new homes as the summer afternoon storms approach.

Only some will find a fertile place to lodge, but those that do will feed and breed in the darkness, spreading out to consume and corrupt the structure that took them in.  Soon, unprotected, adjacent premises are being eaten away from within, and the rot spreads.

Every story we read, whether it be labelled Fiction or Non Fiction, contains varying quantities of objective reality and subjective truths, blended by the author to achieve a certain aim, and interpreted by each reader according to their own experience-based filters.  Many an author (or poet, or movie maker) has been utterly astounded by the meanings that readers have taken from his or her work - many readers are astounded when the author declares that "that is not what I meant by those words"

But, we live by stories - they make a foundation that underpins our lives, and offer us ways to understand the swirling world around us.  Stories offer us hope in the grim times, and hold up the warning hand of bitter experience as a caution against our naive optimisms.

Like the great cables of twisted rope that hold the ocean liner fast to the dock, the vast story of humanity contains within it so many twists of lesser stories, wound about each other in complex spirals that add strength to the whole.

Or like a tapestry stretching the length of human existence, only partly visible to us in the light of the present, and always under construction at the edge that leads into the shadows of the future, the stories add strength, colour, and sometimes even pattern, to the whole.

Flawed stories, stories in which truth is twisted or absent, stories darkened by malice or anger or envy, stories twisted by the teller for personal gain - all these stories can mar the patterns of the great tapestry, or weaken the cable.  Stories of fear and despair make the world a smaller, darker place.  If such stories are being told by people in positions of great power, the damage wrought can be much greater, too.

Tell your story, add some light and colour to the larger story - read or listen to the light-filled stories of others, and join your thread with theirs to brighten the picture of the future.  The human story grows and brightens when such stories are added to the weave.

Your story contains the stories - at least in part - of those who you knew or lived with or worked with or watched or read about, just as the present is built on and from the past, yet also shaped by the stories we tell ourselves about our futures.

It is too easy for the dominant stories of the day to overshadow the many stories being told by fainter voices - yet those stories, less widely known but far greater in number, have made their own unique contributions to the greater picture, and deserve our remembrance.

Consider books such as Radical Sydney  and its associated blog, that try to keep alive stories of Sydney, recent and ancient, that often contradict the "official" line, and might have otherwise faded from view.  Those who seek to impose their paradigm on a culture or society often try to bury the stories that present opposing viewpoints, but dissenting stories can be very hard to stamp out.

Consider the fiction of Robert G Barrett - though many of his later works contained fantastical elements, they also contained traces of those same stories of the other Sydney, while his early books and short stories painted scenes and portraits that would be instantly recognisable to anyone who worked or lived around the eastern suburbs of Sydney in the seventies.  Only the names were changed, and some of by not very much.

As a parting thought, I've heard it said that the Silly Season in Australia begins on Melbourne Cup Day, and ends on Australia Day.  It seemed an odd thing to say, for a moment, but then the memories began to flood back - of holidays and parties and birthdays and bushfires and sunburn and storms - and it suddenly seemed apt, because no matter what the weather or the world situation was trying to throw at us at the time, there was always, somewhere, a bunch of Aussies throwing a party or putting on a barbecue.

Yet the beginning and the end of the Season are marked by days about which so many different and often conflicting stories are told.  For every story of victory at the races there is at least one opposing story of fortunes lost, or horses or jockeys killed or maimed - and as for Australia Day, if you don't know about the conflicting stories gathering around that day then, what can I say.  You must have been partying extra hard not to have noticed that particular barney.

To Believe or not to Believe.......

A big flaw in our political process is gulf between the story a politician believes, and the story they tell to get elected. They know that the story they believe and live by is one that a majority of voters will not accept.  So they tell a story they know that enough voters will accept, despite their intention to push on with their preferred story after the election.

The successful politician knows that people need a story that will seem to make sense of events, and of the decisions being made by government - they know that the story that will resonate with the electorate is the one that feels acceptable to the voters, and that objective truth does not need to be a major part of that story.  Indeed, truth often runs a very distant last in the race when the other contender is a story that fits the desires, prejudices, and beliefs of the audience.

The old adage "Truth is stranger than fiction" is particularly applicable in the field of politics.  Even a light skim of the daily news - local, national, and international - will provide stories that make you stop and exclaim "How could anyone be so stupid" or "Surely they didn't think we would believe that" or "I wonder who is paying who" or even just "That can't possibly be the real reason they are doing this - what is really going on?"

Every now and then a novelist hits the big time by asking the right "What if" question, and then turning the answer into the book that gets published - just before some real life incident that closely resembles the plot of the novel.  How many "What Ifs" have been discarded as too unrealistic, only to find reality mirroring imagination within weeks or months of the screwed up paper hitting the side of the rubbish bin?  In a flash, an idea that seemed too outlandish to publish has become a moment in the history books.  How many authors have stared at the evening news and asked themselves "How could I have tossed that idea away?" or "Why did I take so long to finish that first draft?"  I am one - are you?

Was there, in the torrent of political thrillers that have washed across the shelves and check-out counters of the world's book shops and libraries, one that presaged the Presidential actions that gave us Watergate?  Did some Italian novelist write a story that accurately predicted the awful and undignified end to which Mussolini succumbed? Apart from a possible link to an episode of The Simpsons, has any author really predicted what is happening in the USofA at the moment?

There are times when truth and fiction are equally strange and become inextricably entangled, as evidenced by the conspiracy theories that swirl about in the aftermath of great events, growing in number and complexity, and attracting supporters the way the Canberra street lights draw in the Bogong Moths. 

Did anyone in Australia (or elsewhere) predict in a novel the tumultuous days that came to a head on the steps of Parliament House in December 1975?  Conspiracy theories abound regarding that event, too, and who knows, perhaps one of them is fact rather than theory?

Our need to identify patterns and order make us a sucker for a story that suggests a conspiracy - some of us more so than others. Stories that hint at secrets and conspiracies get our attention - we expect every action to be the result of an active agent, to have a reason behind it, and for it to be part of a discernable, comprehensible narrative.  We want answers, and we want them in a shape, texture, and colour that we can accept and enjoy.

Recently, I read Lee Child's novel "Night School" - in it, an unexpected protagonist gets between the original villains and the hero, as they all pursue the acquisition or recovery of some missing weapons.  The conspiracies are manifold, and weave about each other in ever more complex patterns - yet they never discomfit the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.  As part of the plot, Child has postulated a conspiracy that sees an infiltration of German law enforcement by Neo-Nazi types, though he doesn't specifically name them as such.

Only weeks after reading the novel, and within a year of its publication, I opened the newspaper and found a story about a growing scandal in Germany - it was a serious infiltration of the country's military forces by Neo-Nazis, and the subsequent misuse and theft of weapons by those infiltrators.

Humans are basically the primates who became story tellers.  We use stories to make sense of ourselves and our world.  Our need for stories, and the way we use and abuse them, is like the proverbial box of matches - a match can light the fire that cooks a meal or warms a hearth, or start the bushfire that razes a million acres and a thousand homes.   “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

We need stories to map our past, present, and future, and many of us will cling to our favourite ones in the face of an avalanche of facts that contradict the core "truths" of those favourites. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

Filters are applied to weed out the inconvenient truths and bothersome data, and compatible facts and information are sought out to help build and strengthen the stories we prefer.  Joel Shepherd, in his Cassandra Kresnov series, coined a wonderful term to deal with this aspect of human nature, and Andrew Pollack describes it very well in his blog  here -  Compulsive NarrativeSyndrome

Enjoy your storytelling - may all your stories fall on eager ears, and sail on down the winds of time to become part of the great story that humanity has been weaving for so long.  Perhaps, one day, one of your "What if" stories will be venerated as prophecy - or at least they may say of it, as we said of our village newspaper, years ago - "Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato".

Conflicting Stories

Conflicting Stories:

In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.

Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley.  Was it always rosey and harmonious?

Of course not.  The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work.  In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling.  Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.

It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two.  Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.

Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story.  Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.

I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories.  Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within.  For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future.  One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.

Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind?  Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus?  Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him?  Or did they both drag each other into darkness?  Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear?  Is there ever a simple answer?

Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite?  How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important?  How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction?  From my own experience, quite a bit.

Do I have to "stick to the facts"?  Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"?  I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"

Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past?  What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller?  That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing.  And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.

And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.