Healthy stories are fluid, not fixed
We often forget that our storytelling is rooted in millennia of oral tradition. Collaborative, mutable, fluid, living narratives that changed to suit different ecosystems and social scenarios.
Written tales are more “permanent,” but they have a harder time evolving. So we’ve traded (a false sense of) permanence for the complex and evolving (and communal) narrative lifeforms.
Merlin’s story appears fixed. But then he shoots back with the transformative question: “Who told you this?” Who does this story belong to? Can we tell a different one? A written story becomes fixed, but a spoken question invites a response. The rhythm of call and response, collaborative creating, can show us that even when we feel stuck, there is always a trapdoor. A new story to tell.1
Just calling it a trapdoor, an escape hatch, reminds me of The Body Keeps the Score, where the little boy traumatized by 9/11 is able to process the trauma in a healthy way by rewriting the story with his own creative agency:
At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen—a lifesaving trampoline.2
It’s what Bridger does—what Ada Palmer does—in Terra Ignota, rewriting the future on a galactic scale. We made the archetypes up to begin with, we make the choice to enact them, and we have the power to remake them at any time.
But it is a lie that says the story is eternal, that these roles Lover, Beloved, Villain—are primordial. We made them up, and if we act them, still that is our choice, eternal only while we assent to keep performing. Each time the curtain rises on the final scene, the hero could declare, “I am not this,” and walk away. We want to stop it, urge them in our minds: Valmont, Othello, vengeful Clytemnestra, let it go! Each generation gets a little better, I think, at walking away, warned by past generations’ sad examples, yet the archetypes, once met, live in us always, dormant like viruses that can awaken when some other virus cruel like she—attacks.