About Finding Things Out

Post 736:

It could be said that the art of storytelling is the art of disclosing the unknown until it is known. This is done incrementally, at the writer’s discretion, completely in their hands. The rate of unveiling is the trick, how fast and in what fashion the mystery is revealed.

All stories are mysteries because we are presented with a situation that has an uncertain outcome. There are predictable stories, yes, but even inside the predictable there are a hundred or a thousand little outcomes that should still be unknown. Boiled down, this is why we read or watch anything. To find out.

Here’s a thought to go along with that last one. Living, besides the basics, is finding things out. You may have been born in an orphanage or with a trust fund, but the outcome is still a mystery. The job is to make your way through until the mystery is finally revealed. There’s all kinds of uncertainty, but two that are worth mentioning here.

First, there’s the question of the world. Let’s call it the external. What the world is, how it works, all the people that will come in and out of your life. There are so many things that will happen. So many paths you’ll walk down, only to find out that there are a thousand more unsure paths to walk down. A million forces working to mold and shape you, and things don’t get more predictable unless you close your eyes to them.

But what about the central character? By central character I’m of course referring to you. There are just as many mysteries to be solved inside your soul. The human heart and mind undergo tiny drifts and tectonic shifts and crises of faith and on and on. The most intriguing story might be the one playing out inside our skin. Who are we to become in the midst of all? It is exciting. It’s scary. We’ll find out, one way or another.

This is story. Controlled environments where the external and internal mysteries are contained between credits or between the front and back cover. They give us an escape from the daunting unknown of our own life and thrust us into another one that has consequences we can hold in our hands. This is ironic, and another one of this crazy existence’s wonders.

Try this from Cormac McCarthy. It catches a little bit of what I’m throwing down, though perhaps darkly:  

“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

Cheers and see you after.