When The Moon Sings - July 5, 2025

A new acquaintance asked me if I tell stories here on the program.  Well, I have, but I don’t usually.

Some people use the word “stories” to mean fiction.  The things I say here don’t include fiction, at least not knowingly.  In addition, stories have a structure – they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  I do write stories, but I don’t recite them here.  I simply make observations on what I have seen lately and how I react to them. They usually lack endings, because nobody knows how they will end, especially me.

Used in the broadest terms, stories, both fact and fiction, are a component of life.  Many people think that they are one of the most important parts.  A brief search through adages about stories yielded the following examples, and hands-full more:

“Storytelling reveals meaning” – that from Robert McKee.

“To survive, you must tell stories” – Umbert Eco said that

“We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.”- Arthur Kleinman

That all makes perfect sense.  We use analogies to transmit knowledge and culture, and stories are analogies.  We’ve started using digital transmission too, but that has a messy present and a clouded future.  Lives are more complex than data, and analog still works better than digital.

Again, to construct a story, you must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and for the story to have relevance, to be an analog, the end is the most important part.  Usually, the author has a meaning in mind.  The meaning may be obscure, but authors end the story when they feel that a meaning has been communicated.

Observations can’t meet that standard.  This morning, the dawn air didn’t move, a stillness that we see only every now and then in Savannah, but is even rarer in other places.  If the visual lacked any movement, the sound stayed muted too.  The morning light reached up to meet the morning star, then overtook it.  Then both audio and video came to life.  A hawk sitting in the top of a pine tree noticed me and started chattering challenges.  It flew off in a sulk after getting no response.  Somebody put a distant truck that beeps when it backs up into reverse.  The small gem of a moment passed and the day began.  That’s an observation, but not a story.  The story, if there is one, continues on.

If a story requires an end, most of the things we hear aren’t really stories. At best, the most detailed ones are narratives, opinions on what predicament we are in, how it came about, and what to do about it. Narratives occur far more often than stories, because they don’t have the same structural requirements. They don’t have that end, they don’t have the same internal logic, not even as basic as fairy tales, and they have the same lifespan as a mayfly in a trout hatchery.

I’m not sure that we have more narratives now than we have in the past, but we surely have an abundance of them. Perhaps modern technology has made narratives more available. Anyone with an opinion can make it known through the net, and points of view, both impulsive and calculated, wash over us. Many are impulsive or made for profit; they could not be published any other way than self. We forgive their flaws - we imagine that their crudities and flaws indicate passion rather than incompetence.

Opinions are like any other market commodity.  When the market floods with any item, the percentage of shoddy goods increases, shoddy being badly designed, badly executed, based om flawed assumptions, without any staying power.  As the market becomes oversupplied, they become cheap, so cheap that they aren’t worth even a small investment.

Why do we listen to them?  Perhaps there are two reasons.  First, we are characters in the story; the plot and dialogue affect us.  Second, stories have endings.  Cinderella marries the prince and they live happily ever after.  But life does not end so tidily.  Cinderella’s problems with the duties of royalty, or raising a brood of princelings, or discovering the prince’s uncontrollable fondness for roulette remain unrecorded.  “Happily ever after” is a fictional construct.  Stories usually have some form of closure – the predicaments of life do not.  We can distance ourselves from stories and we cannot from those predicaments.

As characters in a story, we have no power to end it, tidily or otherwise.  We play our parts, largely spear-carriers and horse-holders.  Tom Stoppard wrote a whole play about the concept, and if you have a chance to attend a performance of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, you will understand the problem.  Fortunately, life here isn’t quite that closed, nor is the story already complete.

We celebrated Independence Day yesterday.  In the life of the nation, we are not only characters, but characters who only last for a few episodes.  We were not there at the beginning and we will not be there for the finale, probably.  Our horizons span a much smaller time.

We celebrate the accomplishments of people of the previous episodes, rightly so.  But it is up to us to preserve their practices and beliefs on all of the other days of the year and pass them on to the cast of future episodes.  We do that by applying those beliefs and practices to our situation, rather than allowing the glut of information to desensitize us to what those beliefs are.  Only time will tell how successful we have been.