I Am Not A Story-Teller
The term “story-teller” carries a lot with it. Much of which I believe has been unjustly attached to it as modern content-creation has drug it through the mud. I am not a story-teller. It’s never been a perfectly clear classical narrative arc that that drew me into any pursuit of art-making. In university I was taught that my job was to tell coherent “stories”. But something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on or words to didn’t rest well with me. I can’t say I’ve ever really chased a story. It wasn’t a perfect narrative of triumph that got me on a place to Nepal to sit with earthquake victims who could hear their dying mothers screaming and suffocating under rubble, or their nieces calling them from some mysterious location to which they had been trafficked. I spent three and half years trying to piece together that perfect narrative arc of a people in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya all to finally realize that maybe there wasn’t one. I also realized that in the art that I enjoy most, there often isn’t one either… This perfect Hero’s Journey, a three-act-structure, and so on. Dead Souls (Gogol), didn’t end. In Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), the “protagonist” slowly disappears. Tree of Life (Malick) is often interpreted as a fragmented mosaic of existential nonsense. And what’s to be said for our natural history documentaries? They are simply celebrations of creation, not unlike the first songs of Genesis. So I came to realize its not stories that I’ve ever really sought. Its truth. I don’t mean that which we regard as fact. I mean the essence of truth, truth-essence. That ineffable, quiet understanding that the soul can know that the mind cannot. Human-essence, creation-essence, existential-essence. I believe that we all have a consciousness of beauty. By beauty I don’t mean “pretty”. I mean good. The aesthetic form of good. For me, these essences, this truth is found everywhere. I’ve found it in the morning listening to the wind with my eyes closed. Yes I’ve found it hanging on the back of a truck bouncing through the African Savannah, on a mountaintop, and in remote Himalayan villages, But I’ve also found it just as well in a Marty Robbin’s song, in my mom’s backyard in Grovetown, Georgia. I’ve found it in a cup of coffee and especially in suffering. Stories may be remembered in the mind but its that essence of truth that burrows itself forever into the soul. Humans constantly craft narratives of self. “Where did I come from?” “Where am I now?” “Where am I going?” But I believe at the heart of that is something greater. That is just a template by which we attempt to arrange the absurdity of life. What happens when artists just see truth and beauty and chase them instead of the template? How much truth has not been communicated because the artist could not “put the story together” beforehand? Maybe a great digestible narrative would form. Maybe it wouldn't . But truth will be found by those who seek it
“…poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.”
“The usual logic, that of linear sequentiality, is uncomfortably like the proof of geometric theorem. As a method is incomparably less fruitful artistically that the possibilities opened up by associative linking, which allows for rational appraisal. And how wrong it is that the cinema makes so little use of the latter mode”
“You can play a scene with documentary precision, dress the characters correctly to the point of naturalism, have all the details exactly like real life, and the picture that emerges in consequence will still be nowhere near reality, it will seem utterly artificial, that is, not faithful to life. even though artificiality was precisely what the author was trying to avoid.”
“The pattern of life is far more poetic than it is sometimes represented by the proponents of naturalism.”
-Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time