Stories, Myths and Other Lies is the idea that we are myths made genuine by the telling of stories, and that the fictions we create help reveal as well as cover up our hidden truths.
“Are you telling stories?” my mother asked me. I had been caught out in some minor misdemeanour and had denied it.
Aged 3, possibly 4, this is my earliest memory of lying. Knowingly. To my Mother. This is my first memory of strong emotion – guilt, shame, embarrassment. It is my first understanding of dishonesty.
The memory of the misdemeanour itself has vanished, but the feelings, come to me vividly every time I sit down to write fiction. That little girl in my head hears her mother’s challenge, “Are you telling stories?” The adult woman answers back, “Yes, Ma. I am!”. And while the adult woman understands and thanks her mother’s intention to teach her a lesson about honesty (yet how much I kept from her, how many truths I wanted to say but couldn’t!), the feelings rise up and my pen curiously runs out of ink and the keys of my keyboard suddenly become sticky and I must vacuum them immediately. I am blocked.
I could blame my mother. Mother’s are so influential and such easy targets. But that would be a cliché. Instead, I get angry with myself. I remind myself that I am an educated, sophisticated, mature woman, in my seventh decade. My mother is long dead and I am allowed to ‘tell stories’. In fact I am obliged to because, at my age, I have more stories than I have plans. “So, get on with it!”
Jamie and Sarah Jauncey run personal insight workshops called, ‘The Stories We Tell.’ I like the idea that our lives are made up of stories, and that the fictions we create help to reveal as well as to cover up our hidden truths. One day I hope to join them on one of their retreats. Meanwhile, to help me recover the self that wants to tell stories, I sometimes write Morning Pages, an exercise in letting what wants to come onto the page just come onto the page, without judgement, fear or favour. A ‘note to self’, if you like. But I haven’t written anything fictional for a very long while and even Morning Pages didn’t seem to want to be written. This morning, this came:
Stories, Myths and Other Lies
Terrain; Joanna McFarland; 28 x 38 in; acrylic on stone paper
“THIS is a tale. It is a fiction, of sorts. I will tell you what happened and you will tell yourself the truth of it. We will collude and in our collusion we will create a world where extraordinary things happen, all the time. A strange world, full of strangers who may, or may not, become friends or enemies. They may simply remain other people. We, that is you and I both, will use our imaginations to furnish this world with a climate and a geography, a terrain of fields and hills, of politics and economics. We will keep the company of fellows whose society we know not, nor care to join. This is a story on which we may rest our anxieties and fears, our ambitions and dreams, in the sincere hope that they may, one day, play out as the history of our unlived lives, our memories. Today is Yesterday’s Future. Today is Tomorrow’s Past. Today is the tale we tell ourselves of how things are, were and should, if not will, be. We are myths made genuine by the telling, to ourselves and each other, of the little ticks of our time. He said. She said. We did. If only. Ticks, little regrets, scale up to Tocks in the remembering and re-telling, day after day, year after year, each anniversary an occasion to tell the tale again and to strengthen the myth, a chance to transform a lie into a legend and thereby declare, honestly, a dishonest rendering of the truth.”
And the moral of the story? It is, dear reader, a warning. Parents, aunties, uncles, teachers and family friends, Beware! Be kind but be direct. Euphemisms and nuances come later. Children and the child-like fairies, pixies and other sprites that inhabit the subconscious and immature soul, are literal creatures. They can only take things at face value. How many times have you heard a little one cry with indignation, “But you said…!”
Leave a comment. Tell a friend.
Text copyright; 2016; The Secret Archaeologist
Image copyright; 2016; Joanna McFarland
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