he's saying that human beings need to accept the wild animal side of their nature. We need some way to exhaust our fight-or-flight reflexes. Those skills we learned over the past thousand generations. If we ignore our need to hurt and get hurt, if we deny that need and let it pile up, that's when we get wars. Serial killers. School shootings.
"You're saying we have wars, because we have a low threshold for boredom?
"We have wars because we deny that low threshold."
"
"
"Listen to yourselves, you're so busy telling your stories to each other . You're slways turning the past into a story to make yourselves right."
What Sister Vigilante would call our culture of blame.
It never changes, he says. The other group he brought here, it ended the same way. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. Tha same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories.... and Whittier gestures to our skin and bones.
"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us. It's how we digest our lives. Our experience."
"You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories. The same way this theater seems to digest people." With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, the dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.
Other events - the ones you can't digest - they posison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you're Cassandra's wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories you can digest, that you can tell - you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them . And use them to your own good.
These stories are as important as food.
Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.
It's how we can eat all the shit that happens.
"
For others, it's friday the thriteenth, but just for me alone, it's friday the fourteenth.....
Chuck's right, the only stories you can't tell are those that doesn't exemplify your pain or glory, or... those that are painfully incomplete without an ending.
Since we are onto stories, here's a love story
Was struck by this song on the radio, one of those songs that would make you stop and listen. Found it very familiar, took abit of recalling to remember that i heard it played by a band at YGH at J8 a week ago...