The Power of Stories

During my stay at the Art Monastery, there was a person who brought to my mind a certain idea that I had thought of before but never in so much detail as he showed me. This idea was how powerful stories can be. He showed us how some of the best filmmakers create storyboards so detailed that the producers and editors could not mess around with their ideas too much. In other words, the story was so well set that they could not change it, and so the original story came out fully. He showed us how he had implemented this concept into a financing app he was creating; I didn't fully understand it, but it has to do with laying out the company's “story” into the app to ensure that things would go as planned. A bit more complicated than that obviously.

This being an English blog though, I thought it'd be a little out of place to talk about how good storytelling can be used to ensure something is carried out in a certain way. I thought it would be more interesting to talk in this case about how stories connect to language and cultures. About how stories are able to evoke emotions and teach lessons in a very effective ways. There's a reason why all of the abstract art (especially in areas like writing, theater and music) is not the “mainstream.” And that's because people will always find the relateable format of a story much easier to deal with than the tough-to-grasp, more abstract forms of art.

The reasons why stories are so powerful have to do with imagination and empathy, both innate human characteristics. Through imagination, we are able to suspend our disbelief of something and, to some extent, make ourselves believe that the stories that we are being told are real. And that's precisely what allows empathy to kick in and make us feel for the characters in the stories. In psychology there is a theory of something called a “Flashbulb Memory” and it is the idea that when an event is accompanied by a strong emotional reaction it is much more likely to be “burnt” into our memory. This is what happens with stories. If instead of listening to a boring lecture about moral behavior, you read/hear/watch a story that teaches about those moral behaviors, you would be much more likely to remember them and apply them, especially if the story involves you emotionally. Even more if you are able to identify with the characters in the story, which is the main reason why stories remain more popular than abstract art. It leaves less to speculation and thus makes the characters and the plot more relateable to the audience.

Despite that, stories are not the perfect medium for communicating ideas. Despite not being an abstract art itself, when attempting to teach a lesson through a story, as many cultures have and still do, the story becomes a sort of abstraction of the lesson. One must be told what the lesson underlying in the story is, or otherwise that will be left to speculation, just as if it were an abstract piece. That's precisely where the fun part starts though. Stories can be more than just a fun read or something to relate with; they can be a completely unpredictable thing. With every person's individual interpretation of the events that take place, misunderstandings included, a completely new intention or purpose can surge out of the story.

And by intention I don't mean the author's intention; rather, I am referring to the intention of the story itself. The one that varies between readers. The one that makes a single story fan out into so many different faces. Stories are a powerful and unpredictable thing. Almost behaving like a living being. Changing its intentions and stuff... Funny, it sounds similar to how we described language at the beginning of the course. And with good reason I suppose. After all, stories and language are quite strongly intertwined. They compliment each other, granting each other powers they would not have otherwise.

Humans and their imagination...

Exploring the universe one story at a time...

Writing from the Heart

So, uh… how do I start this… Maybe I should start by analyzing how that list sentence should’ve been a question but wasn’t? Well I guess this awkward thing I’m writing right now is probably stupid enough. I think I’ve broken the ice enough, probably should get to what I wanted to get to now. Question is, whether to do it artistically or just be straightforward about this “general musing…” Nah, that’s a pretty stupid question to ask actually. It’ll just be what it’ll be. Well, here it goes. Just gonna let it flow now.

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to use language without any involvement from the brain? Well ok, obvious logical answer is no. But have you ever thought about what it means to write “from the heart?” Trying to figure out what that meant was extremely difficult. Maybe I should start with the whole story though, some context never hurt any story.

So, I spent the entire first week of April in a small medieval mountain town in Italy called Caramanico as part of a summer program organized by something called the Art Monastery project. Sounds kinda cool, doesn’t it?? The program was essentially a combination between relaxation, contemplation, exploration and creation (by creation I mean art). Among the many activities that we did, there was one creative writing workshop that we did. First one I’d ever done actually (that involved some actual writing). I have absolutely no memory of what she called the thing we were doing, but essentially it was writing from the heart. We read this (translated) poem from the Persian poet Rumi and she told us to pick a word/phrase/verse/section/whatever we wanted from the poem that caught our attention and just write stuff using that as an inspiration. But the most important thing was that we had to write “from the heart.”

And that simple command got me absolutely baffled!

In fact, I don’t even remember what part of that poem I had chosen or anything, because when I got to writing what I did was basically discuss with myself in three different languages how on earth to start writing something that came from “the heart.” However, that was under stress conditions, so I never really thought about what I was doing… I just kept on discussing, thinking that analyzing a poem was definitely something that came from the mind and not the heart and therefore was not something I could start the piece with. But now that I have time I really wanted to ask myself: what does it mean to write with the heart? Is there a way to use language in an entirely intuitive way that does not involve the use of the mind?

Well as I said before, there most likely isn’t. I mean, language is a thought process, right? In that sense, there’s no way to use language without thinking about it. I mean, language is used to convey ideas and those come from the mind. The conscious, “civilized” mind, that is. But what about the other part of the mind? The impulsive one responsible for emotions and things like that? Is it possible to use language using ONLY that part of the brain..? Well, if it’s not impossible I guess it must be extremely difficult for me at the very least, considering how much I overthink stuff. I mean, certainly letting emotions run completely free on a blog meant to be read by my entire class is pretty dangerous… But what would have been the problem with unleashing those emotions onto the sheet of paper back at the monastery? Something just didn’t feel right back then. Like everything I tried to come up with didn’t seem to come from the heart.

It’s a funny thing actually. It makes me question to what extent can language actually convey emotion. Sure, language can create scenarios that one can imagine and then we can immerse ourselves into whatever emotion that scenario produces within us, but that’s not really the language conveying emotion. It’s an idea with the power to produce emotions in others. And of those I’m very sure that there are many. What IS it then, to write from the heart??? Does that actually even exist?

I remember hearing in theater that some theater forms like Absurdist Theater and Theater of Cruelty often worked on the basis that language was a failure as a means for communication. Especially the latter one, which essentially believed that true emotion could only be experienced when one detached from all social stimuli. Language probably being one of them. Language can clearly communicate ideas, but when it comes to conveying emotions it is absolutely useless. Emotions are just such a personal experience. And everyone perceives them in such different ways. The same event can cause completely different reactions on two different people depending on their own memories and personality. And then they might try to communicate the emotion to the other person, but will they ever truly, fully understand what the other person was feeling only through language? Even though they both know all the details from the event firsthand? Language may be a very powerful tool, but when it comes to conveying emotion it certainly falls short…

However, and here’s where it gets interesting, in spoken language it might, just might, be a different story. Especially in personal interactions with other people. At one point in my trip, the person who was my travel companion, a friend from Resuscitation Theater here in Abu Dhabi, said that Spanish and Italians are very passionate people. When we spoke some more about it he mentioned that these languages usually involve much more breath and the sounds tend to come from more within the body than a language like in English. Like saying that when one is a native speaker of these languages there is a lot more from the person’s body that is involved in the communication. Almost like it’s coming straight from the heart..!

And call me crazy for talking Physics in an English blog, but there’s actually still a lot that we possibly don’t know about the things we can’t see. It might be possible that when we speak there is more than just air vibrations that travel the air… There’s something I was read: “Any sound can shake the air. A voice can shake the soul.” Maybe when we speak there’s more than just those vibrations going across… And maybe it’s language that allows us to encode that “something else.” But well, it’s not like I know anything about that stuff. It’s fun to imagine it might be true though 