Blessed are the Storytellers

My next stop along the Camino a Ítaca op-ed blesses the storytellers and their less than satisfactory translation into Spanish as narradores de historias, though I do have to say I rather like the ring of bienaventurados. Click over here for the original.

It should be a general maxim. Particularly in times like this, when the world outside my window is stranger and more remote than any fiction I’ve ever known. Blessed are the storytellers.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that the merciful battling this tiny beast should be replaced. Their struggle is far more sanctified than any book of creeds. Nor can we disparage those who mourn when the very efforts of those same superheroes without capes, or protective gear, fail. Real tragedies of stories cut short. Blessed too are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness in the deluge of untrammelled cynicism that flows from those responsible.

Perhaps not the official, sanctioned version of the blessed, but I’d wager there is still an undiscovered scroll or two preaching them in some dusty cave in Sinai. And even if my bet doesn’t pay off, well before those iron-age scrolls were written, storytellers braving Palaeolithic hyenas were leaving their mark and telling their tales in dark cramped caves like those here in Caceres. We’re made for stories and blessed are those that create them.

They’ve kept me going through this seemingly endless nightmare. When time melted, days blurred and the month of April was cancelled, there they were.

From my window, I tried to make sense of what was happening. Looking back at the text messages I was sending in March and contrast them with how the world looks now and it’s like looking at another life, a life full of others. The world now reaches us through the distorting lens of social media and the information journalists are able to glean.

Truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in life and long ago I became convinced that it is rarely if ever told during working hours, especially when politicians are concerned. ‘Facts’ now change by the minute and even the number of the dead is no longer sacred or true. As Faulkner once mused, facts have very little connection with the truth, so rather than looking for understanding in fact, I found it in stories.

From my bookshelves, I’ve explored plagues in Syria with Ibn Battuta and the criminally unknown Spanish traveller and spy, Ali Bey. Through stories I revisited places I have been and sounds I have heard, reminding myself that they weren’t only a dream. Stories also feed the dreams I still have, of experiencing the Uzbek Mountains, the beaches of Sao Tome and the depths of La Codosera. Things that can still happen when this is over.

The slow creep of the calendar has also meant time to create stories with my family, time I never seemed to have before and that I will probably never see again. We’re creating anecdotes which will remind us of how we experienced this crisis far more clearly than dubious facts would.

Hunter S. Thompson once said, ‘yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why’ and tomorrow will see more twisted facts and cynical attempts at explanations. Blessed indeed are the storytellers’, the real oracles that help us see though this fog, shaping reality so that it resembles truth.