Tell me a story...

In the Chronicles of Elantra series, Kaylin is either stepping in to stop magicians/sorcerers/arcanists whose seeking power threatens the city (or the world), battling shadow, or addressing the elements on a primal level.  In every instance, the heart of what she does is to speak True Words, although for much of the first few books, Kaylin lacks a basic understanding of what it is that she does, utilizing the power of the marks writ upon her skin.  Even after she gains that awareness, she doesn't really understand.  However, she quickly learns that her knowledge of the whys and wherefores of True Words doesn't really matter.  What she knows and/or believes about them does not limit them or strengthen them in any fashion.  True words are whether or not Kaylin is.

In Cast in Silence, Kaylin speaks the end of a dead dragon's story to free him, to grant him the eternal flight that had been denied him when he stayed in human form in order to hold to his duty of protecting the world from the elemental word for water (using that word and its power against the world).  In Cast in Fury, Kaylin tells a story to a Leontine who had been tainted and twisted by shadow in order to give her, not life, but death.

I am not really clear, even after reading and re-reading this series many times, what shadow is, what shadows are.  I know that they twist and taint life. I know that they corrupt life.  I know that they can take life.  And I know that they can make the living into the undying, beings shorn of their soul and yet not dead.  The undying are not zombies in any sense of the word.  They are not demons.  Some are more sentient than others.  Some willingly seek to be undying.  Some have no clue what becoming undying actually will mean for them.  Not all shadows are creatures.  Not all shadows are undying.  But all undying are of the shadow.  And shadow is inimical to life.

In a lot of fantasy books, you have the battle between light and dark, instead of a battle between good and evil.  In a way, I guess you could say that in the Chronicles of Elantra, you have the battle between not shadow and shadow, but the average person does not even know that shadow exists and it is not part of any system of theology or religion.

I am not really clear on who created True Words, other than it is the language of the Ancient Ones (Old Ones), who were creators, or perhaps more accurately makers.   Only in Cast in Chaos, we learn that the elements were once one, with a fifth element, if you were, that bound them as one.  Earth, Air, Fire, and Water resisted the boundaries the fifth one wrought upon them and severed themselves from it.  They created, they were makers, as they walked the world, but they also destroyed.  In the end, they allowed themselves to be bound once more, now separate, but in the same place, a place created for them by True Words, I believe.  They still interact with the world, but in muted fashion.

Water tells the story to Kaylin.  Have just read it, I still am not clear the difference between the elementals as creators and the Ancient Ones as creators, especially because Kaylin doesn't think that the elementals were even created.  They simply have always been.  I guess, I am saying that a true origin of the world (or worlds really, but that is another post or three) it not yet clear.

What is clear, though, is this slowly-evolving awareness of the wholeness, the completeness of True Words and the power of their meaning.

Condensed down into just the story Kaylin tells the Leontine, without the words describing the setting and all the action taking place around Kaylin as she speaks, here are the words spoken:

"Give them choice.  Give them thought and will and volition.  Give them dreams and the ability to see beyond the next meal, the need for shelter.  Give them hope, and light, and a span of days greater than the span they now have.  Give them song, and story, give them fire.  Grace them, in all things with the choice to do and be.  Give them the peace of death, when age descends.  Give them the freedom of death.  Let them leave these lands when life is burden and not joy.  Let none of us stand in their way, who know no such peace." (Michelle Sahara, Cast in Fury, p. 448)

The Old Ones created the Dragons and Barrrani from stone.  Being created from stone, they needed life, so the Dragons and Barrani have (true) names, which are True Words, that give them life.  The Leontines, the Arians, the Tha'alani, and the humans were created from that which was already alive.  Thus, they had no need for names.   Considering that, the words of the story Kaylin tells, not of her speaking but from the power writ on her skin, make more sense.  Taking life and making it more.

The shadow told lies to the Leontine, twisting her and granting her a power that was never hers to have, a power that denied her death.  Marai, even in her tainted self, heard Kaylin's pleas to her to remember who she was, to remember her child.  But she could not doing anything, when reason finally broke through her fury, but ask Kaylin to tell her a story.  Kaylin didn't realize it until the last agonizing moment, but Marai was asking Kaylin to give her back her death.

The contrast between the story Kaylin told the dead Dragon and the story Kaylin told the tainted Leontine interests me because both stories, though having polar opposite outcomes were stories speaking what should have been if life had not been ... corrupted.

Maybe to put it another way, a lot of the speaking of True Words Kaylin does is to speak anew what is meet, right, and salutary.  It is to break through lies that were spoken so that the Truth can be heard once more.  The power of hearing the Truth heals, restores, realigns, gives purpose, and gives both life and death, where death is life, if you will.

"Tell me a story," Marai cries out to Kaylin, even as she is trying to kill Kaylin's companions, driven by the shadow's lies filling her being.  Marai is raging and grieving and regretting all at once.  She is lost and wounded and confused.  Tell me a story.

Little children ask for stories.  In a way, so do adults.  As I have written before, I love the work of Robert Coles, noted psychologist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and now professor emeritus at Harvard, who writes of how we process our lives through story.   The Call of Stories:  Teaching and the Moral Imagination shows how we engage with story to make sense of the human condition and, in so doing, work out who we are as human beings.  It might be easy to say that it is morals and ethics, but it is the whole of humanity, not just one aspect, that is affected by story.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who fundamentally and profoundly changed and expanded our understanding of death and dying and the grieving process, often spoke and wrote of grief stories, the stories folk told about the death in their lives.  No grief story is ever the same; some start before a death, some during the dying process, and some afterwards.  All grief stories are important and the telling of each grief story is also important.  As in, if a person needs to tell their grief story 44 times and others only listen 43 times, the grief is not yet assuaged and processed, as it can be, rather profoundly, in the telling of that story, until it is spoken and heard enough times.

I think of the stories of oral traditions that have explained life for millennia, the folk and fairytales handed down from adult to child, seeking to make sense of the whys and wherefores of creation.  Folk longed for the clarity and certitude they brought.

I think of the "stories" of the Bible.  The stories that are simplified and dressed up to share with children.  I think of the personal stories pastors (at least in the mainline evangelical world) to help make sense of the "stories" of the Bible.  Folk long for the clarity and the certitude they bring.

Tell me a story.  It is a plea for comfort and consolation, a yearning for something meet, right, and salutary in our lives onto which we can grab and hold tightly in times where life is not making all that much sense to us or in times when we face the dark of night, both literally and figuratively, and want light to remember.

When we encounter the confused, the grieving, the wounded, the ill, the informed, the dying ... when we encounter others struggling with the human condition, we ask for their stories, and, upon hearing them, we often respond by telling them a story of their own.  I think ... well, I think that that is a good time to tell a story using True Words, i.e., read to them from the Living Word.  Not just a Bible story. All of the Living Word.  Perhaps some Psalms or Lamentations.  Perhaps one of the Gospels or an Epistle.  Perhaps Isaiah or Jeremiah.  Pick your choice.  Anywhere in the Living Word is powerful and performative and will contain words that are ultimately meet, right, and salutary ...  even if we do not quite understand them or know them.

Just ... tell a story ... maybe like this one, which is, a bit ironically, man telling God a story:

O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me.
Thou dost know when I sit down and when I rise up;
Thou dost understand my thought from afar.
Thou dost scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And art intimately acquainted with all my ways.
Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O Lord, Thou dost know it all.
Thou hast enclosed me behind and before,
And laid Thy hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

Where can I go from Thy Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Thy presence?

If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Thy hand will lead me,
And Thy right hand will lay hold of me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
And the light around me will be night,”
Even the darkness is not dark to Thee,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to Thee.

For Thou didst form my inward parts;
Thou didst weave me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Thy works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Thy book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

How precious also are Thy thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with Thee.

O that Thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God;
Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed.
For they speak against Thee wickedly,
And Thine enemies take Thy name in vain.

Do I not hate those who hate Thee, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against Thee?
I hate them with the utmost hatred;
They have become my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.

~Psalm 139 (NASB 1977)

[P.S.  If you can quote the movie from which I used "pick your choice," you are tops in my book!]