Rancho Tarzanadu: "Miss Linda's Second Humanities MA Discussion Board Post"

     As a creative writer, I was drawn to Ken Plummer’s “Stories and Storied Lives: A Manifesto” for my focus this week. When I first started reading it, I thought: how much is there to say about stories? Ken Plummer has a lot to say about stories! They’re merely the fabric that holds all of humanity and the world at large together, after all.

     Starting at the very beginning of humankind, we have been telling stories; they seem to be an intrinsic part of who we are as human beings. We’ve expressed them through oral traditions, through symbols, and paintings, and later through the written word. Not only do stories reveal our past and create our future, they give our lives meaning, and help us make sense of everything around us and inside of us.

     I found the concept of the “inner life” and “outer life” of stories fascinating; we all have personal and subjective stories, in addition to social and collective stories that we share. Our personal stories affect the collective, and our collective stories affect our personal stories; they are interwoven together through the fabric of humanity. Our stories help us see the inner and outer worlds more clearly, and our place in them; they also help us envision our future place in the physical world, as our stories are ever-changing and shifting – they have a life of their own, much the same way an author can be surprised at what his or her characters end up doing in a particular story. As we are all unique, our stories are also different, and take many shapes and forms, but we all share the same humanity, as we have since the beginning.

     There is never just one and only one story; there are as many perceptions and perspectives of stories as there are humans (which is pretty mind-blowing to me). Each story is unique to the person telling it, and also to the person hearing it, even if it is a collective story; it can be interpreted many different ways by a myriad of people.

     Plummer tells us that stories help keep us alive, ground us, and give our lives meaning. Our stories help turn chaos into order; the chaos inside our own minds, and the chaos of the world around us.

     Our stories are also clues to unravelling culture, they inspire social movements and our educational systems; our stories can literally change the world, and have changed our past into our futures.

     Our stories give shape to our lives, the same way an author gives shape to his or her fictional characters on the page, only our stories are living and breathing, alive. Our stories are our living autobiographies.

     Plummer says that we have good and bad stories “piling up” to form memories (this reminds me of the replicants in Blade Runner, who were made more “human” by their implanted memories). Stories tell us what it means to be living human beings; they help guide us in our search for meaning in our world.

     Our stories change the human-made social world. The conditions we live in shape our stories, and in turn our stories shape and re-shape our conditions. This goes on and on in a perpetual rhythm, a drumbeat of life.

     Plummer brings up the concept of stories “dying”; he urges us to question the sources of our stories, as some stories are not worth reliving, or outlive their usefulness to us. This reminds me of our current political dilemma, and all the declarations of “Fake News” by the same people who are creating it (such as “alternate facts”). Some stories deserve to die, because they do more harm than good in the world, on a personal and collective basis.

     Stories are unveiled gradually through time (just like our own lives unfold, our stores unfold too). Just as human lives have a beginning, middle, and end, stories do also, and cannot be forced to reveal themselves before their time, the same way a flower cannot be forced to bloom before it’s ready.

     Stories are always representations of reality. Plummer asks: “Where does reality start and story end? Where does story start and reality end?” (As I am working on a magical realism novel in which I am the main character, this has several layers for me to unpeel.)

     Plummer speaks of “monologic terrorism”, where there is only one voice in a story. He says that by nature, stories are “dialogic”; there is no story if there is no reader. There is no story without the personal telling of it, and the personal interpretation of it.

     He also speaks of the “Great Unheard”, the lost voices of people who are unable to get their stories heard because of inequalities among us, power dynamics and censorship. The people with the most privilege and power are the most likely to have their stories told and heard; the people with the least privilege and power are the least likely to have their stories told and heard.

     The internet has globalized our stories, bringing us closer to each other, even as we are physically distanced, generating more empathy and understanding of other people’s stories, cultures, and lived experiences.

     Plummer also warns of placing statistics over humanity, and interpreting people’s stories as numbers, charts, and graphs. He says that stories are the “royal road to our humanity”; critical humanism may see the bad, but encourages the good in us.

     Humanism includes animals and the environment, creating a better world for all, so that all of our stories will be better stories, filled with hope and promise and equality…all of our stories will be told and heard in a more inclusive humanistic world.