Origin of Stories

To really understand what centrality cinema has come to possess for me, I have to look as far back as it is possible: If this mode of narrative seems most natural and necessary to me, I must peel away the mysteries that house other familiar forms of story-telling.

Immediately, stories beget a nature that is public or private, root or fruit, impressed or sold.

Any exercise to dissect the following will be arduous. A man doesn't sit down to write about the foundational, formative experiences of his life and achieve that in a few sentences. A daft writer can perhaps accomplish that about his wife or a new, minor character in an unfinished story. But the journal he keeps is necessarily fat and cluttered, irreducible.

Narratives weaved around the stones and bits of colored glass and rags and twigs and cut-outs from newspapers, which formed the cast of the stories told by three-year-olds, were the first public form of narratives I experienced.

There are always a small number of stories that children are told by other children--perhaps a few years older, at most--that incorporate themes older than humanity: fear of the unknown, biological functions, sensory rewards. The story I remember is about an old couple who are visited by a bullying bear, who ends up eating their turd and is scared away when the old woman lets go an alarmingly loud fart. This story no doubt still circulates among Nepali children giggling in the dark.

Swasthani Brata Katha, a book recited an impressive seven times in a matter of a month, established the necessary understanding of karma, basic Hindu scheme of honor, piety and heavenly reward. But, it was also a story where a seven year old girl is married off to an eighty-year old leper. It is also a story where a god with the ability to destroy Creation carries the decomposing corpse of his beloved in a mad expression of high melodrama surpassing adolescent tantrums. It is filled with equally gleeful descriptions of beautiful women and horrible demons; the eyes of a temptress stirs the heart just as much as the description of a flesh-eating rakshasha's blood-plastered face.

Such recitations are also the first experience of the cruelty inherent in a lyrical medium, where sound and images cascade without chance, a complex dance, and the reader's gentle recitation deceptively simplifies the horrors within the narrative.

[More to follow]