Roots

Where are true tales found?

Bardelys had felt the moment of fear and silence, when he thought that all tales were gone for him. Then he had recovered a bit, and come to the belief that only the false tales were gone; in that moment of silent clarity, he had learned that the tales of the present age had gone so far as to cleave apart from true talesmanship. But the true tales had not died, they could not die.

This left him wondering how to find them.

It was not only a matter of being a reader that concerned him; he also wanted to know as a talesman. Now that he had despaired of modern tales, he knew he could never again write one. He must instead tell only the kind of tale he thought of as a true tale without really understanding (as yet) what the term could mean.

Of course, the simple answer lay before him.

If tales had begun, at the dawn of man, with only true tales, and then in the growing sophistication and commercialization of all art, had gone too far, or down the wrong path, then the simple answer was to read the oldest tales he could find, and try to sniff out where the difference lay between them and contemporary tales.

But it was not to be so easy.

For Bardelys was convinced that the true tale was not merely a simple tale, such as the first mysteries, or folk tales from centuries past, or oral tales told by less-commercial, more-liberated societies of today. No, it went beyond that.

He had a suspicion that at the root of the true tale lay some deep and immediate connection between the matter of the tale, the talesman, and the audience.

Bardelys had reached this conclusion in the following way:

First he thought that dreams were tales, and true. Each of us tells ourselves tales when we dream in sleep. What makes these tales so compelling and strong is that we feel that they are real and actually happening to us. It is a quality of the dreamer, who both tells the tale and hears it, immerses himself in it, and instantly, moment by moment, adjusts the tale to suit his current needs, fears, desires.

It was this connection that Bardelys suspected lay at the root of the true tale.

The false tales of his day, our day also, are false because they deal with events, people, things that are far from our daily lives.

So, Bardelys thought, a true tale would begin in its root with where he was, his life situation, his space and time.

Thus it might be a tale an uncle would tell him, that took place beginning in his own house, with people that he knew, branching out from there.

And yet, he shook his head. Hadn’t he already concluded that dreams were by their nature true? And yet none of his dreams dealt with events around him (at least, only a very rare few of them did). Most of his dreams were of the past, with strange tweaks and twists, mixing in bits of movies and books, dreams, fantasies.

But they were true.

Or were all dreams true?

If they were, then it was wholly the connection, the sense of realness, that made them true.

The only other thing to say of dreams was that they were ‘about’ where he was in a symbolic sense, dealing intimately with his own longing and fear. It was a closeness to his life situation in a mental sense, rather than an external or physical one.

He knew there was more to it than that, and he made up his mind to discover it.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 16, 2008)