Why We Make Story

They say a picture is worth a thousand words,
but we can't get the whole picture unless we have the whole story.
And the magic in words is that the story can make the picture.

The day pulls the rain back into its mouth, giving us a wee bit of time to ramble this ancient valley. I'm visiting Kilmartin, Scotland, the land of my bloodlines, and I feel the cells of my body singing with return. For eight thousand years people have lived here on these rolling knobby hills and in the deep silted rifts that extend back from the sea toward the highlands in great fans of green pasture. The past fifteen hundred years have been a bloody mess, feudal clan fighting feudal clan for the hilltops and the space between.

In the shops of Oban, an hour's bus ride north, you can buy the tartans, the crests, the kilts and sweaters, the tea cozies and little silver spoons, the thimbles and knives - everything blazoned with insignia to wear about town. Look at me, I'm the descendant of a MacDougall, a MacLean, a Brown, and a Campbell: American mongrels doing the tour - and I among them.

Beyond the edge of modern commerce, the stones have survived: standing stones, cairns of stones, pathways of stones like teeth protruding from the moss and heather of the moors, sometimes for miles leading toward the center of something important. The stones are waiting in the sheep meadows below the small, exquisitely designed Kilmartin House Museum. We start first with a little education, going through the story of this place so that we can better decode the walk we will be taking into the misty silence of the fields viewable through the plate glass walls of the museum café. Here in this western edge valley, the oldest standing stones are dated at 3000 bce, and the later cairns at 1500 bce.

Kilmartin seems to have been a sacred gathering site where it is imagined the tribes convened for ceremony and initiation. Like most of the standing circles of prehistoric Britain, these stones are calibrated to the path of the sun with slits along rock face to mark the alignment for solstice and equinox. Along one wall of the museum a diorama shows the positioning of stones spreading out for miles. The pattern suggests a long walk to the ceremonial fire and elaborate rituals of worship and exchange. I can imagine this, yes, but everything is speculation. Whoever erected these monoliths were a people whose stories have fallen with them into dust and silence.

One thing we know: in Kilmartin, in Avebury, in Silbury, in Stonehenge, and in hundreds of sites scattered across the terrain of Wales, England, Scotland, and Ireland, these people were amazing engineers and astro-nomers. They were scientists and craftsmen. One thing we don't know: what is the story that inspired them to this work? What inspired generations of them enough to set aside their fishing, hunting, shelter building and take on the mental calculations and backbreaking work?

And why am I so sure they were driven and inspired by story? Because I am. Because you are. Perhaps our greatest freedom is to nurture the passions on which our life decisions and actions rest. Stories are the source of our decisions and actions. Stories excite our dedication in ways that conceptual thought alone cannot. We need both to motivate such hard work: the thought and the inspiration, the idea and the context, the what and the how come.

I believe that most people desire to be good, desire to live lives of integrity and purpose, desire to have honorable work that sustains them and their families, desire to make a contribution to their communities, desire to leave even a small legacy for their successors. This statement is a thought, a chosen conceptual basis for how I live. To sustain this thought, I need evidence, and evidence comes through story. I collect evidence of human goodness by listening to, reading about, passing along in writing and speaking hundreds of stories that support this belief. I am a conduit for stories that give me hope about the nature of humanity and our potential for wisdom. Fortunately, we are storytelling creatures and evidence is not hard to collect.

We are Homo sapiens, "bipedal primates... characterized by a brain capacity of 1,400 cc (85 cubic inches) and a dependence upon language and the creation and utilization of complex tools." Homo, a Latin word meaning "man," derives from the Old Latin word hemo, meaning "earthly one." Sapiens comes from the Latin word sapient, to be wise, to have and to show great wisdom and sound judgment. We have traded everything - fur and claw, size and endurance - to carry around the brain of humanity on this naked, vulnerable stem.

I stand in the valley of my ancestors with my hands on the lichen-covered stones and stare into the swirling mist. My mind takes me back and back and back to another story.

The DNA of Story
Dusk, twenty thousand years ago. The man is wet to the skin and shivers. The lifeless body of a rabbit bounces against his shoulder as he hurries through twilight. The woman trotting at his side pauses in the fading light to gather a few leaves, scratch a surface root free with her toe, and deposit it in the skin pouch at her waist. They move in this fashion along a trail they hope will lead to welcome, warmth, and company for the night. They smell smoke before they can see it, then hear voices. Finally they round a bend and there it is - fire glow on a cave wall. Other travelers have already gathered. Not wanting to be mistaken for prey or foe, the man grunts loudly, making the sound for "man-friend." The people at the fire are alerted now and shush each other, listen cautiously. "Man-friend, man-friend." His word travels through the dark to the fire. There is chatter, then one among them grunts back, "Man-friend, man-friend." The woman opens her throat and ululates the haunting cry of female greeting. The women at the fire call back to her. They have two things to offer: food and story. They will be welcomed. And so it has always been.

Even now, though we live in a world that glows with a manufactured brilliance to dim the stars, when we light a candle on our dining tables, roast marshmallows over the backyard grill, or place a night-light near a child's crib, our twenty-first century bodies remember how important it has always been to find the fire and tend the flame. With offerings that feed the body and stories that sustain the soul, we return to the fire for a primal sense of belonging. Something about firelight welcomes us. Something about story informs, inspires, and connects us. And so it has always been.

For tens of thousands of years getting to the fire or not has been a matter of survival or not. Before fire, community could extend only as far as body warmth: a bonded pair, their offspring, maybe a single juvenile. The early hominid's sense of community was immediate and tangible: how many could be fed, how many could keep warm - instinctual, mammalian behavior. After fire, hominids could expand their living patterns to include kinship groups: more could be fed, more could keep warm. Homo sapiens began to cluster as they realized that more hunters equaled more meat, more females equaled more food gathering and, of course, more babies.

The couple that walked toward the fire twenty thousand years ago had already undergone two hundred thousand years of genetic selection for language and social organization. Scientists now largely agree that several million years ago the great apes and hominids shared a common ancestor with communication abilities, probably similar to those we observe in living apes. After apes and hominids separated, the Homo genus began a series of experiments that, while all extinct, may have contributed to the development of our gene pool: Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis. We know them only through their skulls, teeth, and skeletal fragments. By the time Homo sapiens became the evolutionary link that survived all the earlier models, physical evidence suggests that mutation for language capacity had taken a great leap forward. This evidence shows up in the changed skulls and brain cavities of our earliest direct ancestors, which scientists have studied through endocranial casting.

Oh, that's such a big word: endocranial. There was a time I thought I'd know a scientific term like this better than the words of poetry. I spent fifth grade poring through a cache of National Geographic magazines I'd found stacked in my Grandpa Anderson's basement, their muskiness adding an aura of antiquity and authority: these were not comic books. That spring when, for my birthday party, my mother came up with the theme, "Come as what you want to be when you grow up," I was ready. In a room full of nurses, secretaries, and teachers (this was, after all, 1957), I descended the stairs wearing khaki shorts, a big white shirt, and a pith helmet. I had just learned a new word: anthropologist.

Biologists note that brain tissue is "expensive" for the body: it re-quires more protection, and increased blood and oxygen supply. Animals develop only as much brain tissue as they need to fulfill their function. The mental capacities of a mouse, a horse, and an elephant are all determined in part by the size and configuration of their brains. The mental capacities of a human are determined by brain size, configuration, and the ability to retain complex systems of information and bodies of knowledge that are based on symbolic transfer: language.

Lest we get too enamored with our specialness, in his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker writes, "Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens... in nature's talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale."

Pinker makes the case that language is biologically innate. He says, "Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently..."

According to scientific theory, language development does not remove us from the animal realm; it distinguishes our place within it. I believe that nature is a manifestation of the Divine, and that anthropological studies of evolution based on fossil skeletons and DNA, and a growing scientific exploration of brain development and language, are not in conflict with religious belief. Both are true. Religion and science are complementary views of how we got here: religion is the story of what we can imagine; science is the verification of what we can observe.

Science and story have always been partners. The impulse to understand our lives and the world through science is almost as ancient as the impulse to understand our lives and the world through story. Science-mind led to capturing the secret of fire tending, studying the properties of plants, learning from animals, figuring out the seasons and the stars, and building the standing stones of Great Britain and Easter Island, the pyramids of the Mayans and Egyptians, and every marvel under heaven. Story-mind fills in the significance and embeds information inside narrative so that we remember it.

Later in his book, Pinker tells the story of the discovery of the Papua New Guinea peoples between 1930 and 1960. "By the 1920s," Pinker says, "it was thought that no corner of earth fit for human habitation had remained unexplored. New Guinea, the world's second largest island, was no exception. The European missionaries, planters, and administrators clung to its coastal lowlands, convinced that no one could live in the treacherous mountain range that seemed to run in a solid line down the middle of the island. But the mountains visible from each coast in fact belonged to two ranges, not one, and between them was a temperate plateau crisscrossed by many fertile valleys. A million Stone Age people lived in those highlands, isolated from the rest of the world for forty thousand years."

In 1930, Michael Leahy, a gold prospector following a river upstream and cresting the first ridge, found himself staring into previously undiscovered terrain. As night fell, he noticed a number of firelights flickering below and realized that he was not alone. The next day, he and his companions met the peoples of the Neolithic era, and these people met pale-skinned modern man. In the isolated plateau, various tribal groups had developed eight hundred languages, each capable of expressing "abstract concepts, invisible entities, and complex trains of reasoning."

Pinker uses the story of this discovery to make several scientific points:

• All groups of people develop language; no mute cultural group has ever been discovered.
• Though certain regions and societies have been labeled "cradles of civilization," no region or group has served as a "cradle of language" conferring speech to previously languageless groups.
• While the technologies of a culture vary widely in their sophistication, the sophistication of language is consistently complex.
• Children will learn language and when necessary will develop grammatical complexity that surpasses that of their parents or teachers (deaf people, who cannot learn auditorily, create sophisticated grammatical languages of sign).

The biological and neurological wiring that makes us human has been in the developmental stages for several million years. The skulls of Homo habilis, which lived 2.5 to 2 million years ago, show the faint imprints of their brains clearly enough to determine that the language areas of the left hemisphere were already present. And Homo sapiens, which appeared in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, and began migrating out of Africa about one hundred thousand years ago, had skulls like ours. As Pinker notes, "It is hard to believe that they lacked language, given that biologically they were us, and all biologically modern humans have language."

The Necessity of Language to Know the Story
In about 250 ce, an Irish tribe called the Scotti began to sail across the Irish Sea and settle on the Inner and Outer Hebrides and coastal lands of western Scotland, moving in amongst those who were already residents. We don't know much about these people, not even what they called themselves. The Picts is what the Romans named this tribe, from the Latin word pictis, meaning "painted," supposedly in honor of their heavily tattooed bodies. The Picts left art and stones but no records of their stories other than several quotations attributed to their chiefs and written down in Latin during the era when they held the line at the end of the Roman Empire (one wonders how this translation occurred, since the Picts were certainly not speaking Latin).

At first, it seems, the Scots and the Picts joined together to keep the Roman Empire at bay, but once successful at fighting back a common foe, they turned on each other and the English in an age of bloodletting that went on for centuries and still erupts in the modern era. The Scottish and the English remain; the Picts are gone. Standing on a small rise, looking northeast, I see the landscape as a plaid of blood and bones.

Through it all, the stones have stood in their mysterious placements. For five thousand years, they have withstood everything humans and nature have done in and to this valley. The original stone circles from the earlier Largie period were piled over with fifty-foot cairns of local stones. As climate has changed, they have been covered over by seawater, embedded in peat bog, eroded and stripped back into view. The cairns have been deconstructed to build walls between pastures and carried off to pave village streets. The people come and go and change and adapt. The people forget and remember and change the story. The stones stand.

As a great-great-granddaughter of the Baldwins, Knights, Harts, and Purdys, standing in Scotland, England, Kilmartin, and Avebury, placing my hand on these rough-carved obelisks of mystery, is as close as I can come to decoding the stories of my patrilineal origins. And this is true of any modern human: what we know about ourselves quickly disappears into the mist. Story itself goes back, but we have not, as a species, always taken good care of our stories. And until the very recent invention of writing, the only form of preservation was mouth to mind.

This day on the moors, in the timelessness of stones, I stand within a technology of communication that can save story as never before. Yet the question remains, what stories will we save? And the question arises, what stories might save us? And the question walks with me down the path, what decisions will ensure that the stories told about us in the future - the seven-billion-member "us" of the extended human family - speak of the uprising of human goodness?

We have been evolving for this moment for millions of years. And considering the state of the world, it seems a good time to step fully into the capacities bequeathed us in our name: Homo sapiens, the earthly ones with the capacity for wisdom and sound judgment. Scientific inquiry informs us we are biologically wired to talk and listen; we are psychologically wired to empathize. An invisible lightning strike flashes in the brain and opens our minds to story. This is our brightest hope. Story is the heart of our language capacity. In the right context, given the respect it deserves, story heals, reminds, and guides us. Story is the most powerful tool ever granted ordinary people. Story is power.

Behind all the distraction and gadgetry and technological hyperbole, dusk is gathering in the real world. We need to find our way to the fire. We need to bring what we hold dear and sit down and stare a while into the flickering and unembellished light that holds the darkness at bay. We need to call out to each other, "man-friend... woman-friend...," and have that call returned. We need to sing our coming into the circle around the flames, and to hear the chorus of welcome that gives us courage to step into the light. We need to proceed boldly, arms open with the fruits we have to share and mouths already singing the tales of our journey.

© 2007, Christina Baldwin, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted from the book Storyccatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story © 2007 by Christina Baldwin. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. or 800-972-6657 ext. 52. Storycatcher is available for purchase now at your local bookseller, or by clicking on the cover image above.

Join us next month for the second half of this chapter from
Christina Baldwin's Storycatcher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina Baldwin is the author of Storycatcher: Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. She has devoted her life work to helping people honor the importance of story. www.storycatcher.net.