I have a great story to tell you.
Long ago, no-one had a word for the bad things that happen to people. There was a word for sun and a word for moon, a word for tears and a word for smiles. Water, leaf, and cranberry got a word each. But the only words anyone had were for talking about things.
Real things. Things you could taste, see, and touch. If someone needed a cranberry, they could go and ask for it. But if they needed something more complicated, like an epistemology or a dialectic, they were on their own. Without the word, they couldn’t even tell themselves about it.
Everyone got by, even without epistemologies. They ate their berries and drank their water out of leaves without any confusion. And even when things got very bad, they didn’t talk about it. They made tears together and moped around for a while, but when the sun came out again they went back to their former ways – if not without a thought, then certainly without a word.
One day, someone who did not have much to do stared at the sky and noticed the fluffy white things that floated around up there. The sloth gave them a name. It was their word for cloud. The others liked it. They got so excited that they decided to throw a great festival to honour the birth of the new word.
Things went wrong at that festival. A storm came up. The rain came down. A wind came through, scattering the coals of the campfire. It picked up the sloth and hurled that sloth over the horizon.
The others couldn’t go looking until the rain stopped. But it carried on for days. The others huddled together, soaked to the bone, and sang mournful songs about clouds, cranberries, and water.
One day the sun came out. And one day, the sloth came back. But that sloth was not so slothful anymore. The not-sloth had big, wild eyes and hair like lightning. Everyone gathered round to hear that not-sloth’s story.
The story was big. It was about someone who lived in a cave at the top of the mountain. Someone furry with big teeth and long horns. Someone who made the pleasant sun take their water away. Someone who turned nice clouds bad. And with that story came a brand new word. It was their word for evil.
The not-sloth didn’t live much longer. But whenever things went bad after that, everyone knew whom to blame. From time to time they would look for that someone on top of the mountain. They would find strangers there and scare them away, knowing that there weren’t just evil clouds. There were evil people, too.
Some people didn’t like that not-sloth’s story. Down the ages they tried to fight it. Some had long beards. Some had enormous moustaches. Most had epistemologies. But even with epistemologies, no-one could seem to dislodge it. Evil had its ups and downs, but “evil” kept getting bigger. Because it was a good word, wrapped in a good story.
And once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose on the world.
Not much room left for discoveries. I liked the parallel of Leslie Silko’s version with Pandora’s Box. Silko’s is less didactic, more playful. My version is influenced by linguistic relativism and other such ideas. I had a lot of fun writing it. Keep the lasagna flying!
“The Myth of Pandora’s Box.” Greek Myths – Greek Mythology. Greek Myths and Greek Mythology. n.d. Web. May 28, 2015.
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. Print.
Swoyer, Chris. “The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information. 2003. Web. May 28, 2015.
Hi Mattias,
I enjoyed the emphasis on language and its role in your story, and it wasn’t until the end of your post that I realized there was a term to describe what you were touching on “language relativity”. Thanks to your hyperlink I got lost for 10 minutes just reading into exactly what the theory of language relativity is and I was fascinated. I think that it is easy to overlook the role of language, as something automatically integrated into the context of words and storytelling, and miss the role it has in a reader’s interpretation of a story. The truth it, we all understand in different ways, influenced by who we are, where we’ve been, our beliefs, values, experiences, cultures, personalities, etc and it’s great to see you touch on that idea of what words mean to each person in your story of how evil was born. How do you think your own experiences and backstory influence the way you read the other stories from our class blog this week? Do you think they influence the way you tell stories as well? Please feel free to check out my blog and leave a comment!
Hi Freda!
I’m so glad you enjoyed it and found something interesting through it. I must say I find your questions difficult to answer – I don’t feel influenced by my past so much as composed of it. One’s context is the source of prejudice and bias, but also of language, reason, and curiosity. Without it, there is no interpretation.
At the same time, I think I can say that I believe in the possibility of common ground, and that huge gaps in background can still be bridged. (Even when people agree that every mind is ultimately alone, they’re still agreeing on something, aren’t they?) Those two beliefs – that there is no “true” and “false” independent of people and their specific backgrounds, and that it is nonetheless possible to come to substantial agreements – shape my interpretation of basically everything. I hope that doesn’t sound like a dodge!
🙂
I quite enjoyed this and like FredaLi above, the language relativity was quite interesting. If the story you said “even when bad things happened, they didn’t have a word for it” (Or something along those lines), I think that hits the core of the story. As with Adam and Eve, Pandora’s box, and with most stories about evil entering the world the evil existed prior and generally it is the lack of knowledge (or obedience) that leads to the understanding of Evil in the traditional sense. I am wondering if that was your intention?
Great work.
Thank you for your thoughts, James. I had to read the third-to-last sentence a few times to quite see if the nail had been hit on the head. My hope with this story was to draw attention to the question of whether evil is, in the end, a useful concept for understanding the world. In the stories you mention, the implication is that evil existed all along, even before people knew about it. In my story (and to some extent in the story related by Silko), it was the naming that brought it into being. Things that once were disparate were suddenly bound together into an overarching concept – “annexed to a word,” as Locke would put it – and given a meaning they didn’t have before. The question is open, then, whether the word really gets at anything, whether it’s insightful or accurate or true.
That’s what I was trying to get across, although I’m not sure how well I did. Does that answer your question?
🙂
Intriguing and engaging story. Your work, to me, engages with the power of words. It is quite poetic and very clearly written.
King discusses the important of story in shaping our realities. He states that “stories control our lives…” ( and can “chain…” (9) us to a particularly reality. My blog https://blogs.ubc.ca/hvaartnou/2015/05/29/the-stories-that-we-hear-can-keep-us-in-chains/ engages with King’s ideas about the power of the words we speak. Yours intrigued me as our ideas were not that different, though we chose different settings, I was also inspired by Pandora’s Box. My story focuses on stories, while yours is drawn to the power of meaning in words. Very compelling.
What I’m getting as is that is in one of my personal beliefs and political beliefs that words shape our consciousness. King alludes to this in his story about evil. I wonder if you agree, from the linguistic relativism link, about “the suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)? Your story, to me, reflects this idea. Your focus on specificity of word choice was interesting and unique.
Thanks for your work!
-Hannah
Hi Hannah,
I’m glad you liked it 🙂 Interesting that we both went back to that same touchstone of Western culture.
I do agree with that suggestion. In particular, I think “carving up” is a particularly apt metaphor for it. At the same time, I think that there are still important similarities between languages in general: humans from different cultures are similar in the structure of their brains, which makes it likely that there would be some meaningful common patterns in how languages are constructed. Generally, I think the gaps can be bridged with enough effort, but it’s very important to acknowledge the limitations of translation, especially at the level of phrases, wordplay, musicality, and other subtleties that are crucial to the appreciation of language for its own sake.
Thanks for reading, cheers!
~Mattias
🙂
Hi Mattias,
I found your story really engaging and clearly written. Really nice work! Following up on your response to James’s question, I do feel that your story successfully speaks to the arbitrary relationship of the word to ‘reality,’ or in the terms of structural linguistics, to the arbitrary relationship between the ‘sign’ and the ‘signifier’. As you put, it is naming something that puts it into existence, as opposed to to the concept (in this case, the concept of evil) existing, fully formed, “out there” in ‘reality’. I felt your story thoughtfully played upon the ways in which language fundamentally shapes our world, and the need to, if possible, step back and witness language in an objective light- to understand it as a symbolic system that references and constructs ‘reality,’ rather than as transparently bound in reality.
Hi Laura, thanks so much 🙂 That’s definitely what I was going for.
🙂