Not so long a time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, there existed a remarkably sophisticated new animal. This new animal was really terrific; top notch; spared no expense. This animal could not only do the basic rigamarole of eating, sleeping, making new, smaller animals, and trying to avoid being eaten by scarier animals – or falling off cliffs, and what have you. This animal figured out how to do all sorts of brand, shiny new things: namely, how to hold onto things with a sneaky, special claw, which allowed the animal to jam sticks together to make a den, or how to jam sticks together differently to make some glowing hot stuff.

“Ouch!” thought the animal. “But cooooool.”

Sticks continued to work out well for the animal. It used sticks to sharpen other sticks, to keep away the scarier animals, and catch and eat smaller and stupider ones. It used sticks for all kinds of neat stuff – even drawing pictures of itself on cave walls. Then, the animal wanted to have a better look at the pictures it drew of itself, so it got right up onto its hind legs, and had a good look at the picture it had drawn.

“Cooooool,” said the animal, out loud.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

You guessed it: we’re pretty familiar with the animal I’m talking about – as all the other animals became familiar with it too. “All right, all right,” they grumbled. “Show off.” And they named the flashy new animal HUMAN, and learned to increasingly give it some space. As one does with braggarts and pests.

For HUMAN became a braggart indeed. And one day, when HUMAN was fast asleep, after a day of sharpening sticks and doing stuff with them, the different parts of HUMAN threw themselves a lil’ party, to celebrate all the cool stuff they could do.

“All right, all right,” crowed Brain. “We’ve really been hitting it out of the park lately. What have y’all been up to?”

(“I mean,” chortled Brain, “I know, because I’m the knowledge centre of this whole shebang. But I like hearing y’all tell it.”)

So Body stood up, and told the assembly all about the incredible things it had been doing with HUMAN – how to hold things, and move things, and climb things, and run away from things, and throw things, and grab things, and jump off things, and…

“Yes, yes,” smirked Brain. “You’re very good at doing all the things I tell you to do. Well done.”

“Hold my beer,” said Heart. And Heart told a long, rousing story about how Body and Brain couldn’t do any of the interesting things that they did without it pumping away, giving them all the juice and inspiration they needed to keep on keeping on.

“Wow,” sniffed Brain. “I gotta hand it to you, Heart. You sure are useful. Anyone who helps me do what I do must be pretty darn cool.”

And so it went for a while, with Heart, Brain, and Body all telling story after story, boast after boast, of all the neat stuff they’d learned to do, and how excellent they felt learning to do those things. And it was quite some time before they realized they had another guest at the party. A guest that sat near the back, wearing a dark cloak and a dark hood, looking thoroughly out of place.

“Hey,” belched Body, who had had quite enough to drink, thank you very much. “Who’s that weirdo?”

“Chill,” hissed Brain. “That’s my estranged cousin, Bad Feelings. We don’t get on so well, any more. Just be polite, and keep your distance.”

“Zat so?” chortled Heart. “Hey! Bad Feelings! Did you hear all the cool stuff we’ve been up to?”

“Oh yes,” responded Bad Feelings, who spoke in a soft purr, almost inaudible, but perfectly clear. “I heard. You’ve been busy.”

“Darn right we have!” crowed Body, flexing itself for no real reason. “What about you? What have you been up to? Huh?”

“Can it,” murmured Brain, looking thoroughly nervous. “Just leave it be.”

Bad Feelings stood up. Its dark cloak whooshed theatrically as it did.

“What have I been up to?” purred Bad Feelings. “I’ll tell you. I’ve been watching. And learning.”

“Learning? Ha ha ha. Isn’t that my job?” blustered Brain, more nervous by the second.

“I have learned One Thing, which I know to be True,” whispered Bad Feelings.

A hush fell over the group. No one was laughing or swaying now. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped. No one asked Bad Feelings what the One True Thing was. They had started thinking that maybe they didn’t want to know, thank you very much.

But Bad Feelings told them anyway.

“All the things you have said today… are lies.”

A rumble passed over the party. Warning lights started to blink.

“Hey!” Brain frowned. “We’re waking up. But it’s not morning yet!”

Brain looked around. Bad Feelings was gone, and Body and Heart had snapped into action. But neither of them were looking so hot.

“Oooh,” burbled Body. “I don’t feel so good.” And sure enough, Body was shaking all over, and clenching up, and tying itself into all sorts of knots.

“Hey!!” squealed Heart, who was jumping up and down in place like there was no tomorrow. “That’s not how you do it, Body! Get it together!”

“Well maybe if you chilled out and stopped giving me so much juice, I would!” spat Body, curling itself into a ball and a pretzel at once.

“Both of you stop it!” said Brain, trying to sound both stern and calming at once. “I didn’t tell you to do any of these things. So cut it out!”

“What are you talking about, Brain?” said Body, its prezel-ball-self quivering in place.

“Of course you did,” panted Heart, jumping up and down.

Brain stopped and thought. Had it told Body and Brain to do all of these wacky things? Brain hadn’t thought so; it couldn’t remember doing so. But Brain looked up, and saw all kinds of paper airplanes flying out of its pockets, in all directions.

“Hey!” exclaimed Brain. It grabbed the closest paper airplane, and unfolded it. The paper airplane simply said ‘CRY.’

Brain snagged the next paper airplane and unfolded it. The airplane said ‘BREAK STICK.’

“What is going on?” trembled Brain.

“You tell me!” wheezed Heart, doing somersaults and jumping jacks at once.

“MMRRGRRFFFLLLDRRFFLL” mumbled Body, no longer able to respond through its pretzel self.

Brain was getting thoroughly flummoxed, and more than a little scared, when finally it snapped its fingers.

“Bad Feelings!” Brain called out. “Where did you go? You’ve started something disastrous, and we need it to stop – fast!”

But Bad Feelings was nowhere to be seen. There may have been the faintest purr of an amused chuckle in the distance – but it was pretty hard to tell over the acrobatics of Body and Heart.

“This is no good at all,” said Brain. “We’ve done all these amazing things! How are we supposed to keep doing amazing things if we’re stuck doing this kind of nonsense?”

There is no happy ending to this story, as you well know. Brain, Body, and Heart continued to make HUMAN do more and more amazing things. But the amazing things steadily became less and less amazing, and more and more silly, fruitless, and hurtful – to the other animals, to the planet, and even to HUMAN itself.

Brain fought and fought and fought to keep Body and Heart (and, sheepishly, itself) on task. It used all of its mighty Cerebrum to remind Body and Heart – and, grumbling, itself – of the stories of all the cool things they had done, with sticks and otherwise, and all of the even more cool things they could do if they could stop fussing around with this nonsense.

But it was too late. Bad Feelings had spoken its piece. And once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. And the world – and HUMAN – have regretted that story ever since.

-KH

MUSINGS

In terms of getting the idea for this story, it did indeed come from my Brain, but I think I was inherently channeling the ‘Heart and Brain’ strip from Nick Seluk’s wonderful Awkward Yeti comics – and maybe a teensy bit of the magic realism of Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out as well, if I’m being totally honest.

In terms of the story’s telling, I have a bit of an acting background, so I had figured I’d have fun paraphrasing my story and reiterating it orally. I actually found the opposite to be the case. I’m a chatty fellow, and thereby far from unfamiliar with ‘storytelling’ in a group setting (at least in terms of sharing personal anecdotes), but this kind of sharing a personal creative work orally felt far more unsettlingly unfamiliar to me than I’d expected. I felt overtly sheepish telling the story to my wife, and an adult friend, and its telling definitely suffered for it. The consensus was, universally, once they’d heard the oral version and compared it to my written version, that my written telling was more effective and skillful.

I had better success telling the story to my drama class of 6-8 year olds (which I think I’d implicitly anticipated, as I think I instinctively wrote this as a bit of a kid’s fable). In telling the story to then, I fed off their more eager investment and interest (kids get bedtime stories, and are thereby more accustomed to having stories shared with them orally, then a lot of we crusty adults out of synch with the oral traditions we grow up with), and my telling of the story picked up a lot more energy through them responding to it. It helped my playfully characterize each of the ‘characters’ (‘Body’ became more of a dumb jock; ‘Bad Feelings’ became much scarier; etc.), and build the dramatic ‘oomph’ of it. That said, this was a double-edged sword, as telling the story orally to my class of kids  also made the immutability of the ending play as a lot more sad – so much so, that I felt almost guilty sucker-punching the fun I’d built up earlier. As Thomas King rightly points out, stories can injure as much as cure (92), and the closing finality of the ‘once stories are shared, they cannot be recalled’ moral really hit home sharing it with a younger, more impressionable audience.

Telling my story orally from memory also made it clumsier – I felt like I’d lost control over the wording I’d carefully scrutinized, and it was hard to relinquish my intrinsic conflation of control and ownership. I actually felt a lot less ownership over my story telling it out loud – the empathetic actor in me couldn’t help but feed off the vice and emotions of each audience each telling, making it an inherently communal experience each time. In writing, it was MY story – but out loud it immediately became ‘our’ story (that said, I’d written it with a Thomas King-ian tone in my head, so I guess that inherently makes it ‘our story’ right off the bat). I found this pretty thematically fitting – for, indeed, my choice of story is, indeed, very much the story of ‘us’ – and the experience also forced me to become intimately acquainted with some Bad Feelings of my own. Hopefully it doesn’t stir up too many for you, dear reader, as well.

Regardless, as King puts it (and these sentiments now reeeeaaaally resonate): this story is yours now. Do with it what you will. Muse on it and post an insightful reflection comment. Sneer at my shallow faux-creativity, turn your nose up, and go find a better story to comment on. Shed tears, drink a glass of wine, and fall into an existential funk. Make a comic strip out of it – or perhaps an animated short narrated by someone appropriately irreverent – maybe Jack Black? But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.

You’ve heard it now.

 

Heart & Brain, from Nick Seluk’s effervescent Awkward Yeti comics. 

WORKS CITED:

The Awkward Yeti. http://theawkwardyeti.com/ Accessed January 23, 2019. 

Inside Out (film). Dir. Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen. Pixar Animation Studios & Walt Disney Pictures, 2015.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.