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The fifth thing Scheherazade knew is that wonder comes at the price of certainty. In a thousand and one nights, she convinced the sultan that this was a price well worth paying.
The great Ursula K. Le Guin said that fantasy literature is all about ‘the freedom of uncertainty’. I would broaden the category to include all acts of storytelling.
While learning to be adults, we are told that we should reduce uncertainty as much as possible, that we should decide once and for all what we believe, what we like, what we want to do with our lives. We are told that it is wrong not to have clear-cut opinions: what will we tweet about if we don’t?
So to make the process of opinion-making smoother, we are offered wholesale identities. We are taught to think of ourselves as ‘man’ or ‘woman’, as ‘British’ or ‘Italian’, as ‘sultan’ – or as ‘serf’. Assuming a couple of those identities will indeed reduce our uncertainty, because each identity comes with a set of ready-made opinions. The price we pay for the privilege is our sense of wonder.
Only what is uncertain, unclear, misty, can be awesome. Scheherazade’s stories taught Shahryar how to rejoice in ambiguity. The price of certainty is a loss of wonder and the price of wonder is a loss of certainty: stage magicians, witches, scientists, explorers and fairy-seers all agree that there is no way out of that.
A storyteller’s world is ever ambiguous, echoing with stories that connect to other stories, a maze of crossed destinies that change with every step, every choice. By the end of any given day a storyteller has died five times, tamed a lion, welcomed aliens, slept with three good-looking strangers. Or not. While every sensible adult tries to reduce uncertainty, telling themselves that fairies do not (or do) exist loud enough to start believing it, storytellers work hard to maximize uncertainty, to embrace as many possibilities as they can. Everything is strange to a storyteller, and their job is to make your life stranger.
I read Madame Bovary when I was sixteen. When I got to the point at which Emma gives birth to a daughter and is not happy with her, I was flabbergasted. It dawned on me for the first time that mothers have thoughts about their children that are both positive and negative – that mothers are not born mothers. They are people who have children, but they are people first. There is more to them than their role.
It meant that my own mother was like that too. This realization was frightening: I felt as though I didn’t know her any more. And of course that was correct, my knowledge of her was incomplete. Madame Bovary had revealed to me a general face of motherhood of which I had hitherto been unaware, and with that came the particular, shocking truth that my mum was a human being.
This is what we have been doing on our journey so far: we have been coming at our lives from different perspectives, thus making them stranger. We have been looking not for reassurance, but for its opposite. And we have been doing that in a storyteller’s way. As Scheherazade did with Shahryar, I have told you stories and made you a part of mine, thus becoming, inevitably, a part of yours.
Before we embark on the last stage of our journey, let’s recap how this has happened.
By talking to magicians, we found out about mystery, things that cannot be explained because they do not exist to be explained. If there were no mysteries in life, if everything was merely a problem to be solved, there would be no stories: we could explain everything rationally, by number and square and compass. Stories probe the borders of mystery. They hint, but they never explain. When the existence of mystery upsets us, and we deny it exists at all, we sever our primal connection to wonder.
After that, we danced with witches. They reminded us of the numinous, the feeling of something that attracts us and makes us afraid in equal measure. They also reminded us of the importance of ritual, and every well-formed story is a ritual, an attempt to hint at a deeper reality which can never be communicated directly.
Then, when we looked at science, we saw how far the asking of good questions can take us. They push us to a point at which we unlearn everything we thought we knew. In their simplest form, stories are answers to questions. What will Hamlet decide to do? What would happen if you transplanted a dog’s heart into a human being? When a story does not make us wonder, it hasn’t taken its questioning far enough; and when life does not make us wonder, we have stopped questioning far too soon.
Our fourth key took us into the natural world of forest and stream, to look at how our stories interact with the physical landscape we are part of.
To get our fifth key we leaped into Faerie, to begin to see the strange way in which stories influence our perceptions. Every new story is the promise of a new world.
And finally, we have seen that stories and reality collide, that we can never completely disentangle one from the other. Stories can heal us because stories can break us. We have learned Scheherazade’s secret, to become better tellers of the tale of our life.
We are almost ready to wrap up our journey, but not quite.
Ray Bradbury said that ‘the logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses’. We are creatures of flesh and bone. It is all too easy to forget that wonder, like all emotions (and all life) happens in the body. We are not a ghost in the machine: we are spirits of matter. Without the other five senses, our sense of wonder would not exist.
Before returning home, we will give those senses their due.
THE WORKOUT
1. Scheherazade’s First Lesson: Stories Make Us
Write down in your Book of Wonder three stories that are important to you. They might be books, films, or anecdotes passed down in your family (the time grandma disgraced herself after three glasses of sparkling wine at your cousin’s wedding; how your parents met), or memorable things that happened to you. You might be inclined to write down only a short sentence or title, such as ‘Charlotte’s Web’ or ‘that epic night in Barcelona’; or you might want to narrate the stories in a longer format.
Then look at the three stories and ask yourself: how have those stories impacted on my life – in good ways and bad? Examine both sides: even your favourite story will have its negative effects.
For each story, write down at least four ways in which it has influenced your life – two positive ways, and two negative.
2. Scheherazade’s Second Lesson: Poetic Faith Is a Formidable Tool of Enchantment
Find a character you love and trust – it could be Mary Poppins, Jack Skellington, Aragorn or Elizabeth Bennet. For the next month, imagine that this character is entirely real, and let him or her help you. When you are feeling unsure about something, ask yourself what the character might suggest you do. Try to catch a glimpse of the character in the street, in bars, at work, out of the corner of your eye.
Make a note in your Book of Wonder of all the ways that character has helped you out in the past, and of the ways the character is helping you out in the present.
If you happen to meet the character, and maybe even have a conversation, describe the encounter in your Book of Wonder.
3. Scheherazade’s Third Lesson: Reality Is Only Wondrous When It Is Declined in the Plural
For a week, or longer, meditate on the moon. Go into your garden, or to a place where you can look at her, and gaze at her for at least five minutes every time, setting a timer in advance. If the moon is not visible every night for a week, keep trying until you have done the meditation at least seven times.
During the meditation, think of the moon as a goddess (you might want to call her Diana). Look at the face of the moon as you would the face of a friend. Acknowledge her presence with a nod. If you hear her voice in your head, in the form of thoughts and ideas, be sure to answer. Make a note in your Book of Wonder.