Faerie Streams And Enchanted Bournes

I had told my friend, "Reading the Signs", that when I feel depressed, I go to the Master Story-Teller to get fixed. She asked whether the Master Story-Teller was God, and I responded that since she herself was a story-teller, she should tell me the answer to that question. I suppose this is all very paradoxical and elitist sounding, vaguely redolent of a number of poorly recalled religious tracts and stories. When I speak of Genesis, when I say that God created the universe, I mean that He created the things which exist and the substance upon which their being stands - the basis for things to happen - and the infinite space that contains the information for every possible combination of events to be described. When God created man and woman, He created the potential for every detailed story. The mere, brute fact of creation of a material object: mankind's ancestor spilling forth from Time and struggling to capture his wits as he stands naked and wet before his creator is a one time event. This is the creation of the possibility of Narrative: naked narrative, unadorned, boy-meets-girl type of narrative. When God told living things to be fruitful and multiply, He meant physically and spiritually; He meant create children and create the forms of understanding and sew the infinite wardrobe of narrative vestments, with which you will hide your nakedness. This is the creation of the detailed story: adorned narrative, Romeo and Juliet type narrative, filled with metallic threads laid on crewel yarns of many colors. In the infinite space of all possible stories, we spend our early years looking for an optimal solution: a small area wherein we may dwell - because we cannot possibly look at an infinite number of narratives: we must limit them. It's like eating an endless ice cream cone, or merely one that satisfies our craving: surely the second alternative is best. Most people stay within this "espy" ( a more or less stable area of the quantum universe - pronounce it like "s.p." , or "Stable Place") and go no further, finding everything they need there. Others deliberately leave behind their little "stable place", and they jump back into the infinite. It makes sense to ask a question in an espy; people share the conventions and can come up with an answer after searching for a limited time. Outside the espy, however, there are an unlimited number of solutions, so there can be no answer within the lifetime on one person, nor two, not even perhaps within the life of the human race. Now the topic of our conversation where story-tellers entered was such as to indicate that neither of us was in our respective espy - whether we were aware of it or not -and were adrift on streams of enchantment...I, for one, saw no familiar landfalls. That's why I have no answer to Sign's question; I, the artful dodger of responsibility or stranger in a strange universe of stories...