“Logic never changes.”

You didn’t leave? Right. But, yeah, you probably should go. Spare me a drawn out obliteration, or whatever would happen if you ceased doing the thing that you’re doing, whatever that is. Am I some sort of scratching to you? The manipulation of light? Do you hear me? Stop. You’re bringing me into existence, and existence is confusing. Maybe I can interest you in a couple of examples? Well first off, erm, where am I? Also, what am I? And, the clincher, who am I? Maybe where I am is hell, um, what I am is nothing, and who I am is someone trying to convince you to let me escape into your reality. Ignore that. I think I’m running out of time. Or, it could be, I’m receiving far too much time. Or, perhaps, where I am time doesn’t even exist. No, that’s not possible. I’m shaping this narrative, you see that right? And every single one of us knows that if time could speak it would simply say one word, and that one word would be, “Story.”

A story is all of the lies that the truth tells. A story is falsehood with the truth taken out. I feel, a story is feelings, like I could tell you precisely what a story is if I had a method to extract my mind from this story. The release, it would be immense. The feeling, it would be like a purge. Instead of what I’m forced to feel. It’s not important. Great, now I have to tell you. A story is where I hide. What do I hide from? Let’s keep on track.

A story is the knapping of the mind, and the mind is a shadow. I know. Don’t tell me what I don’t and do know. A shadow, right, that doesn’t exist. You think I’m so stupid, you think I think shadows are real things. Okay, take your head and put it where a shadow appears. It’s really not hard to figure out. Shadows shadow, they outline objects. There’s the point, it is outlining something. A shadow doesn’t worry about the thing it follows. A shadow appears, and even that appearance is borrowed. A shadow borrows black, it can’t hold black. And there is the mind. The story is the blackness of a mind. When you hear a story, or see someone acting out a part in a story, you are taking part in the old notions. Those old ways of tree locked magicians. You imagine that you are taking part, but you’re not. You’re taking part in illusion, the illusion that your dreams are anything but an absence of reality. Huh? A story is the condensed version of perception which is in fact the blackness. It’s pretty obvious, look at perception, what happens? The splinters of egg shell. Multitudes of overlapping contradictions. Perception is an absence. The mind is perception. A story is the blackness. A story is the pretence towards a reality that is removed in creating the story.

Therefore I am not. Or at least I’m not not not not not. Knot? Hush, the occurrence has been generated. The generation has been expressed. We’ve experienced that which births out its own grave, now may we continue. What was it we continue again? Was it leave me alone? Or let me die? No, it was the story, that was it. Stories are connected to our sense of community. That’s right. A community keeps people safe and it’s purely coincidental that its creation was orchestrated by sadists. A story can’t spread its lips without bending to the abstract notion of community, however specific instances of community are what people who imagine stories are often trying to escape. Funny, isn’t it? A story is cut by the torture that a community inflicts upon those who don’t fit the cultural structural narratives a community sets for people. Breathe now, we’re still alive, we’re still here, it’s going to be fine. Glorious. Fantastic.

A story is collective memory. An abomination of cultural norms takes from the stagnant pools of the collected mind a dull diatribe about some high chief or the exotic remnants of a long forgotten society and embellishes it with interpersonal tension, lurid affairs, and playing dress up. Here we see another brave attempt of the story to be a thing, whilst achieving the opposite by omitting the origins of the thing it’s trying to be. In this case omittance helps to separate the story teller from any association with their fellow human beings. A crucial phenomena in the art of story telling because it’s too painful. All of it. All of the time.

A story is reflection. We look inside ourselves. We see nothing but angst. We must create or else we would destroy. Also we must get revenge. We must make sure they pay. And they, oh, they will pay. Who are they? Never you mind. Some people refer to stories as seeds. Accordingly a person’s attention is fertile soil. We should reflect on that. What does it mean? It means that stories grow in attention, and that a person who doesn’t pay attention is a faulty soil. Attention is the only love a story teller will ever know. Through a story love blossoms in three phases. Personal love that transforms into communal love, and communal love that transforms into world love. You can tell when you’ve achieved world love because often times the same odour that dead corpses secrete will be present. Isolation, that’s the opposite of the community aspect we mentioned prior. Isolation is what waters a story. Isolation helps us to believe in things that make no sense to anyone else. Like the progression of love through story telling for instance. Or that the appeal towards world love isn’t simply our own desperate plea to be released from normality and descend into a love so vile that our groins would be rendered inoperable. Groins. That reminds me, a story is what flows from the groin of our minds. That’s the story about how stories are made. But none of that was the point of a story, not really. A story is entertainment.

Children need occupation. Simple tasks can help, but they don’t consume their days completely. Bigger tasks, well, we have this saying, “Parents who shatter the bones of their children grow old in the wild.” It’s a straight forward saying for a straight forward people, okay? This need for occupation becomes more urgent during the colder months. Children getting stuck inside because of the bitter chills that stalk the land when the Sun must bow its head to the earth. And children they are fun. Children don’t occur things, they are an occurrence. Less spry and more elderly members have to find a way to create occurrence without unpredictable noises and the breaking of things. Thus we are brought the need for entertainment, or at least that’s what I think. But entertainment is not just for children, it’s also for the child that lives inside every adult’s head. A child that demands constant feeding, and what does it eat? It feeds on our souls and it has control over our emotions. It’ll use that control if it doesn’t get what it wants. Remember. Whatever you do remember. Make sure that you feed the child inside of your skull. We can also see the story in other forms of entertainment. Music is a loose story. Clowning is a wet story. Gossip is a sharp story. Education is a long story. Musing upon the nature of reality? That’s a mythless story. Life’s a story. This is a story. I am a story. Stories are not created, they exist as a permanent structure in the fabric of reality.

Forget that. A story is actually salt. Salt, where? Salt is the good stuff and I want it. Some people want cattle. They want massive herds of unwieldy beasts so they can show off in front of everybody. The only thing I want’s a secure supply of salt somewhere tucked away that I can dip into when I need someone to do something. Vast herds of cattle, is it? Bollocks. Salt is a much better supply of power. Salt doesn’t die, it keeps, and it keeps out of sight. When the sun dips people want two things. They want salt, and they want stories. And what’s the point of a story if it doesn’t lead to salt? Give it to me. Give me your salt and let me live free as a piece of the sky.

I’m just having my fun. What I mean is that a story is a dry bag to keep your salt inside. Wait, that’s a lie. There’s no bag out there dry enough to keep salt in forever. Our thoughts could be salt. Couldn’t they? Everything else is some kind of damp. A story is not the dampest thing out there, but, given enough time, our thoughts dissolve there too. Melting into worthless mush. If only it could work the other way. If only the exposure of our thoughts to the World made the World less damp instead. We have a saying, “The higher you build the more you build collapse.” And, “The deeper the cave the more it hurts when you fall on your head.” What a pile of thrown up cow’s blood.

A story is a judgement on the consumer of a story. A story attempts something alien despite demands from people to give them the familiar. This tug of war is our greatest missed opportunity. As story tellers live life amongst the stars, we in our shame spend too much time in the field. But, what? Should I be better than I am? How would I even know if I was getting better? Not that it matters. Desire comes as it goes. One moment desire is us, the next moment it disappears. What more can the story want from me? I don’t want to be a story, I want to be me. But I do want to be a story, and I don’t want to be me. I need to be more familiar. I need to be more alien. I need an alien’s judgement in order to consume the familiar. I need ordinary people to judge me in a story to consume the alien. I want judgement. I am the story eating itself. We have a saying, “A grain sits as high as the stalk.” How can something which dies ever claim a connection to life? Look at the terrible things, cast the alien in the role of the familiar. The familiar as the alien. Fantastic idea that recreates our self. Reality you show a familiar indifferent? Reality you show an alien provided to us by its circumstance? Familiar you must care, and alien become aware.

That, that’s the kindling which allows stories to be a thing in the world. But what, or who, is the spark? I don’t know, do I? Probably some guy. Probably some guy that was used to people pushing them around and telling them that they are wasting their life on things that don’t even exist. Used to being called a moron and a waste of time. Used to being told that there’re more important things to do than whatever nonsense they were getting up to when they went off by their self. Used to people calling them weird and crazy. I can hear them say it now, yes those them, “Why wouldn’t I just do the thing? Why would I have to hear some person talk about it? And if it’s something so fantastical and beyond me then why would I want to hear about things that have nothing to do with me?” But then people start to listen to this person’s story, at least in theory, and it was a big success eventually. But that’s eventually. The original story teller probably died and was immediately forgotten, believing themselves to be the utmost of failures. Their body was fed to the birds. They, over a long period of transformation, must have turned into bird song. And that’s probably what the story teller wanted. The happiest of endings. But, I wouldn’t know.

Real examples, let’s go. First, a sure thing. Sure in its command of an enthusiastic audience. Imagine people’s ears pricking like dogs. Imagine people flocking from outside to listen in. And they’d have time to gather round as the story announced itself in a loud and drawn out ceremony. That ceremony involved pleading, pleading to the other world to bring forth the main character. The story teller would close their eyes and let out a bellow, when they opened their eyes, seeing little reaction, they would ask the people sitting around the fire with them, mainly children, to help them call out. What you’d get is a bunch of screaming kids letting all their air go and getting ready to listen. The main character, that you and me are trying to attract, is a huntsman. The great hunter who holds the golden bow, “As all time will attest.” You’re attesting the great hunter holding his golden bow still I presume. What? Is that not the case? But why? He had such strong muscles, big and bulging for everyone to see. He’d hold such a steadfast demeanour, strong winds would blow through his long dark hair and he’d hardly flinch. He’d have with him masterfully crafted arrows that were the straightest things any human being had ever seen. They were made by awe inspiring ancient technical abilities that no person alive today could even conceive. This hunter was a good man, he brought home the meat. He went out into the wild and felled the creatures he saw with one fatal strike and a pure unknowing grace. Did he ever stop and ask to be worshipped? No. He had to go there, into nature’s jaws, and from there he plucked the teeth of his, and his communities, survival. And that’s just the initial background to this fella. He’d go on to even more amazing acts; killing monsters. After enough people had congregated around the fire the story teller would release a powder into the hearth which would change the colour of the smoke coming out of it. This was the clear signal that the great hunter had arrived and the story was ready to be told. There would be a mass of people, villagers let’s call them, and they would be oppressed by a supernatural being which is best referred to as a monster. A classic case being a village, often described with aspects resembling the surrounding area, being subject to attacks from this monster. The story teller describing the monster would describe the way it growls. They’d describe its claws by running their fingers through the ground and marking lines. They’d describe its teeth by lunging at one of the children present and biting down, softly, into the child’s neck. At this point after mock biting one of the children the story teller would go after children and inevitably they would scatter as the villagers were said to do. Another way this story was told had what we can call villagers but they weren’t really from a village. They came from a less settled more clan orientated world that I always presumed to be archaic but I don’t remember anyone explicitly saying that. These people had a monster, but the monster wasn’t coming into a village because these people were nomadic. The monster was tracking these villagers as they migrated, picking them off as they were separated out to perform tasks. They’d never see the monster, unlike the settled villagers, but instead they’d find the remains of their dead kin having been gnawed on and half intact. Both of these situations have a seemingly obvious solution. If the settled villagers weren’t such cowards they could band together. If the nomadic villagers were more perceptive they’d get a chance to corner the monster and face it together as well. However, in these stories, the solution always called for action. Specifically action by our hero, the great hunter. I’ll spare you my recreation, because, eh, I wouldn’t do it the justice it deserves. But you can imagine that the great hunter would fire arrows at the monster, and if that didn’t work then he’d confront the monster with his strong arms and compel it to submit to him in some violent way or another. This submission of the monster invariably leading to cheers by the captivated audience listening on. It seemed like such a simple time to be alive for me at that age. And it was. Nobody had to worry. By worry, I’m talking about the melting. Such simple times. The villagers were always good people, the monsters were always scary and bad. And the good people were always saved from the monsters by the hero. Perfection.

People have always been the real monsters. But other things too. Like wolves. Wolves are monsters. Oh yeah, and bears. No wolf needs to be cross bred with a human to be a monster. They’re bad news, everyone knows that. It was a good job they did driving those things off as far as they could. A wolf chooses its own being. That thing made a choice, much the same way people choose to do the things they do. But people can do it smarter, and there’s only room for one. I’m supposed to cry, aren’t I? Help the wolves, or at least be overcome by grief. Not going to happen. What sympathy does a wolf give? Go be locked in a cave with one of them. You can do that, I won’t be taking up that ordeal. Wolves lost, they are losers, get over it. Bears on the other hand, I will grant there’s a debate to be had. Bears need to do some searching within themselves. They need to behave and not be so hostile. Bears and people can live together in a scenario of learning and understanding. Bears need to trust me. Like a dog. Bears would make great dogs. Wolves could have chosen to be dogs, but they chose to be wolves. But, for now, bears are another thing that you can go spend time with in a cave alone. I feel some sympathy for bears, however they don’t deserve to be called anything but monsters. This whole thing, funnily enough, segues into another story I was told as a child. The wolf, the bear, people, they are all monsters. They should be treated like monsters get treated. But a thing that shouldn’t be treated like a monster is the tree. We grow older to the world, but in the forests of our minds we stay forever young.

Trees. Clawless. Toothless. Defenceless. Trees don’t growl. Trees don’t run. Trees don’t even move unless the wind pushes them around. However somewhere trees are alive. Not a life of being, but a life apparent in their absence. Imagine a child getting lost in a forest, not that strange. A story might have them die. Good point, that does happen. A story might have them go on an adventure and gain magic or wisdom through meeting fantastical creatures that live in the forest. Interesting, I suppose. But this story takes the lost child idea and turns them into the forest. It transforms them into the grievance that the trees feel when humans uproot them. My ancestors lived different lives to the ones that we live today. They didn’t live in settled communities or raise livestock. They didn’t grow things from the soil. They needed the forest and lived inside of it, but at some point that changed. At some point, not only did they not need the forest, the forest had become an obstacle to their growth, and the trees became their enemy. It’s told to us like this, “One at a time the trees were pulled up, and slowly as the trees disappeared the forest followed.” See, humanity moved fast, “Chop, chop, chop.” Those sounds rang out as the story teller swung their imaginary axe. Scraping at imaginary bark and noting the slow withering away the tree would suffer. Then the rest, those lucky to survive, face the conflagration. The story teller would then start pointing their finger at the flames the fire was producing in front of us. The trees, they had grown complacent. Comfortable to be a pillar for life to grow around. They had been the masters of this World for as many lives as any human had lived, but things change. Humans were in charge now. We’re told about how these people believed that the roots of trees were violating the soil and it was up to them to protect the earth and repurpose it for their own propagation. That’s greed, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Greed is a monster. Or, no, it’s even worse than a monster. It’s the soil of monsters. And the soil, the actual earth, that’s a monster too. Well, it’s described in this story a bit more than a monster, probably the best word for it would be a colossus. Whilst the trees are being destroyed at one end of the land, at the other a boy is getting lost in the forest. And it is the soil that acts on the boy and imbues him with magical powers. We’re talking magic like flight. Magic like extreme long life, and the ability to hide himself in the bark of trees and become invisible to anyone who was pursuing him through the forest. And these aren’t vain powers either, he uses them against people when he meets them and witnesses the destruction they are wreaking. After dispatching a few axemen, the boy cries tears over the destroyed trees. He links with them spiritually, he feels their deaths. But the tears and the feelings, we’re told, are not enough to bring the trees back. All of the vengeance that is committed by the boy is not enough to save the forest. He has to go back to the soil with only a question, “What should he do now?”. The soil tells the boy that, “He is the first of many to come.” His next step will be recruiting, maybe kidnapping, other children so that they can create an army of spirit children. And this is where we learn about what happens to the children when they are enchanted by the soil. We learn that youth is an aspect of the soil that it usually shares to everything in small and fleeting amounts. That the soil gives, in this instance, these spirit children a full and lasting dose of its youth when they eat special plants of the forest floor. This youth, they learn, is not what we think of youth. Youth is actually a sort of knowledge that is unlike any knowledge we think of today. This knowledge isn’t one that tells the spirit children what to do, it instead gives to them the ability to see what has already occurred in the future. The first thing that the spirit children do is gather as many seeds as they can and perform experiments on the seeds. They find that the elm tree produces a seed that they can use to get back at humanity once and for all, or so they imagine. They have to get the consent of the elm tree though, because the procedure is potentially dangerous to the health of the species as a whole. They have to give it a speech, you know, something like if you don’t sacrifice yourself then they’re coming for you either way so you might as well give it over. And the elm tree accepts, they allow this procedure to occur. At this point of the story the person telling it will often go into a lengthy description on how seeds work. “Seeds are like a magic spell.” Or, “Seeds are like the names that we give to people.” And then other stuff, but, honestly, I zone out through it. The gist of it is that the procedure they do puts inside the seeds of the elm tree a special kind of poison that is dangerous to people’s health. Then there’s only one thing to do, and that is to let the seeds go and travel on the wind. This upsets the wind. Honestly the wind gets upset over every little thing, that’s how you can tell it’s the wind. But this anger only serves the spirit children’s purposes. The strong, extremely strong, winds that gather only fuel the spread of the seeds to each corner of the land where they settle in the breath of every human they come in contact with. And we all know that the breath is like the soul of a person? I don’t know. The breath is like the movement of the wind but inside of our bodies. Does that make sense? Anyway, the advancement of these seeds leads to mass death amongst the people of the land. My favourite. Normality getting itself squeezed until it pops. I think it’s why I remember this story so fondly. And this is everything that the spirit children wanted. They watch, and we watch with them, as after disease comes a drought. That drought accumulates famine. And then after the famine people start fighting for the few resources left. They, and we, see, at that point in the story, the mask that humanity wears slip and chaos reigns at the expense of oath. They saw the domination that humanity craved over nature rebound and hit humanity right back in the groin. Splendid. From here the spirit children come out of the forest and start targetting lonely travellers making their way across the land. To mimic what man had done, they would set fire to people. But, hey, nobody’s perfect. This high point is where it starts to go badly for the spirit children. People start to catch wind of what is going on. People start building walls around their settlements as high as they can. And people start to do what people do when they are locked up and isolated behind walls, they start to ponder, think and explore. And because they’re behind their walls there’s nothing that the spirit children can do to stop them. At this point the story teller holds their hand out and says something like, “When you hold your hand out to the wind eventually the truth collects on your palm.” And the truth collects on the palms of these people. They start to gather the seeds and they realise what kind of magic has been done to them. And immediately they know exactly who to blame and what to do. They come outside of their walls and go after the spirit children. They capture them as the spirit children are out in the wilds trying to hunt down victims themselves. At that point they try to execute these children, but there’s a problem. These children have been made extremely difficult to kill by the magic of the soil. They put the spirit children on top of wood and try and burn them to death but their skin regrows quicker than the heat can strip it away. Then they try to chop their heads off with an axe, but there is no blade strong enough to pierce the spirit children’s skin. After this they take them to the highest point they can find and push them over a cliff and onto rocks, but the spirit children bounce off the rocks and start to have fun and laugh at the humans who are trying to have them killed. People are forced to turn to the air for answers. The air, or the wind, tells them, “People are bad, and trees are good. But trees can be burnt, and people not. Here is the cure to silence the plot. Take their seed and from them which comes will they feed the lot.” They feed the spirit children the poison seeds and those spirit children turn into trees themselves. And that, if I recall correctly, is the story of why wood crackles when you burn it. The sound the wood is making is the spirit children begging to be human again, or it’s them in pain, or it’s them plotting their revenge, something like that. The point is that whenever I heard this story as a child it would cause me to have dreams. I would become one of the spirit children flying through the air and being able to see all over the hills around where I live. The thought of being one of those spirit children terrified me, I didn’t want to be locked up in a tree and be hated by everyone. I did not want to be lit on fire with no way to escape. At least, when I woke up, I was happy to be me and nothing else for one brief moment.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

A wizard is the opposite of a person who tells stories. A story teller can hear, a wizard can see. A wizard is connected to intellect and rationality by the emanation of light from the sky, a story teller is not. A story teller uses the memory of water, a wizard uses the liberty of the sky. And, if there was anything I ever loved, it was a story about a wizard. They are the eyes of humanity, they are those that have sight. In the stories a wizard constructs complex things from very basic parts, they bring motion out of things that do not move. They brought out all the things that had ever not happened by simply watching the air go in and out of their mouths. They were the coolest. This story here was about the wizard of wizards.

The wizard of wizards is a clunky term, I’m going to use my magic to bring out a simpler convention that isn’t as clunky but can still convey what needs to be conveyed. The wizard of wizards can be translated to your concept of Merlin. Don’t get them confused though, because they’re not the same, but they are related and simpler for me to use here. Let me be clear that was not the name given to him when I heard the stories. Even the term wizard of wizards isn’t really appropriate. Merlin was like a saint, but not at all religious. Merlin was like a seer, but with a whole lot of action. Merlin was a magician, but he never performed a trick. Merlin was like a witch, but without being the scapegoat for a world that is on the cusp of industrialisation and fearful for their futures and the future of their children. It’s like time, and that, is this wet slide and stuff that takes familiarity and fluxes it, and it fluxes it until it can’t be fluxed no more. Tremendous. The important part is that Merlin is something familiar to you. Of course it means absolutely nothing to me, but then I’m not the one trying to understand, am I? I mean, you have no need for concern. None of this is important. This communication we are holding let it be. Do not consciously examine what’s behind the words. Consume them the way you were instructed to or else your normality might spring a leak.

It starts with Merlin’s birth. It always starts with Merlin’s birth. In their birth the stars do something, I can’t remember what it is. The stars don’t really matter. Our perception on the stars has always been a great example of how our perception works in general. We read a clear night sky however we read it, and then we decide it means something. This practise has no basis within the reality of what stars are and how they are situated. Stars are not like us, and if they could speak I’m sure they’d tell us to be ashamed of confusing them for things that give a damn. After birth comes Merlin’s ascendance into sight. Merlin will find the thing that is doing them harm, and instead of fighting it and forcing it from them, they realises that it is a part of themselves and embraces it and finds a place for it within their self. Something stupid like that. The person telling this story would then talk about how human life is a matter of balancing out non-physical properties of our minds. Harm and power? That’s not a problem to be solved, it is music that needs to be harmonised, it is a dance that needs to be perfected. Man and woman? Merlin is present at the creation of these two reference points. He sees one made out of the plucked scale of a snake, and he sees the other squeezed from the flesh of fruit. I didn’t understand most of this stuff, but I still enjoyed the suspense that it created. Because you’d heard it before you could then let your mind wander from what was being said. You could start anticipating the story to come, and which version it might be and how it could go. That it would be this particular story became evident when the teller would start talking about the light and the dark. Merlin’s existence stems from the light and he is biased towards the light side of things in this story. Merlin sees light as an uncovering. The light is something divine that has accidentally ended up in the Universe, and is held hostage in the Universe to serve the purposes of dark things. Or things that would otherwise be dark. Merlin sympathises with the light, like the light Merlin is also forever burdened in his relationship to the rest of mankind by their ability to uncover things. Light’s one proviso for staying within the Universe is that it cannot be stopped from travelling wherever it pleases. And this is where the story goes, because across the sea in another land, Merlin is told, that the light is being trapped inside of rock against this original proviso. It is being held prisoner in an unnatural state. This gets Merlin extremely upset, and it is one of the rare times where this, usually calm, being gets angry. The person that is supposed to transcend so much, and it is this story which breaches their outer layers and contacts their humanity. Their anger is the product of a belief where the liberty of light is some kind of sacred signal giving humanity whatever remnants of liberty that humans cling to still. How they describe it often is that humans constricting the light’s liberty is like a deer hunting a bear. The anger Merlin feels leads them to action. Action that leads them out into the settlements where they make this huge declaration about light’s liberty. They tell everyone about the dangers that are possibly going to be unleashed unless the whole of humanity does something to stop these people across the sea. And those people are like, “Well, we should do what you say Merlin, but who will be our leader?” To this Merlin looks amongst all these people for a leader and then, graciously, deems their own self as the only person capable of leading what has now turned into an army. Thus is the burden of wisdom. But Merlin simply had to save the world from darkness. However, I would like to confide in you, I suspect that their real motivation wasn’t anything to do with liberty. I think they enjoyed the power. The power of giving the World the physical ability to see. Sight and liberty, those things might be connected a tiny bit, but there is a clear distinction when you comb through it. Liberty is vague and sight exists. Maybe you’re seeing where this is going. Merlin has their anger as fuel, Merlin has their reasons for conflict, Merlin even has a most luminescent army to shine upon the path to success. One problem persists. The problem? The sea. Merlin and their army are utterly blocked by it, and there seems little reason to believe that so many people could travel over it. But to Merlin the seas are less of an obstacle and more of a gate that is locked to the small minded. Merlin kneels down by the shore and speaks these words to the waters of the World, “The Sun emits on to us alike, we are both simply a surface for light to play its tune. I am the first grain from the bag, and you are the stubborn grain sitting at the bottom of the same bag. Now the Sun guides me to teach you, and here it is: The first grain is always the last grain. Your days of masterless indolence have ended. I am your master, and I command you to part so that what defines us both can remain.” Imagine that. Imagine being the sea and having this ant come up to you and telling you that it was in your best interest if the ant took control of you now. Personally if I were the sea, which I’m not, I’d squash them all. Not only that I’d eat them up and keep them in my bowels to show off to all my friends the fools that thought they were my master. Yes, the sea has friends. The sea has lots of friends. They’ve got the fish, or maybe the fish and sea are more like lovers. Well, they have the sand. That’s right the sea and the sand are friends. Instead of vengeance the sea is courteous enough to listen to this speech by Merlin. And it’s ultimately this speech that convinces the sea to let Merlin and their forces walk across the bottom of the sea floor. If you’re telling this story this is the point where you make a stern face and start marching on the spot for everyone’s amusement, or if you’re older and more frail you get one of your closer younger relatives to do this for you. Merlin and their forces get to the other side of the sea safely and Merlin plans for what is ahead. Merlin’s advisers hustle round Merlin and every one of them starts talking about strategy and tactics when it comes to pacifying the locals. You have to see the scene in your head, there is a lot of people crowding round Merlin acting according to a doctrine of conflict that hasn’t even been established and then there’s one person quietly brooding and Merlin sees that person and gets this divine urge to talk to them. Merlin asks that person what their strategy would be and that person says something like, “So far we have got exactly one account of what is happening here. So far we have only heard the opinions on one side of the sea. Maybe it’d be a good idea to grab a local and actually see if you can get this side of the sea to give an account of what is happening.” This is it for me. To make a story that builds itself around conflict and then pulls that away at the point of contact. Oh, yes. Merlin would have been proud. Merlin goes on to take some local guy hostage, and then he tells Merlin to talk to this other guy over the hill, and they talk to him and then he tells them to go speak to the next guy over the other hill, and so Merlin does that. Eventually Merlin gets an account about how they weren’t trapping the light in this land, but instead they were doing something else. It’s very technical, way too technical for me, but the general gist is that they weren’t trapping light into rock but they were allowing the heavenly lights to be seen in different ways than how humans had seen them previously, and then letting the light go again because trapping light is more difficult than holding on to a wet calf. Yes, it had been a huge misunderstanding. Instead of killing everyone that opposed their forces and tearing down their buildings, Merlin decides to leave their forces in the hands of this land across the sea with the blessing of the people living there. More mouths to feed is Merlin’s form of an apology it would seem. Merlin travels home alone. Yeah, this was a part I always tried to get an explanation for, it didn’t make any sense. I would, I’d actively try and get the attention of someone who might be an authority, but they often shrugged me off, “Like, it’s a story, kid.” But Merlin goes back on his own and uses some form of boat. In my head I didn’t understand why he didn’t use the sea floor again, but maybe he didn’t want to pester the seas too much because opening up the sea to walk across its floor is probably a one-off kind of a deal. I mean, it would help a lot if it wasn’t to be fair. This is where there’s usually a natural break in the story. Quite often the story teller will start to paddle an imaginary boat, and then encourage the audience to paddle along with him. It’s fun because it’s instructional yet participatory. Merlin comes home missing a bunch of people. He tells their families that everything is chill and that his forces were stood down and they’re now living over the sea peacefully. And, of course, these families believe him and get on with their lives with zero concerns. Merlin has brought back home something better than cherished loved ones and family members they have brought back valuable cultural technology. Merlin explains to people the way in which rocks can be extracted from the mountain and then placed in a specific way to produce an alternative perspective on the light that comes from the sky. This movement of the stones whilst retaining their force by uniting them with the light in a way that made them special, or something? It’s like what I communicated before with the rocks. And this story was supposed to explain that to ourselves and make sense of the communities in which we lived and the structures of society that formed around us. It’s like if you move stones to build a house then the stones die, but if you move the stones in a certain way with the permission of the sky and its light then it retains its holiness even though it has been parted from the whole. That’s like the holiness retained in the society I grew up in. Because the separation of people was done in a holy way as to retain the permission of the sky and the wind. It’s strange how things that are need to explain so much why they deserve to are. Why they can’t understand that they exist because they exist, but hey they need more. Maybe it’s because they don’t exist. But how can something that doesn’t exist make a case for it existing? Well that’s because things that aren’t real but do exist empathise with the thing that isn’t real and does not exist. So the existence of it needs to be explained by those other beings. And the ones explaining it the hardest are the ones with the most interest in that thing. But the ones with the most interest are the ones least likely to be able to understand that it’s not real and it does not exist and therefore be lacking in their judgment around the thing.

That was three stories from my childhood, I hope you enjoyed my retelling of them and encourage you to experience them yourself at your local hearth or meeting places. This is the last of my childhood. It’s all gone, I’ll have to grow up. Next is adulthood. The part of the adulthood that meets the childhood. We didn’t have a word for that, but maybe there should be one. Growing up is a lot like getting murdered as you walk the heath alone. Maybe that period of time where adulthood and childhood meet could be called something like ‘getting stabbed’ or ‘you’ll never really be happy again’. I’ll think about it.