nunoncastors

I have always told myself stories, I am certain of this. I distinctly remember walking to school, aged about seven, telling myself a tale about a Bunyip and a Dingo. The Bunyip would try to kill children by luring them into his pool to drown, while the dingo would try to rescue them using nothing but his cunning.

I can even recall how I imagined a billabong to look and what a Kookaburra would sound like. It’s strange how vivid this memory is, yet I can’t recall ever walking to school in the rain or the first time I kissed a girl.

There are other, older, stories that I remember too. I remember the story of a man who lived in a cottage in the clouds, amidst a glorious rose garden, and how he would watch over me and sing me songs. I recall the stories I used to divine from the way flocks of starlings swirled and pulsed in the sky above my house, and how upset I was the first year the starlings didn’t come.

As I grew up, the stories became less about the natural world, less about nymphs and satyrs, and more about people, myths and legends. Well, there’s still a few about nymphs but they’re wholly inappropriate. The Greeks would approve.

The stories I tell myself now, they tend to be tragedies and tales of sacrifice and woe. They’re apocryphal tales of fallen heroes and struggles in dark places, far from the eyes of the world. Mine are tales of old soldiers recalling the last stand of a shattered regiment, the forgotten deed that changed a world and the sorrow of never returning home.

I continually suspect that these stories have a life of their own; they often seem to run on and develop while my thoughts are elsewhere, never being quite the same when I return as when I left. But then stories are like that, I suppose. It’s as though they have a power all of their own and persist long after their first telling. They may fade with time or become intermingled and confused, distorted by memory in the retelling, but often the core persists.

As well that they do, for without stories there would be no Tír na nÓg and no Annwyn, no once and future king, no Kraken, no dim remembrance of the virtues and vices our ancestors held up or the firesides where they listened. I wonder if the stories have always been there and humanity simply listens to them from time to time.

I suppose that many of the stories I tell myself are the remnants of old tales told a thousand times before. After all, how much originality you can draw from themes that are as universal as hope and love, and to what extent is my imagination free from the influence of all the stories I’ve ever heard? It isn’t important, not really, but I do wonder if the images I create for myself have any root in the real world.

I tell myself stories, I always have.