Nothing is more basic to the process of human thinking than how we divide everything into oppositions between one thing and another. We orient ourselves to the world by speaking of up or down, left or right, hot or cold, future or past, good or bad, light or dark, alive or dead. So fundamental is this dualism to the way our consciousness works that we are scarcely aware of the omnipresent part it plays in our thinking.
Which Way is Up?
We use such dualities in establishing our own identities – in sensing our own difference from others. We are male or female, tall or short, this religion or that, this political belief or that etc. It gives us a sense of where we fit in but also a sense of our own uniqueness. This duality lies at the heart of all stories which, it seems, are designed to guide us towards a point where opposites can become reconciled or transcended. Stories bring that which is unbalanced and incomplete to a state of balance and completeness – not somewhere between the two extremes but usually to some third position that transcends them both.
Polarity - Dave Gadsden Graphic
In real life – we, as individuals are involved in a wide range of experiential fragments – now I am typing, thinking about the reasons for doing theatre – in a moment I may be on the phone discussing what we’ll have for tea – then I might go and have lunch – as I go inside I might stop and talk to the dog telling him how beautiful he is – then I might watch an ad that grabs my eye on tv about a woman who heroically climbs mount everest – lots of little fragments impinging on my consciousness - broken, fragmented moments – that as a whole make up the movie of my life. This movie that I call my life is only made continuous by the continuity of space and time … and all of these fragments of experience are translated into complex branching, multiply firing neurone sequences. My mind can make a linear thread from this multiplicity of fragmented, branching experience in the form of a story … a story is a line of structured thought tied together by cause and effect pulled out of the branching, chaotic, fragmentary experience of reality, i.e. “Story” packages reality into comprehendible meaningful experience … with the clutter, stripped away. In the same way that our brain uses dualities to make sense of the world, so too do stories simplify and give meaning and insight to our lives and our existence.
Story is the extraction of cause and effect threads from the chaotic, complex, layered, branching nexus of activity that is the stuff of living.
