Wednesday, March 14, 2012

A Matter of Life and Death

Imagine for a moment a duck.  Continue imagining the duck.  Now, stop imagining the duck.  Is it gone?  Good.  This is not a story.

Imagine a new duck, and for the sake of clarity, let's call him Ferdinand.
Imagine that he looks kind of
like this, only bigger.  And more real.
Once, Ferdinand was by a pond.  After seeing some of his duck brethren fly by, he decides to join them.  They fly to a lake and Ferdinand finds a new place to hang out.  This is a story.

A while ago I mentioned Aristotle coming up with the idea of a story as a beginning, a middle with conflict, and an end.  Now you can see why the first section of this blog was not a story.  There was no conflict.  There was a beginning and an end; arguably, even a middle.  But a duck is a duck is a duck.

Ferdinand tells a story, albeit a fairly uninteresting one.  The difference is that Ferdinand did something.  There was a conflict because Ferdinand was not where he wanted to be and he had to give something up to get there.  He flew.  He moved.

The etymology of the word conflict shows us that it came from the meaning "to strike together."  Conflict. When two forces strike together, they lose a part of themselves.  Just look at swords that clash together.  They come out all chinked and janky.  That's death.  When you're in the middle of a story, you're going to experience some sort of death.  A part of who you are is going to have to be given up to reach a resolution. 

There's conflict in every story because there must be.  Otherwise, nothing happens.  There is no narrative without struggle.  From the conflict however arises resolution.  Resolution means to settle, or to come to rest.  With rest comes new life.  Every story is a matter of life and death.

In a letter that a guy named Paul wrote to a church in a city called Ephesus, there's a line that says Christ put hostility to death through the cross.  The hostility that Paul is talking about here is between the Jewish folk and the non-Jewish folk.  Paul says that because Christ died, those two groups have a new life together.  Christ's death brings a new life of peace between communities.

You have the power to make new life where there is none.  The way this works is by you dying.  Not physically, maybe, but in the stories we live out everyday, resolution of conflict comes when a force dies.  If you want to live well, die better.  Maybe you think dying means the end of things.  Think again.

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