Tall Tales

Beginning. Middle. End.

Such is Life.

Have you ever given much thought to the role of story in your life? Not necessarily a story, but the existence of story. That is, I don't mean to focus on the Grimm tales of childhood, rather what I mean is have you ever felt yourself playing the role in your own existence? 

Once there was a King, who was at war for a long time. After many years and many battles, many marches and many more retreats, the enemies of the King were at the gates of the capital. It was then that the king's most valued counselor came to him bearing a black crown. 

"Place this on thy head, most high king, and begone from this world, to wreck mischief and misery on thine enemies..."

With but one glance from the balcony of his highest tower, a glance devoid of victory, the king turned to his servant and took the crown. It touched but one lock of his hair and he disappeared. 

Time stood still. Flashing flames along the moats of the besieged city froze like drifts of snow, men in the blood of battle were but statues of marble. The King found himself in a maelstrom of locusts, he could not breathe. Then there was light.

The crown proved a violent servant from that day forward. First placing the king unrecognized amongst his enemy's generals in peace at a hunting party. Next leaving him at the crib of his greatest adversary's newborn son. He had revenge. 

But then just when the hope for victory had rewritten time itself, the crown no longer carried the king so far. The swirl of blackness left him stranded on roads or in fields of countries he knew not. Sometimes he found himself on the doorstep of inns where the halls rolled with tongues he did not recognize. 

It was then that serendipity led him to the real power of this device. One black night, abandoned beneath the stars, the king lay down upon his cloak to sleep; and hanging his belt and his crown upon a branch over his head the king fell dead to the strange world surrounding him....

We start our lives filled with vain imaginings. But how vain were they, really? We prey upon stories as children for they fuel in us the vanities of idealism: The prince is good that overcomes, the princess purity that divines the true heart from the false. We prey upon them as adults to escape the hard 'facts of life' that have imprisoned us with the measure of our value. I contend that we idolize stories for something greater than the face value of their entertainment. We idolize stories because we all exist in one ourselves. We each have a hopeful beginning, a delusional middle and an end. The nature of story is the very nature of our existence. So we strive to find meaning, motive, heart, and more, in the fiction of things that we never believe will happen. We are all carrying crowns, trying to reverse our own tale.

Stories and belief. That is the pure sum of human existence.  

How does it end? Maybe I'll share it someday, heaped with the sentimental symbolism, I'll mean to tell it for application in our own lives, not just simple emotion wrought from empathy.