Books mentor us…well, their authors do. Yet I think it’s much more than just the authors that do the mentoring, There’s a whole cadre of support at work when we read. There’s an architecture that evolves as our minds configure an understanding of the shape of the story we’re reading. A framework rises up on which we can hang whole worlds, our imagination sees to that. An infrastructure consisting of our own experiences, built layer by layer using a lifetime of memories lends its support. This is, in part, how story comes alive and its beating heart pushes life through the whole of us and every arterial subplot contributes.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, The Farthest Shore, the storyline follows a mystery in which life is draining away, out of people in the towns and in the country. The people are going about their business for the most part, yet there’s no real animation to it. Everything is drained of life and color. The wizards, most of whom feel they will be impervious to this malaise, eventually forget how to use magic. They even forget their past use of magic and begin to bring it all into question, saying it probably never happened. Not only do they forget the stories of magic, they forget the very words they have used to practice magic. And this is critical because when the wizards know the name of something, the true name, not the everyday name, but the true name, they are able to create works of magic.
Somehow this principle is at the heart of storytelling. This is how the great and magic shaping takes place, the true names of things are revealed. We understand not just the words, but the true name of what we are reading. It is then that the magic of transformation takes place.
Worlds are built, we cross thresholds and we are changed. One of the most iconic thresholds is the site of “The Pillars of Hercules,” the passage out of the Mediterranean into Terra Incognita where what is unknown begins to be unveiled. It can be said that “The Pillars of Hercules” represent all thresholds. Stepping through thresholds is how we begin our world building. We step through to a place we have never been before.
Samuel Coleridge understood well the concept of reading as world building and as a source that can transform us into trailblazers. He built the world of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as he stepped through thresholds of his imagination while reading travel logs. Jonathan Livingston Lowes writes in his book The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, the lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “The water, like witch’s oils, Burnt green and blue and white,” were evidently conceived in the imagination of Coleridge after reading passages of Captain Cook’s Voyage. Lowes book is cram packed with quotes like this that found their inspiration in the travel logs Coleridge had read and which became the catalyst for much of Coleridge’s work.
Coleridge was a master of assimilation and synthesis. We all have this capacity, but he used his very intentionally and maximized his extraordinary ability as he created story. He joined one and another image from his readings over and over, working pure alchemy in his writing. We all do some sort of world building with the images we gather, configuring our framework for both imagining and living, for creating architecture in storytelling, for our own story that we live in our daily lives and for the many stories that we tell in our creativity and expression. We use world building in our being and in our doing and this is at least in part due to the shaping we undergo as a result of our reading.
What worlds are taking shape in your imagination?
Writing Prompt for the Week: Great and Magic Shaping
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