gather around, there’s a story to be told

in the most inspiring and mind-opening book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness—one i i’ve been fortunate to receive as a gift from someone of an extraordinary intuition and sensitivity—a beautiful, curious human mind of Peter Godfrey-Smith has distilled—and was generous to share in the most approachable manner—an immense wealth of insight into the processes that have given us the most useful, yet, at the same time, the most tricky to use, tool of consciousness.

in it, he writes:

“Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.”

as all consciousness is based on two-way communication between us and the reality we’re a part of, one of the main issues in communication between the two worlds of humans and octopuses, and the reason we’ve treated them—the living, feeling creatures—as merely yet another source of food and income, is their lifespan: they simply live too short to develop the necessary tools to pass their experience and knowledge to their offspring (or us), the ability that has been the very backbone of our collective evolutionary success. because we, unlike the otherwise humblingly clever octopuses, we tell stories, which helps us keep our own extinction at bay. if you think about it, memory and the narratives we tell are the core of our individual and collective identity—without them, without the context of the past experiences of our own and of those of our ancestors, we’re merely bodily shells. the clear and gut-wrenching evidence of it is what happens to people, their families and communities, when their memory fades away.

we indeed are the stories we tell, those about ourselves and the world around us, so it does matter how we tell them. and because—as a species—we’ve been lucky, we’ve also been given the opportunity to develop that ability and skill over time. that is exactly where language has come from, this is why we use symbols, why we weave metaphors, why we’ve invented the internet, why we so obsessively collect memories to protect them—and ourselves—from oblivion and to prevent the individual—and collective—Alzheimer’s disease.

and this is why we make films.

i don’t know how you see it, but to me (and this is one of the reasons why i studied at a film school) their superficial entertainment factor and the audio-visual appeal are massively outweighed by their subliminal ability to in-form our minds, to educate, feed our thoughts and to emulate—in all sorts of fantastic and fictional environments—‘what might happen if…’, both in the optimistic and the terrifying ways. they’re the tangible manifestations of the dimensions we’re more than familiar with through the experiences we gain in our journeys into the lands of dream, combining the reality of our everyday existence with the multitude of those of our wildest imagination. their might has only recently been slightly dimmed—and that part is debatable, too—by a new kind of narratives offered by the interactivity of games—just think of the titles, amazing both in their form and substance, like Journey, Spiritfarer, Outer Wilds or Gorogoa, to name but a few.

but let’s not haste here to go further up this branch too far yet, please stay on the film-story-telling one with me for a moment, because i’ve got something to share that might make you a far happier human: if you—like me—have been longing for meaning with ever more increasing urgency, especially within the most recent cycles around our gracious star, if you can’t help but watch films, read stories or listen to music with your mind focused on the most fundamental questions—placing doubt in even the most sacred beliefs—with a hunger for inspiration and reassurance that you aren’t alone in asking them, even if they bring even more confusion and pain, if you need to be comforted once in a while that the things whose meaning you feel deep beyond your bodily self are, indeed, far beyond what you call ‘I’, and whose significance is, indeed, shared collectively, even if there’s no-one in your immediate environment to speak about them with, then i’m sure you’ll enjoy (although that might not be quite the very word to distil it to) what one of the noble and generous souls of our self-obsessed and imbalanced times, Tom van der Linden, has been generous to share through documenting his most inspiring, mind-broadening, if a little under-the-radar, journey into the lands of film and culture we’re immersed in and collectively create.

this one i’m re-posting here (https://youtu.be/tooiNm9WmkM), is the most recent episode of Like Stories of Old, that has the potential of crumbling away quite a few rigid preconceptions we nearly all hold, but if you wish to be enlightened even more, dig a little deeper, because there is much more of it, and the metaphors you’ve lived your entire life with and by may gain some new and exciting depth.

thank you that you’ve devoted your time and effort to meet me and my thoughts here.

and thank you Tom, thank you Peter, thank you Magda :).

may today be a good day for you and those you hold dear.