guns, swords and bare hands in the dance of story-telling

‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’

—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

i’ve watched—or, rather, listened to—Natalie Portman and Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation: https://youtu.be/ledJBbRfH8g , and although i’d had my expectations—as i’m rather familiar with the work of both participants, and it is humanly impossible for a thought not to be immersed in the past experience of the wider context—it has inspired mental disturbance more than i expected it to, leading the individual lens of the mind assigned to my particular bodily experience of life in a human form, and the collective mind i have access to, to distil into words the notion of urgency and importance floating until now shapelessly and vaguely suspended in a wordless cloud.

urgent and important it is enough to strive to encode it into words, or whatever other communicable form may be used to carry it across, because our survival depends on our collective understanding of a simple message that no matter how fictional and silly-innocent they may sometimes seem,

the stories we tell matter in the most fundamental sense,

whether we tell them individually or collectively, in the sanctity of our own mind, to ourselves, to our children and family, or to the innumerable crowds across the planet, as not a single person’s story, memory, decision, is without a collective context, just as not a single atom in the entire universe lives in separation. and it does—immensely—matter how we use our story-telling skills, our design skills, our influence as creators, musicians, artists, sources of inspiration and promotors of ideas, what dreams, illusions on the wall of the Platonic cave we all dwell in, and their interpretations we give—to ourselves—and how we communicate them to others, especially those, who come after us, with more trust and vulnerability, less experience, who will be hearing, seeing and reading what we’ve recorded for them to add to, or as the base of, their lives, successes, failures.

“Relation of word to object… what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.”

says Philip K. Dick in Time Out of Joint.

it matters whether we make heroes out of singularly power-wielding characters, superhuman conquerors coming with the crushing might of a muscle, speed of an eye or that of computing power and technology, until recently usually males, usually of a pale complexion, who single-handedly save the world against yet another pretender to the global throne, glory and access to unlimited wealth, pleasures and convenience of blissful life devoid of responsibilities or duties of any kind, all at the expense of humanity, either erased or enslaved. never-ending war of clans and chieftains who were born from, and into, a conflict, or, far too often, a self-propelling narrative of a conflict where reality holds no support for it. sheer strength, excessive speed and arrogant thought depicted as virtues holding the guarantees of survival and salvation.

there is an iconic scene in one of the films that many love deeply and unconditionally—because c’mon, it’s Steven Spielberg, it’s Nazis defeated by the righteously blinding almighty rays, it’s a smug Han Solo of archaeology (so we’ve got the science bit covered), how can you not love it?—and therefore not so many dare to question, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which—however, in my view—perfectly summarises, in an unassumingly humble and seemingly innocent shot (the pun intended), the moment when the world collapsed: the gun vs sword fight.

at face value, it is, literally, bringing a knife to a gunfight—it just doesn’t get more morbidly slapstick-silly than this. the old-fashioned, slow and inefficient, rooted in history and ornamented code of honour and tradition, if overweight and ridiculously grotesque, vs the dead-efficient, if devoid of finesse or honour, focused on the result with not much consideration for the means required to deliver, clever, witty and, above all, funny and entertaining.

why funny? why above all?

because that is how humour works. laughter is a biological response of the human nervous system to a stimulus that’s not recognized instantly and coming as a surprise. the sudden exhale, which is the cooling, relaxing stage of the cycle of breath, with the diaphragm returning to its resting state, is the same device the body uses to deal with great pain, ecstasy or joy, when we scream, moan, yell or sing at the top of our lungs. it is the sudden exhale of relief, the oofs and phews after the inhale held in anxious anticipation for a little longer than comfortable. and now, apparently, quite obviously, we’ve been attempting to hold to the—seemingly separable from the cycle—wealth of our breath, the fuel collected in our lungs, and banks, and agglomerates of the human mind, for a little too long, and the first signs of suffocation are beginning to emerge.

like in any story, so in the Indiana Jones film, as in every other intended or unintended joke, we are being lead down a seemingly familiar path which suddenly makes a sharp twist or the scenery changes unexpectedly—so, just in case, we show the teeth and exhale sharply, so that everyone knows we’re not to be messed with if any fight for survival is required quickly. this is how gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates communicate and react socially to something that can be perceived as a threat. funny, ha-ha…

the fight in the film was supposed to be much longer, according to the original script, but the diarrhoea from the unfamiliar geo-cultural conditions disrespected, and the conqueror’s mentality of the our collective dream-makers, took the stage. Harrison Ford shortened three pages of a supposedly elaborate duel into the one-sentence, and half-a-second, epitome of the western brute force applied as a seemingly entertaining—depending, again, on the geo-cultural perspective—solution to a childishly simple dilemma of differing interests and opinions. childishly simple, if you have a simplistic and childish mentality that hasn’t evolved past that. honourless and cowardly? sure. but sure-as-hell-effective, too. and the global audience liked it, because that’s how most wars in the name of freedom of commerce and exploitation, pardon, progress and democracy, have been won, ever. not through honour and respect towards the adversary, but through whatever means available and required to eliminate the competition to the resources. in the times of cold and hunger, those with the strongest fists, the fastest claws, the wittiest minds and the fullest chests of supplies will continue down, or up, the evolutional path, making their genes live, possibly, one more generation, carrying the message of the success of the aggression, conflict, strength and speed along with it. armies, nations, religions, tribes, crime syndicates, commercial empires—all organised along the same structure of power, greedily seeking source of energy, and shedding responsibilities and duties as the undesirable expenses of energy to be avoided at all cost.

a sole machine gun operated by a single handler, from a safe distance obliterating the entire army of samurai warriors wielding the weapons requiring actual skill and honour to be defeated (as in The Last Samurai).

‘Tales told of battles won… | Of things we've done | Caligula would grin.’

Maynard James Keenan sings in Tool’s Invincible.

‘Warrior struggling to remain relevant… | Warrior struggling to remain consequential…’

and maybe, like in the most recent episodes of the eternal tale, now global and more nuanced than ever before, the chaos of commercially fuelled never-ending gunfight at all scales, and in all variants, of the Star Wars universe, will finally be matched and verified against the finesse and nobility of the combat and swordfight of its very origins among the more demanding sands of Arakis or the lush forests of Caladan? i am hopeful, because in reality, right now, no matter how eloquently and elaborately we decorate it with words, and how many pompous declarations of honour and morality we utter, it is not even the atrocity of a relatively slow, however—nevertheless—bodily intrusive and harmful arquebus or a musket, or a six-bullet revolver, still requiring some level of skill and precision, but fully automated, A.I.-equipped killing machines, flooding everything with torrents of literal and metaphorical bullets, missiles, punches, all deployed to maximise the impact with a minimum expense. subtlety, honour or morality do not belong in this company, as quantity, frequency and intensity over quality and precision hold priority, just like with the media and entertainment industry spewing series and superheroes faster than the global audience’s digestive system allows to ingest and digest in a healthy human manner and pace. all has been designed by the masters of multimedia propaganda and marketing to pierce any mental armour, and take down any defence mechanisms, you may have acquired.

whatever the physical and superficial manifestation, the underlying essence of it all remains fundamentally unquestionable—the fear of not having enough energy, readily available on demand or stored, in whatever form, to sustain life of the organism, of the family, of the extended tribal family or the crime syndicate, of the nation, country, species… nature doesn’t care and gets really nasty, really fast, when the sources of energy run low. parasitic symbiosis is estimated to be dominant variation of interaction between biological forms of life, being the core of around 60% of all relationships in nature (Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929270-300-parasitism-is-the-most-popular-lifestyle-on-earth/ ). but it all boils down to the availability—or, in our human case, perceived availability—of resources. we may have enough, but the fear of hunger and death from cold and starvation—or from ruthless strangers also fighting for survival on the same premise—carried in the genetic code, makes us fixate on gathering as much as we can, as quickly as possible, and then protect it in the name of survival.

some of the Northern American Nations had the bow-and-arrow hunting technique which made it forbidden for the hunter to aim directly at the target animal, but to shoot in the air instead, allowing the arrow to fly up first and then, if no interference from the wind or time occurs and the shot has been attuned to the conditions properly, strike the animal from above. this way the advantage of the strength from the bow’s thrust, something no human or animal muscles would be capable of producing organically, was sufficiently diminished, and the animal—given a chance of escape from an element of chaos intervening. there is recognition of the struggle for survival embedded in it deeply, of the fight and suffering awaiting either of the sides, one way or another, but also the aspect some see as exactly what makes us human—respect, altruism and recognition of one’s place in the larger harmony of voices in the opus of life, accepting the lack of control and ownership over the reality. accepting the inevitable change and transformation, seeking balance between the opposing forces, not the impossibility of dominance of either of them. and then came the Harkonnens… or the Trastámaras, the Wettins, the Rockefellers, the Kochs, the Murdochs under different names, in different disguise… the kings, the popes, the judges and the holy, all hungry for spice, for gold, for the energy turned into dark liquid, for the immortality of their frightened selves.

in one of the more recent films—also strongly rooted in the narrative diverging from the entertainment highway we’ve been generously given, and actively encouraged to travel along, by the industry of dream-makers for quite a long time, and quite convincingly at that, too—Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, there’s also a fight-scene, actually more than one, which is, however, a manifestation of a narrative many these days would agree with and would like to see and hear amplified: the most evident, or maybe not as much as i’d imagine, example of a successful multimedia attempt at providing a multi-layered answer, an illustration of the nature of the current economic and geo-political situation in its very essence, complexity, and simplicity at the same time.

Shang-Chi’s father, Xu Wenwu, the yang half of the whole, the male element of nature, strength-obsessed aggression, change and growth embodied, the desire to expand exponentially in size, matter, wealth and time, trying to get access to yet another source of power, the energy needed to extend life, meets Li, Shang-Chi’s mother, the yin, who embodies the round feminine nature of the Nature protecting itself from aggression. having lived for thousands of years, having fought countless wars, the ten-ring-dependent tyrant aggressively trying to break the resistance and gain access to what he feels will let him feel meaningful and fulfilled, is defeated and transformed not by the force opposed, but by his own force, anger and lack of attention diverted and engaged in a dance which combines all circles into one movement, which doesn’t destroy, doesn’t harm or kill, but decreases the momentum, depletes the overabundance of energy accumulated and suddenly released in an abrupt masculine manner, which later, long after the transformation, echoes back into the main current again, introducing the tragic story-line twist and the spark for yet another blind contest of strength and the might of lungs. it is the contrast of the tightly clenched fist blowing punches hard and fast, and the open hand, open mind dancing around it effortlessly avoiding impact or friction, employing wind and water without the intention to confront and compete but to ease the tension and to connect.

but then again, we all know well its all only one persenoid’s hypothetical mental meanders, told to another hypothetical persenoid being, and then to another, borrowing a literary metaphor from Stanis?aw Lem’s Non Serviam. stories shape us and i’m thankful—these days more than ever—that i’m blessed and privileged to live in the times when responsibility is starting to be taken for the message in the story-telling we do throughout—and with—our lives, personally, commercially, for education, information or entertainment, and that i have access to it all: through history, education, through the decisions my parents, ancestors, teachers and all co-creators of my life have ever made, the access to the stories of others, to their voices in the whole range of colours, flavours and rhythms. and that includes yours, too.

??