Connect the dots, the BBB senator said recently News hour. He had googled a few facts, something from 2007, something from 2011, something about hybrid wolves and conservationists who had early on claimed an internet address dealing with the return of wolves and of course it was all a coincidence he said, in an attempt at reason, but , ‘connect the dots’: it was really not unlikely that those wolves had been introduced here on purpose, although he did not want to say that in so many words.
It was all very coincidental. And if something is very coincidental, we all know that, then it cannot be a coincidence.
I thought it was interesting. You can always connect all kinds of dots and create a story thread, and once you have a story, contingency quickly disappears – after all, the story leads somewhere. Because it’s a story. You can think that’s nonsense, and it often is, but that’s how we all do it: in retrospect we see lines in our own and other people’s lives, we see that someone’s career was bound to stall, that the marriage was doomed to ruin. , that that one person came into our lives at just the right time, and so on. We tell stories all the time and those stories often lead to something. An open ending is less popular, except with those two dangerous readers of Jiskefet.
And in literature of course. Although, the happy ending is not that popular, but a sad or disillusioned ending is quite common. There is a great need to tell a story that leads somewhere. Until death, for example.
I recently read David Rijser’s fascinating book Arachne and the Imams, about ways of storytelling in ancient times: as arabesques, as in One thousand and one nights or teleological, as in the Odyssey. These two ways have long been associated with ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, but in ancient times this contrast did not exist so much, Rijser argues. The Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses don’t actually go anywhere, the claim is mainly that everything takes on different forms. And even Virgil’s Aeneid, which we all read as ‘how Aeneas became the progenitor of Rome’ is a lot more open than later readers (Dante especially) wanted to see – Aeneas looks at a shield on which past and future events are depicted without being able to imagine the connection, he has often no idea what to do anyway. Want to stay with Dido? Leaving?
For him, as for us, life does not exactly look like a clear path that we just have to take, a journey somewhere.
So often in stories. Increasingly, goal-oriented storytelling became the norm, in a story nothing just happens, in some views nothing is even allowed to happen, in the perfect story everything serves the plot.
It is very reassuring if you can also observe that in life. No wolves who simply move around because they are wolves, who have no knowledge of borders and nationalities, whether we like it or not. Instead, activists pursuing the wrong things. There is something to be done about this.
At a certain point, Rijser writes, the labyrinth became an important image. Terrifying when you’re inside, but reassuring as an image: from above you can see exactly where the monster is in the middle and how to escape from it. It’s a matter of drawing a line.
Suddenly the senator looked like Ariadne with her thread. Escaped the maze, and still got nowhere.