Back stories matter

Matter moves from simple to complex. All things grow.

Languages evolve from roots to ramifications, from words to phrases to historic speeches and modern novels.

Human cultures weave old stories into new yarns, ancient spools into new fabric. Back stories matter because they’ve always been front and centre of our lives.

The back story is always there, although it may not always be visible, just like the backstage is always there, even though the lights and curtains blind us from seeing it. History, etymology, archeology are as many ways of recovering the back stories of human life. In many ways, understanding itself is a disclosure of a back story. The Big Bang is a way of grasping the ultimate back story of the physical universe.

Nothing makes sense except stories. Everything else is in the service of narratives. The data is data, which means given, and the facts are faits, that is ‘assembled’, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed. They make no sense on their own, they need stories to help them release their meaning and value.

And a story leads to another and another and so on all the way back to a back story. Only that there’s always a back story to a back story.