The Story of B (Ishmael 2) - Page 58

“Improbable as it seems on the basis of the facts you’ve just mentioned, these were not gratuitous or wasteful slaughters. Hunters in the Old West—I mean hunters of our own culture—could have explained it. They knew from experience that you could literally starve to death surrounded by bison, if these were lean animals such as you’d find late in the winter. In the absence of other food, the only way to survive in the midst of lean bison is to kill vast numbers of them and take what little fat there is. I’m not going to get into the biochemistry of it here, but if you like I can lend you a book on it.”

I told her I’d take her word for it.

“Where was I …? I was making the point that hunting isn’t violence. Let me put it this way. The trait that was being saved as we evolved as human hunters was not murderousness, it was a talent for observation, deduction, forecasting, cunning, stealth, and alertness. These are the qualities that make for success as a hunter—and they’re not at all specific to hunting. If they were, then we would indeed be irresistibly impelled to hunt. But there are things that we’re irresistibly impelled to do … and you can see them here.”

She patted the ground in front of her.

The “storytelling gene”

“Tell me what happened here in this spot a few hours ago, Jared.”

“Well, a beetle came walking along, then a mouse leaped out of the grass at the left and made a grab at the beetle. You said these marks looked like marks of a scuffle, but I don’t know why a mouse would have to scuffle with a beetle.”

“Maybe the beetle grabbed back.”

“True … Anyway, after the scuffle, the mouse carried the beetle off to the right.”

“You understand that this—what you’ve just done—is totally beyond the capacity of any other animal on this planet.”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did you do?”

“Well … actually, I didn’t do anything. You did it.”

“That’s odd. I could have sworn I saw your lips move.”

“Yeah, but … What exactly is your question?”

“I asked what you did.”

“You said, ‘Tell me what happened here,’ and I told you what happened. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. What I’m trying to make you see is that the two of us did different things. I did one thing, and you did another. I want you to put a name to what you did.”

All I could think of to say was that I talked—and I wasn’t going to say that.

“The reason you can’t name it, Jared, is that you undervalue it. Do you know who Koko is?”

“Koko? She’s a gorilla that’s been taught sign language, isn’t she?”

“That’s right. If you sat Koko down here, and a beetle started ambling through the dust, and a mouse came out of the grass and carried it off, Koko would be able to sign something like, ‘Bug bug mouse bug run fight mouse run bug.’ If, ten minutes later, you were able to convey to her your desire for a description of what she’d seen (which is pretty unlikely), the best you could expect would be something like this: ‘Koko mouse see mouse bug Koko see.’ Even that would be remarkable. But what Koko will never be able to do is what you did, which is …?”

“To put it all together into a story.”

“Exactly.” B patted the ground in front of her. “This is where storytelling began, Jared. This is where people began to read the world as a collection of stories. There isn’t a child anywhere in the world, in any culture of the world, that doesn’t want to hear a story—and everywhere in the world, in every culture of the world, a story is a story is a story: beginning, middle, and end. Beginning: ‘One night a mouse was traveling through the tall grass on its way home when it suddenly spotted a great black beetle lumbering across a clearing just ahead. “Well,” thought the mouse, “beetles aren’t exactly my favorite food, but protein is protein!”’ Middle: ‘So the mouse hid in the grass until the beetle was just a leap and a bound away, then it rushed out and attacked. To the mouse’s surprise, however, the beetle had a powerful set of jaws of its own, which closed around the mouse’s nose. Back and forth the two of them fought until at last the mouse managed to dislodge the beetle.’ End: ‘ “I’ve got you now,” the mouse said, using its sore nose to flip the beetle onto its back. Carefully avoiding the beetle’s waving legs and snapping jaws, the mouse gobbled up the beetle and happily trotted off toward home.’”

“Very nice, but … Do you really think we have a storytelling gene:”

“Well … a geneticist would wince at such an expression. There is no single gene in there you can pop out and label ‘storytelling.’ The theory I’m putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren’t—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren’t, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn’t just found here and there among human cultures, it’s found universally.”

Reading the future

“The people of the Great Forgetting are quite content to imagine that the human story began just a few thousand years ago when people started building cities, but here is where we became human in the first place. I’m not talking about how we came to walk on two legs or how we came to lose our hair. We were two-legged and hairless for hundreds of thousands of years before we crossed this border.”

Again she patted the ground in front of us.

“This is where the temporal structure of the universe began to be imprinted on the human brain. These tracks in front of us are of course with us in the present, but they won’t make any sense until we recognize them as traces of past events. They would be meaningless to any other species, because no other species would be able to read them as traces of the past.”

Tags: Daniel Quinn Ishmael Classics
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