The Storyteller

I am old and my memory is not what it used to be, but if I recall correctly it was in 1948 that I first came up, in a fit of inspiration, with the basic outline of the character of Justin Smith-Ruiu. Of course that’s not what I was calling him back then, for indeed this name emerges only out of a very recent plot twist. But it was then that the seed of the person we all now know as “JSR” got planted in my mind, and quickly began to grow. I spent the next 24 years working out the finer details of his character and envisioning the entire dramatic arc of his life.

But then the most remarkable thing happened. Just when I was ready to “launch” him, as they say today, in the form of a tale told to others of our Sodality —a tale I had promised them I could wrap up in just under 74 years—, that same Justin Smith-Ruiu, that seedling of my own imagination, was born into the world, a flesh-and-blood human being, at St. Mary’s Hospital, in Reno, Nevada. In fact, though I cannot be certain of this, I suspect his “germ” entered nature at least a decade before that, in consequence of an obscene little gesture of mine I’m too ashamed to describe here. The evidence suggests that it spent those years floating around on currents of air, cycling through the water cycle, absorbing scenes natural and human across his dim membrane, before maneuvering into position, like a twice-born pinky-sized joey climbing towards its mother’s pouch, to begin the common process of mammalian (placental) gestation.

It would of course have made good narrative sense for his germ to have wafted through various sites of historical interest during this hypothetical prodrome phase. To have shown up, for example, for the Summer of Love. But it seems that for a little over two years, from September, 1966, through October, 1968, the microscopic soul-pip that would eventually grow into Justin Smith-Ruiu found itself far from San Francisco indeed — stuck, of all places, in the elastic band of a fussy old Little Rock church lady’s bright pink shower-cap. By 1969 he seems to have drifted to Nashville, where for a while he smudged the lens of a camera on the set of The Porter Wagoner Show. How he made it to Reno by late 1971 is anyone’s guess.

In all my centuries of storytelling such a “downward hypostasis” as this had only happened once before, indeed with one of my very most beloved creations, the peasant girl Maria, who, in 1680, at the age of eight, goes blind while staring at a triple parhelion and prophecies the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna three years later. But I confess when I learned of this mishap I swiftly and discreetly arranged for her disappearance, an incident of what today they would no doubt call “SIDS”, but for which baby Maria’s familiars all found satisfaction in accusing one of the feudal estate’s several feral cats, which, they said, must have crept in and sucked out her breath as she slept.

I probably should have tied things off in similar fashion back in 1972, but something held me back. Perhaps it was the gentler spirit of the times, I don’t know. But anyhow I decided not to intervene, and now here we are, 51 years later, still stuck with two Justins Smith-Ruiu: the one up here with me, whose story I’m still in the course of telling, and the one down there, who believes his life is his own, and is still, tenaciously and improbably, trying to live it.

Those of our Sodality who have bothered to stick around to hear me tell his story, mostly out of politeness or loyalties shaped long ago, have told me the others find something altogether unseemly in this unprecedented “split”, between the “narrative JSR”, let us say, and the “earthly” one. Just last month they set up a Council to determine which of the two should take precedence in the official records, and how to ensure that such a thing never happen again. The Council says I did not follow due precaution in my original conception of JSR, that I allowed my imagination to “imaginate” too vividly, which as we know, for those of our kind, can sometimes project an unmistakable likeness out into the external environment, searing it into the surface of a basalt outcropping, or even, as when I was hard at work on a retelling of the life of Tamerlane (before the Sodality banned “historical fiction”), into the Butter Mountain on display at the 1961 Indiana State Fair. They said that in the case of JSR (they’d quietly agreed not to mention Maria, which we all knew, technically, was an infanticide) my imagination was so fervid as to go beyond mere likenesses in stone or butter or other sculptable matter, and to transfer the being itself directly into reality. They said I should have known to control it better.

Soon after the Council was formed, rumors began to circulate that they were looking to expel me from the Sodality, and to force me to go down into the other world and to tell my stories to the poor lost souls there who don’t even know what stories are, and in their ignorance take them for something “unreal”. 

To make things worse, the version of JSR down there, the flesh-and-blood one, just keeps getting things wrong at every turn. I don’t mean to be rude, but he’s a bit of a fool. My own JSR, I admit, was supposed to be a “superfluous man” too —I’d been reading a lot of Lermontov back in the ‘40s—, but gracious, not like this. Noncommittal, meandering, indecisive, every time the earthly JSR starts to get good at something, he quits it to pursue something else. He is a dabbler and a dilettante, a Bouvard without a Pécuchet, or vice versa. He has started studying more languages than most people have ever heard of, but seldom gets past the most rudimentary familiarity with their grammars. His reading is pathologically desultory: El Castillo Interior, De Divinatione, The Quincunciall Lozenge, the Monas Hieroglyphica, The Recognitions, the Gospels, and on and on, never more than a few pages at a time, dog-eared and BIC-marked, frequently soiled by his food-smeared thumbs, all in a disordered stack by his bedside. The cumulative effect of this life of pointless perusal is for him something deeper than a chronic crisis of faith. It is an abidingly desolate sense, deep in the heart of the earthly JSR, of the total absence of narrativity, of anything remotely resembling the arc of a story, in the course of his earthly life.

To be honest it’s hard to blame him for feeling this absence so sharply. At times I admit I’ve felt optimistic, when the two JSRs have fallen into unexpected harmony with one another. But even on those rare occasions when their respective circumstances happen to line up, there’s still always something missing from the earthly version. For example, already by 1954 or so I had got the idea that the infant JSR should have bees land on his lips while sleeping, that they would not sting him, but only gently perch there for a few seconds, foreshadowing the eloquence and “sweet-talk” of his future years. Almost miraculously, a trio of bees indeed landed on the earthly JSR’s lips more or less simultaneously with my telling of this same scene to the few members of the Sodality who had gathered to hear it. But here’s the problem: down there, the bees didn’t foreshadow anything. They just landed, and then flew away again. No one even noticed them but me. What’s the connection between the bees and our earthly JSR’s current habits of speech? Who can say! Down there it’s just one damned thing after another. No narrative cohesion at all. You see a rifle on the wall in the first act? When you’re on earth, it might still be hanging there at the end of the third. It’s as if no one has thought things through, no one is paying attention. No one cares.

They say I’m too preoccupied with earthly events, and I suppose they’re right. I suppose I feel I have a stake in what goes on there, and even that one of my own “children”, so to speak, belongs to that race of beings. Sometimes I think they would have cast me out already back in the era of stagflation, around the time the bees landed on JSR’s newborn lips, if they didn’t all know that the Raconteur Majeur has a soft spot for me. I don’t mean to boast when I say he and I get along pretty well. We even have something of a joking relationship, and I’m one of the only ones he allows to call him by his “secret” name of Magsman.

Once, when the JSR incident came up, I reminded him that he could plausibly be accused of the same mistake, but at a far greater scale, as the physical universe itself is said by many to have slipped into existence inadvertently, to have flown out as a droplet of his overexcited spittle, once, long ago, when he was in the course of telling an amusing but ultimately forgettable little tale about the tedium of bookkeeping. The Magsman just laughed in his good-natured way, and said: “I suppose you’re right. We all make mistakes every now and then.”

A few centuries ago the Magsman decided to give our various Councils full authority to make their own decrees. It was the new fashion for “constitutional monarchy” that convinced him to institute this reform, or so he liked to joke at the time. And this is why, when he told me a few days ago that the Council seemed to be preparing to pass down a stern ruling against me, he also reminded me that, unfortunately, he would not be in a position to intervene directly. He quickly added, though, that there was really nothing I needed to worry about. Everything was going to turn out just fine, he said, smiling kindly. And I believed him.

I would soon learn that some on the Council had supplemented the charges against me with others that could not but have been conceived in bad faith. They accused me of yet another case, alongside Maria and JSR, of downward hypostasis, which they say occurred long ago, when a quinotaur ravished the unborn Merovech’s mother as she swam in the River Meuse, conceiving upon her the hybrid first king of the Merovingian Dynasty, and thereby also founding the nation of France. It’s true I am the one who first told this story, long ago, but it is quite obviously just a story, no matter what the Frankish Chronicles of Fredegar would later tell us. The Council wants to take Fredegar’s word for it, as an official record of earthly events. I keep trying to tell them it’s just a myth, indeed a rather typical one for early medieval dynastic genealogies, whose authors have no idea where and how the dynasty actually gets started, and so just make something up about, say, a five-horned taurine merman with a taste for human maidens who swim nude in rivers.

Other charges from the Council are even more plainly trumped up. For example, I recently gave one of my protégé storytellers an assignment to spin out the tale of Dan and Brandon Kumpe of Yakima, Washington, brothers stuck in a protracted legal battle over who deserves exclusive rights to the business name “Kumpe and Sons Discount Mufflers”. The Council tells me the e-mails between their two lawyers look far too much like the correspondence between the Carolingian emperor Louis II and his Byzantine counterpart Basil I, on the matter of which of the two may legitimately claim to be the true heir of Rome. And thus, they say, in view of my fiduciary responsibility towards my protégé, I have violated the new ban on historical fiction. This is absurd, of course. I try to remind them of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Folktale Index, which establishes that there are really only 134 or so base-level possibilities for the narrative art, plus various combinations of these, so it is not at all surprising when certain motifs of our tales resonate with world-historical events — which are themselves of course not narrative in the first instance, but you can be sure they will become at least somewhat story-like by the time Basil and Louis get the idea to put quill to vellum.

So, they condemned me. I heard the news just yesterday. The Council said I had two options. I could, they informed me, go and kill the earthly JSR right away, which indeed would not be at all hard to pass off as the tragic outcome of one of his frequent mental-health episodes. Or I could agree to an earthly exile that was to last for as long as the earthly JSR, aged 51, was to continue living. Honestly, I was shocked to learn that the Council was now perfectly at ease with the open suggestion of murder, which is something that, when I resorted to it back in 1672, the entire Sodality found exceedingly shocking and at most only ever mentioned in hushed tones. Anyhow I myself had resolved never to resort to it again, and so, by evening, I had made my decision: I was going to leave the Sodality and enter into earthly banishment.

The Magsman came to me this morning and in his gentle way he encouraged me not to think of this “little trip” as punishment, but rather as an opportunity. “JSR needs you,” the Magsman says. He tells me there is an old trick that almost none of our Sodality remembers, but that I should consider attempting while on earth. It’s what the Greeks used to call ενσάρκωση, where rather than creating a life through telling the story of it, as we do up here, you enter the body of a human being and you give it meaningful narrative structure and direction through your own wise guidance. “Anyway,” the Magsman adds, once he’s explained how this all works, “it won’t be for that long at all. Just the rest of JSR’s mortal life. It’ll all fly by,” he laughs, “faster than a three-day weekend.”

And so I enter first into the narrative JSR, as storytellers often do when they are said to “inhabit” their characters. And then I, or we, descend down into the earthly JSR in turn, which is a somewhat more difficult process — something like what you might see in an illustrated Theosophical pamphlet from the 1930s, where the outline of a luminous astral body glides slowly downward into an opaque and earthly one. But we pull it off gracefully. And then the two JSRs become one, now not only harmonized, but identical.

And the earthly JSR feels a little twinge that he mistakes for inspiration. He still doesn’t really know who he is or where he comes from, but at least he has a good idea for a story, which, with no Sodality to tell it to out loud, he sits down to write, hands on keyboard, on this 24th day of March, 2024.

—JSR, Buttes-Chaumont