Before moving on, I thought I'd throw up a handful of those obligatory meta posts. First, there is the sensitive matter of telling a story, especially through a long historical arc. Given modern conceptions of cause and effect, it is always tempting to to point at a given chain of relations, such as a historical progression of ideas and events, and say, "aha the cause!" And so we get a crystallization and a hardening of ideology around a provincial point of perception.
As language has a tendency to "pin" things down in the image of what they present to the perception - even subtle language does this, multiplying the pins but nevertheless pinning - then the storytelling necessarily focuses in the perception to a delimited sphere of relations, marked off by the language itself.
This sphere can remain flexible and constantly shift, both through feedback internal to it and through feedback coming from its relation to the real: one moves, and acts with image in mind, and tests that relation. It can remain living.
Beyond that sphere however, life is still happening. This is partially an apology: I'll never really get it. One can trace military histories and changing relations of violence and say quite a bit of useful things about our present moment, but then there are many other changes going on beyond those things: in culture and in spirit and materially and economically, biologically, chemically, in the individual, and so on. One puts in one's work to capture what one can and then the day is done and the time is up.
This work is still quite useful, and crucial even. Telling the story of the poisonous berry may not capture the true nature of the berry, but it keeps the storytellers and the audiences alive. But forgetting this humility tends to facilitate the hardening of the sphere, or the story and it stops moving and communicating. It becomes dead, and then it begins to cut into the world of the living.
