The Shape of Stories: How Myths Move Through Bodies and Worlds

The Emerald

Joshua Schrei

Religion & Spirituality, Trance, Mythology, Culture, Society & Culture, Shamanism, Arts, Justice, Entheogens, Spirituality, Cosmology, Art, History

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2021

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes — that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This episode builds on Vonnegut's thesis and explores the energetic shapes and trajectories of myths — trajectories that serve, within oral myth telling cultures, to take the listener on an experiential journey of scattering and rejoining, of rupture and cascade, of coiling and release, and of journey and return. These wave dynamics exist throughout nat...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants and Trends Through a Mythic Lens,
0:12.9	the podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth,
0:19.8	story, and imagination.
0:26.6	The Emerald.
0:28.6	All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Some decades ago, a young writing student submitted a master's thesis to the University of Chicago.
0:48.9	The thesis posited that stories have shapes, that there is a trajectory to most stories and this trajectory can be
0:57.2	mapped on a graph, and what really is central to all story, what really binds stories together,
1:03.2	is their common shape. The vision was simple. Stories were plotted on a graph in which the
1:09.6	vertical axis was ill fortune to good fortune,
1:12.6	and the horizontal axis was beginning to end.
1:15.6	And plotted that way, there was a particular waveform to each story.
1:20.6	Stories could then be grouped together by their shape,
1:23.6	and there were several groupings that taken together accounted for pretty much all the stories we tell.
1:29.8	Well, the University of Chicago rejected the student's thesis, too cutesy, too oversimplified.
1:36.5	The great literature of Western culture can't possibly be reduced to little wave-like shapes.
1:42.1	Little did they know that the student in question would go on to become one of the greatest
1:45.9	writers of the 20th century.
1:47.8	His name was Kurt Vonnegut, and he said later that his thesis on the shape of stories
1:52.7	was his prettiest contribution to the culture.
1:56.2	There's no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers.
2:00.4	They are beautiful shapes.
2:01.6	This is the GI axis, good fortune, ill fortune.
	...

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