Again with the Ellis love
I've mentioned that Warren Ellis is as much a mad genius as, well, those other guys that everyone talks about as being brilliant, but hopelessly nutty. Now I don't think that Warren Ellis is crazy, but I do think that he has an ability to tap into that well of lunacy everyone has in their brain, and turn whatever spills out into entertaining stories. I just read a post by him that sort of touches on that, and I thought I'd share.

The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They’re an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they’re not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

And we’ve always had them.

Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

Walk down the great processional avenue to Glastonbury Tor, and you experience a similar effect. The walk is designed to sequentially reveal and present aspects of the surroundings, until the Tor is brought out of the backdrop to stand in front of you. It’s intended as a religious experience – a walk that becomes an experience of mystery and revelation. It’s a plotline.

Cave paintings are comics. Standing stones are art installations. It’s all stories.

  ¶ 7:24 p.m.