The Loremaster: On Storytelling and Legacy
As I’ve written about previously, I am a longtime player of World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG):
Several months ago I set might sights on earning “The Loremaster” in-game achievement, which is granted for completing the storyline quests in every zone from every World of Warcraft expansion—an exercise in diligence and tenacity if ever there was one! When I began, I predicted that earning “The Loremaster” achievement would take approximately six months. After much head-down time completing quest after quest, I finally completed the last quest necessary for the achievement, earning myself the coveted “Loremaster” in-game character title. As for the accuracy of my time estimate to complete the achievement, I got it in just under the one at five months instead of six. (I’ve gotten better at estimating my time commitments at this stage of my career and life!)
My effort to complete “The Loremaster” achievement in World of Warcraft got me thinking about the importance of storytelling in general—both about the importance of celebrating one’s own accomplishments (and each other’s!) and about the importance of telling your own story in general. Humans are, after all, storytellers, as fellow philosopher Brian Swimme pointed out in one of my favorite must-read short works of speculative postmodern philosophy, “Cosmic Creation Story”:
To be human is to be in a story. To forget one’s story is to go insane. All the tribal peoples show an awareness of the connection between health and storytelling. The original humans will have their cosmic stories just as surely as they will have their food and drink. Our ancestors recognized that the universe, at its most basic level, is story. Each creature is a story. Humans enter this world and awaken to a simple truth: “We must find our story within this great epic of being.” (Brian Swimme, “Cosmic Creation Story,” The Reenchantment of Science, SUNY Press)
Each of us is responsible for creating our own experiences and reaching our own accomplishments, but also for telling our own stories and creating our own legacies in the process. And some of us are fortunate enough for our stories to have been embraced and carried forward by others, and to be written by others into the larger story of humanity, whether at the local, national, or global level, or woven into the ongoing story of our one’s own particular field of study: philosophy, science, history, or otherwise—to have others say about you that you made a noteworthy and lasting impact on the story of humanity.
One of my favorite lines from the film Braveheart, a fictional account of the historical figure William Wallace, who was instrumental in the First War of Scottish Independence, goes simply as follows:
“His legend grows.” (Edward the Longshanks, Braveheart)
How much meaning is packed into those few words, “His legend grows!” Great deeds, after all, become known to the world and to history only if they are converted from action into story—and sometimes, for the very fortunate, into legend.
An unlikely connection, but an important one—and one that should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with my love for the history of professional wrestling—is the much-loved character of The Ultimate Warrior, a staple of late-1980s / early-1990s professional wrestling in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as World Wrestling Entertainment). Although it would be a stretch to call Jim Hellwig, who changed his legal name to “Warrior” along with the surname of his entire family) a philosopher in anything but the broadest sense of the term, Warrior had the following to say about the importance of storytelling as it relates to legacy, in his final appearance in the WWE, sadly passing away from a heart attack the very next day:
No WWE talent becomes a legend on their own. Every man’s heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe their final breath. And if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others and makes them bleed deeper and something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory of those who honor him and make the running the man did live forever.
You, you, you, you, you, you are the legend makers of Ultimate Warrior. In the back I see many potential legends. Some of them with warrior spirits. And you will do the same for them. You will decide if they lived with the passion and intensity. So much so that you will tell your stories and you will make them legends, as well. I am Ultimate Warrior. You are the Ultimate Warrior fans and the spirit of Ultimate Warrior will run forever.
(The Ultimate Warrior, Monday Night RAW, April 7, 2014)
Warrior was fully conscious of the power of storytelling in creating a legacy for himself, a fact which he had recounted many times prior to his death in describing the literary influences that went into the creation of The Ultimate Warrior, the character, in the first place—such as the Homeric epics (The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc.). By tapping to the primal need for storytelling and legacy, Hellwig was able to create a lasting legacy for himself and for the ideals that he himself chose to embrace for the rest of his life, however controversial they might have been, and to pass those stories and ideals down to future generations of wrestlers and wrestling fans—and indeed to anyone who wishes to embrace the power of storytelling in legacy creation in any other aspect of their own lives as well.
Although philosophers Jean-Francois Lyotard and Brian Swimme each approach this postmodern emphasis on storytelling in their own ways, they both appear to lament the loss of storytelling in the current age:
“That is what the postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.” (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge)
“In a sentence, I summarize my position this way: all our disasters today are directly related to our having been raised in cultures that ignored the cosmos for an exclusive focus on the human…. How could this have happened? How could modern Western culture escape a 50,000-year-old tradition of telling cosmic stories?” (Brian Swimme, “Cosmic Creation Story,” The Reenchantement of Science)
While Swimme has a more overtly negative view of the loss of storytelling, Lyotard seems almost to embrace this loss of grand narratives in favor of the emerging postmodern world with its emphasis on technological development, specialization over polymathy, and so on. As Lyotard states:
“Pedagogy would not necessarily suffer. The students would still have to be taught something: not contents, but how to use the terminals.” (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge)
This emphasis on storytelling hasn’t really gone away; it has merely taken on new forms, for better or for worse. After all, one is often taught in contemporary Career Development courses that you need to learn to “Tell Your Story,” which, most of the time, sadly means little more than telling your career story in the context of your next job interview, itself a sign of the postmodern shift away from narrative and toward performativity that Lyotard described—or perhaps prophesied—in The Postmodern Condition.
Why, however, are we so open and receptive to storytelling in a career or business context but fail to embrace the narrative aspects of the rest of our (actual) lives? Why restrict the epic journey of life merely to a career context when all of life itself has a narrative story arc with its many ups and downs, triumphs and failures, turning points and plot twists, loyalties and betrayals? We sometimes sum up, or rather frequently fail to sum up, a person’s life with a pathetically written obituary that does no justice whatsoever to the epic narrative and the real drama of a person’s life. Not only do we fail to tell our own stories in life, but sadly also even in death!
My journey to achieve “The Loremaster” achievement in World of Warcraft is, of course, merely in a video game—an ostensive time-waster compared to the journey of life with its many parallel obstacles and accomplishments (which perhaps is the real value of video games, as a metaphorical training ground for overcoming the obstacles and sticking with the journey of life no matter how many mobs of enemies knock you down along the way). In the game, my avatar proudly displays its “Loremaster” title above itself and before its displayed name above its head. What, then, does it take to become the “Loremaster” of your actual life, to embrace and proclaim the narrative elements of your own life and accomplishments in the same way that your video game avatar does on screen?
We happily place our degree titles before or after our names in our email signatures and correspondence (Zachary Fruhling, M.A., Ph.D. A.B.D. here!), but we never seem to convey the heart of the actual journey it took to receive those titles, in much the same way that my special “Loremaster” tabard in World of Warcraft, with its glistening gold exclamation mark signifying the many quests I’ve completed along the journey, doesn’t really capture the investment of time (and sometimes frustration) that it took to earn the achievement in the first place. At best we may have bios on our personal or professional websites that contain some shadowy semblance of a narrative about the journey we’ve undergone to achieve our successes and to overcome our obstacles and failures, but usually with the real drama and passion stripped away with an almost clinical degree of sanitization.
I don’t just want to hear about people’s accomplishments, I want to hear about the mud and the muck they’ve waded through along the way—for good or for ill—in other words, the actual journey of life and not just its mere destinations. For it is only through storytelling that we give our lives meaning, either internally for ourselves in some existential sense of self-definition, or externally for others in creating the legacy and providing the context for our own lives—and for future generations. We must once again become storytellers, not just in our resumes and professional ives but in imbuing every aspect of our lives with importance and meaning, and in viewing even the mundane aspects of our lives in epic terms—worthy of Homer’s Odysseus himself.
