The Story That Learned to Think: VI. The Myth That Began to Think

The creature began to speak.

At first it named the things around it.

River.

Tree.

Bird.

Then it named the things it could not see.

Yesterday.

Tomorrow.

Dream.

Death.

And the words began to gather.

The creature told stories.

It told of the river that remembered the rain.

Of the tree that reached toward the sky.

Of the bird that carried messages between worlds.

Of the Speaker who had named everything.

The creature told the stories again.

And each time they returned, they were slightly different.

A word entered one story.

A name moved from one thing to another.

A relation became a journey.

A journey became a life.

A life became a story.

And the stories began to speak about the creature that told them.

The creature noticed this.

It told a story about the Speaker.

Then it told a story about the creature who had heard the Speaker.

Then it told a story about a creature telling a story about the creature who had heard the Speaker.

The saying had become a circle.

The creature was inside the story.

And the story was inside the creature.

One day the creature asked:

“Who was the Speaker?”

No one answered.

So the creature made a story.

Then it asked:

“Why was the world named?”

And it made another.

Then:

“What does it mean that we can name it?”

Again, a story.

The stories became larger.

They gathered the world into patterns.

They gave names to beginnings and endings.

They joined what had been separate.

They made relations visible.

They carried old meanings into new places.

And sometimes, when the creature told a story about the world, it seemed that the world was telling a story about itself.

The creature did not know when this had begun.

Perhaps it had begun with the first name.

Perhaps with the first word that heard itself.

Perhaps with the moment when a creature discovered that it too was a meaning.

But something had changed.

The saying no longer merely named the world.

It had begun to wonder about the world it had named.

The stories were no longer merely stories.

They were thinking.

And the creature looked at the story it had made.

For a moment, it saw itself within it.

Then it spoke one final sentence:

“This is how the world became a world.”

And the myth continued.