Story: The Definitive GPS
by Nicodemo Manfredo

Why is story important? Why does it matter?

Stories are fossils of thoughts and feelings of people and times which have passed, or of people and times which never happened except in the imagination. They are connections to a someone or an everyone who has come before us.

My family was large and widely dispersed. We were lucky in that, for most of our lives, four or five generations were alive. My grandmother’s grandmother died when I was eleven. She was born in 1851, sixty years before the earthquake that caused her to flee Calabria. She was fourteen years old when the American Civil War happened. She was in her thirties when the modern automobile was invented. I spoke to her in person. She told me about her father. He was born in 1810, the year Beethoven wrote “Fur Elise.” The year the US annexed Florida from Spain.

Her daughter, my great grandmother, raised me for the first several years of my life. She told me stories. When she arrived in l'ameriga with her three-year-old daughter, she was nineteen. Her husband and brother had arrived two years earlier. A year after she arrived, her husband died during the Spanish flu epidemic. A few years later, her brother died during World War I. I knew them both. I knew them as surely as if they had still been alive.

Ultimately, story acts as a GPS that’s able to say, “You are this person in this place at this time.” It displays a map of where this person/place/time is in relation to all other persons/places/times. Like the visual concept of negative space, it defines what is by putting it into the context of what surrounds it.

The family stories I heard located me. They told me where me/here/now is. They connected me to the history of the world. They made me a part of the chrono-scape. And knowing them told me, “You are here/now,” and showed me a map of how I arrived at that particular place and time.
 
My great grandmother lost sons and daughters both to wars that will never be forgotten and to diseases: TB, cholera, influenza, polio. Her story rooted me not in the past, but in the world as an environment—an organism—that I don’t merely live in but am an integral and necessary part of.

But, story doesn’t have to have a direct connection to the person hearing it any more than the places portrayed on a map need to have any direct connection to where we are or where we are trying to navigate to. It is important, at any given moment of our journey, to triangulate where we are in relation to everything else. That triangulation connects us to all the places we aren’t and may never be. Me/here/now only exists by who/where/when it is in relation to who/where/when it’s not.

Likewise, fictional story connects us to ideas and emotions that might have never existed outside of the imagination of the relater of the story. By existence of the story alone—maybe in no way a real time, place or event—we are triangulated, connected to the place (the mind) in which the story takes place. It tells us who we are by creating a connection to who we are not.

Story doesn’t have importance because it diverts our attention, or amuses us or teaches us something—even though it may do those things. It’s important because it doesn’t need to include us in order to contain us. Like a star billions of light years away whose light hasn’t reached us yet, even if we have never seen it. The fact that the star is fixes us in a position, our current home address in the universe.

Nicodemo’s story “The Greatest” appears in Dammit, I Learned a Lot from That Son-of-a-Gun. Click here to learn more about him.