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When your toddler enshrines a toothpaste tube between your sheets and saves sandwich triangles in your running shoes "for later," the veneer of logic that clads a complicated twenty-first century life can begin to crack and let seep a wild and extravagant chaos. You can almost start to feel the invisible millions of germs that the parenting books insist are teeming on every mouth-level surface. I don't know why it was that these fine cracks and swarming wee beasties yawned wide enough for the underworld to swallow me, but they did, and I was nearly lost, in the middle of a summer field. 

 

Hell, it turns out, has redecorated since Persephone's day, and Dante's orderly, concentric rings have yielded to a sickening vertigo in which there is no center, as I, capable of seeing every question from too many perspectives, lost all perspective. I got too dizzy to make any progress, even if I could have determined which way forward was, in a place where every step we've taken since the Industrial Revolution looks like self-destruction.

Gone too is the elegant fitting of punishment to crime that looks like destiny fulfilled, a certainty I could envy the damned. They cannot doubt the hand of fate exists, where I had begun to suspect that there is no inevitability at all - no divine retribution for the wicked, no purpose to existence, nothing to be revealed about why I was put here, or even that I was put here. The elegant contrapasso replaced by the crass joke that we humans - creatures who could just as easily be called homo scriptoris as homo erectus for our tendency to see a hunter's belt in a smattering of summer stars - we, the patternmakers, confront the total randomness of those distant flaming gas balls and find that they don't chart our course, or make us underlings, (or even Leos and Virgos.) Any wagon we hitch is fastened only to own shoulders. What I had hoped to find I can only invent, and must trust my journey to a map of my own devising. Belief is always only a choice, and how can I trust the whole weight of my soul to something I made - so much heavier than a feather, or Icarus's wings?

Hell isn't even Satre's other people anymore, but my inability to connect with them in a meaningful way in a wired world of tweets and call-waiting. Hell, now, is total patternless disorder. There is no plan, no purpose, no meaning. And it was that pain, the agonizing sense of actually being deconstructed, that showed me I must have some construction within me. I understood that if I felt the rending force of meaninglessness, there must be an equal and opposite force - some unnumbered law of thermodynamics at work to gather and order, even while the second one dissipates and cools. There must be something that creates while entropy destroys, and suddenly I felt like I knew something with certainty: There is chaos and there is order, and I like order a whole lot more! 

And so I quieted the first beast of hell by the fairytale trick of learning his name: "Chaos," and began to grope my way out of the land of the lost. The next monster in my path was God, and "sore afraid" doesn't begin to cover it. I lashed myself to the mast against the siren song of everything I wanted most - a deep and divine love for me personally, a god with a plan, a destiny to discover, a meaning to fulfill. But the god I encountered wasn't a singer. My god is a teller of tales, I am a part of the story told.

And so I was spared having to fight a battle I could never have won, and instead align myself with the ordering: I order and create myself. Because I believe we, unique among living things, have some of this power over ourselves, to create order, to oppose entropy, to create our own stories. When we do, I believe we put ourselves in harmony with that larger ordering force, and I believe it benefits from that. We can spin a yarn ourselves, sophisticated post-modern non-linear ones, or a simple quest story with monsters and blunt symbolism. 

I made a choice. I believe in stories. 

I believe in the stories we know, that we share with others as the vehicle of who we are - stories of ancestry and personal history, stories that share vulnerability and build shared history. I believe in stories that I don't know, that play themselves out through me until I catch on and stop - or at least edit - them. I believe in Story's power to create reality and to transform pain into meaning and worth into shame. I believe in its ability to transfer information across generations and to unify a nation. Or divide one. I believe that sharing our stories binds us, and that understanding another's inevitably eradicates hate. I believe in Story because a story saved my life. 

I wish I could say I left that dark place and never went back, but the truth is I'm writing from there now. The pomegranate seed that pulls me back is the truth that all stories begin in chaos. I come back to the unstructured, uncreated for materials that are really raw from which all creative work, even debut novels, are made. But the things I make in this place are the paths I walk out of it. Even if I set half the story there.