We Are Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On: Reading David Loy’s “The World is Made of Stories.”

We Are Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On: Reading David Loy’s “The World is Made of Stories.” June 20, 2010

I usually go from my home in the Oak Hill neighborhood of Pawtucket to the church on College Hill in Providence’s East Side by driving along Hope Street, which follows along the spine of the large hill that is the East Side.

Along my way I pass a Baptist church. It has one of those message boards. Often the sayings posted are barely truisms, trite, obvious, and occasionally embarrassing for the constricted view they expose. I like them because they let me feel superior to my neighbors.

Then, of course, the complexities of life present, revealing the foolishness of any easy judgment of others.
Right now there’s a saying that I find haunts me. It reads “Our father spoke the world into existence. Amen.”
On the one hand it simply represents a fairly obvious interpretation of the book of Genesis. And if I weren’t at the right moment in the flow of this and that I could have just dismissed the sign. Fortunately for me I was a just a tad more open as I drove down the street, just a tiny bit more vulnerable to what presents than is too often the case.
And the sign is worth contemplating. After all that saying points to a fundamental way we humans engage the world, the deepest way, perhaps. Engaging through the magic of words. No wonder we would have our gods speak the world into existence. Because in the deepest sense, it is true.
I was recently asked to blurb David Loy’s newest book, due out in September. It’s title is The World is Made of Stories. When I received the advance reader’s copy I was momentarily confused. It already had a blurb from me, which read “David Loy is a subversive, undermining our cherished opinions and revealing a revolutionary world of human possibility.” I quickly recalled I wrote those words in response to a similar request when his Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution was published.
And those words are still true. I consider Loy one of the most important spiritual thinkers of our day, genuinely one of my teachers. A master in the Harada-Yasutani Zen reform lineage, an academic, and a social justice activist, he weaves his life in ways that I find profoundly admirable. He writes, I read. And I learn.
The World is Made of Stories consists of a collection of quotations from all around the world together with Loy’s comments, which ties all together into an amazing web of stories, and meta stories, the whole of it pointing to something very important.
In this slender but powerful book Loy draws the reader’s attention to the power of words. He shows how stories have spoken us into existence. He shows how we, each of us, also speak the world into existence. And he shows how these different stories inform and replace and transform, and out of that how we find our lives.
I think the most important question Loy asks in his book is “What happens when I realize that my story is a story?” Of course, this isn’t just true of our individual stories, as mind boggling as that can be, it is also true of what he calls the big stories. “Big stories are the overarching ones that explain everything, including our role within it. God is the best example, although scientism is a secular equivalent when ‘science can explain everything that can be explained.’”
This can be a frightening moment. No doubt. It lays the foundations bare. But it is also an exhilarating moment, because so much then becomes possible. Loy analyzes all of this suggesting that it opens the possible story of our freedom. Which he then immediately gives some serious attention.
He notes how “One meaning of freedom is the opportunity to act out the story I identify with.” Here that tiny bit of distance gives us some freedom of movement within the stories within which we live.
But he also notes how “Another freedom is the ability to change stories and my role within them. I move from scripted character to co-author of my own life.” This is a deeper perspective, with terrible responsibility, but amazing in itself.
And he calls us to not stop there. “A third type of freedom results from understanding how stories construct and constrict my possibilities.” This is an even deeper freedom.
From here he calls us to how we can go deeper, yet.

And here we see his favorite stories.

“The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna refers to shunyata, emptiness, as “the exhaustion of all theories and views.’” Expanding a little on this he cites the great thirteenth century Japanese Zen teacher, Dogen, who calls us to “Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free form birth and death.”

Of course this is my favorite story, as well. So, as he begins to poke at it, I find myself challenged.

A good thing, no doubt.

But not always a comfortable thing.

Part of what makes Loy so important to me is that he doesn’t stop. Instead he asks, “is a Buddhist story better than Nietzche’s will-to-power story, better than a social Darwinist story?” And he opens that question to include all the stories we can and do hear, hold and cherish.
Loy asks, “How does one decide among them?”
His analysis is deep and relentless. He points out whatever else may be true “There is no such thing as not storying.” Storying. For a moment that word can jar. But the noun and the verb are one thing, so, really, there’s no better word. And it takes us to a question, the real one.

“The only choice we get is how to story.”

This is an art, it is the most important art we can learn.
And in this David Loy shows what the art he learned, the Zen way, can be.
And for that I am endlessly grateful.

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