On The Shortfalls Of Narrative Poem by David Welch

I hear the phrase all of the time,
‘It doesn't fit the narrative, '
used in news, academia,
and in political missives,
a phrase that I find curious
since so many do seem to yell
that the narrative they've chosen
outweighs even the world itself.
Like Marx's view on history,
and the old ‘progress' fallacy,
this thought that we must have stages,
advance through them relentlessly,
but history won't hold them up,
it doesn't go by what they say,
there is no path man is bound to,
just crazy lurchings everyday.
Did not 2016 prove this?
The narrative was she would win,
but things didn't turn out that way,
and folks went nuts, thought it a sin.
Screamed about it for four years,
it wasn't supposed to happen, no!
Despite the fact, scanning the past,
that this is how things often go.

I think, perhaps, the first mistake
you see in the narrative crowd,
is simple overreduction,
to pair all human beings down.
We saw this in Collectivists,
and their misplaced faith in ‘the group, '
but others do this trick as well,
simplification hides the truth.
Humans are a chaos system,
even taken one at time,
sure, we do have our old routines,
but every so often you'll find
we do something that makes no sense,
that no other man could predict,
that unseen burst of randomness,
is so often what makes us tick.
Expand that to the whole species,
and you see chaos written large,
chaos actors interacting,
I think that it's a stretch too far
for any human mind to grasp,
to think you could is a conceit,
too many factors change too fast
to be forseen reliably.
Add to that the physical world
is a chaos system as well,
and we're all stuck living with it,
this makes it really hard to tell
what causes this, or changes that,
to our mind it seems randomness,
it's plain to see that narrative
cannot encompass all of this.
Our brain simply can't organize
or relate to something that vast,
we simplify to understand,
and there's a great danger in that.
Some start to think the narrative
is objective reality,
and act as if denying that
is a troubling perfidy.
But when has the world ever cared
about the thoughts we apes create?
The world is not a narrative,
that is a fact we can't escape.

I say all this as a writer
who makes narratives all the time,
I love stories, they're lots of fun,
and when done well they're quite sublime.
But every time I write a tale
I cannot help but be aware
that placed up against the real world
my narratives just can't compare.
Even when I've thought it all out,
believe I've covered everything,
compared to what humans endure
my creations come up lacking.
The realness of our human souls
exceed the characters I make,
the details of the outside world
no purple prose can imitate.
The details of the narrative
don't even match what's in my mind,
and what I think is paltry when
compared to our real space and time.
Because, of course, the narrative
was never even close to real,
it's just a tool we created,
it's a thing we've made up to deal
with a world that our mind can't grasp
in its massive entirety,
narrative is just our filter
because there's too much truth to see.
To make it something we can know
we cut out most of what's out there,
the endless details of chaos
that make the smartest minds despair.
I think all should remember that,
all of our ideologies
are narratives, and thus too small
to deal with the reality.
To forget that, to cling to them,
as if in them all was explained
reduces us, and blinds us too,
and that's before it brings the pain.

And it always does…