It is perhaps a bit of a conceit, but I don’t like posting anything on this blog that doesn’t feel timeless. This does not mean ahistorical. In fact, timeless to me means acutely historical. The epics for example, are stories about very specific historical periods and events. They are timeless because of their immortal relevance, not because they are exercises in abstract thought ungrounded in time. Mathematics is timeless because we keep finding currently relevant properties of numbers in every era. Purely abstract ideas divorced from time are often the most transient and empty ideas of all.

History is, in a way, a test of the timelessness of the DNA of current events. To generalize Benjamin Graham’s idea about markets, in the short run, history is a voting machine, in the long run, it’s a weighing machine. And almost everything I think about these days feels very much situated in time in a… very lightweight way. Lots of votes for everything, but very little weight to anything.

It certainly feels like there are typical kinds of historic things going on, but it is hard to talk about them in an appropriately timeless way. The upcoming US elections smell historically significant, as does Musk’s messy takeover of Twitter. But it’s not obvious what the underlying historic big story is. One I’m playing around with is that we are at the tail-end of an up-cycle in de facto monarchism that began with the charismatic presidency of Ronald Reagan, and the charismatic CEO-ship of Jack Welch. In this view, the timeless thing going on is Trump, Musk, Xi, and Putin bringing up the rear of a half-century flirtation with monarchist social orders built around political cults of personality and billionaires, and that we’re heading into an anti-monarchist half-cycle.

Or perhaps the monarchist cycle is beginning rather than ending. I could argue either case. That’s the problem. There is no compelling reason to buy any particular attempt to historicize current events into timelessness through appropriate kinds of frame stories. When every half-assed story sorta fits, none of them actually works.

It’s this very insubstantiality of historical speculation that makes me feel like we are living in a not-very-timeless time. Every just-so story like my two alternate monarchist-cycle theories feels sort of arbitrarily made up. And I could make up a dozen more invoking various obviously important things — climate, AI, crypto, the end of Moore’s Law, gender culture, and so on — that would pass a basic sniff test but wouldn’t be deeply compelling. We are in the sort of era that’s easy to forget in longue durée history writing. It’s an interregnum. A liminal passage full of sound and fury signifying nothing. And we’re all ghosts for the time being, looking for identity-anchoring structure in circumstances where there’s only the clutter of chaotic transition.

A darker thought I’ve had is that perhaps the sense of timelessness is harder to find because we are, in fact, running out of time, and that our mortal civilization is ending. Not just in a Fukuyama end-of-history way, but literally.

A funny related notion I’ve been toying with is that we are drowning in a sea of reboots, reruns, and recycled stories on television and movie screens for the same reason dying people supposedly see their lives flash before their eyes. The story is ending. Despite living through arguably the greatest era of storytelling technology in history, we have no new stories to tell ourselves.

Now this is not entirely true. I’ve found the occasional fresh new story. Station 11 is an example, a lovely recent TV show, but rather tellingly, set in a post-apocalyptic world where for some reason the survivors perform budget Shakespeare reboot productions in a slightly nicer Mad Max world (really? the world ended and Shakespeare is still the source of the most interesting stories you can tell yourself?). And there are formal innovations too. I suspect the metamodern turn I wrote about last time has at least a little substance (though the latest Taika Waititi Thor movie is a big disappointment). But it feels like too little, too late.

So overall, I can’t shake this sense that the difficulty we face telling fresh new stories, about both real and fictional events, is a sign of the End Times.

I’m fairly certain this sense is entirely wrong. There are big problems in the world, but not world-ending ones. Even in the worst-case climate futures, we are not talking about the world ending. We are talking about a very tight evolutionary bottleneck which might lead to severe depopulation and de-complexification (though not back to stone age primitivism). The fraught political events are well within the historical range.

But definitely, something is going on that has temporarily shut down our ability to access a sense of the timeless in order to construct stable notions of ourselves in relation to it. For the time being, we seem to be eternity blind, unable to see past the sound and fury of reboots and reruns of our collective memories.

I’ve been reviewing my own experiments with fiction (the stand-alone ones are on a separate fiction blogchain) to try and understand what makes an idea for a story tellable. I got to thinking about it because I was recently asked whether writing was a “particularly fluent” experience for me. The answer is: with nonfiction it definitely is, but with fiction, it isn’t. At least not yet.

I think it’s because “tellability” of stories is a more complex phenomenon that takes longer to turn into muscle memory where it feels like a fluency. Fiction fluency is to non-fiction fluency as riding a unicycle is to riding a bicycle. Developing this fluency, so I can go from idea to story in one sitting, with little to no metacognitive overhead, is kinda what I’m aiming at for now. I don’t really care about whether the stories are “good” as such, or meet other people’s formal notions of what a story ought to be. I just want to develop a fluency in “telling” so I can log the big wordcounts easily, while enjoying myself doing so. I want to learn to balance and ride the unicycle, and worry about getting somewhere later.

It’s not a point I’ve seen addressed in any of the storytelling material I’ve read so far, perhaps because it’s so obvious to people with natural fiction fluency. A story gets told if it is worth telling to the would-be teller, and is tellable. Just as an essay gets written if it is essayworthy to the would-be essayist, and essayable. It’s like whether a flight plan gets flown. The flight plan has to be tripworthy it for the pilot to do the actual flying, and the plane has to be flyable. Skill matters only after these two conditions are met, and the second one is the more basic one. Even a skilled pilot can’t make a bus fly. Not even if you put a gun to his head to make it worthwhile.

Tellability is not about whether the story is good or bad. It is about whether the storyteller can literally sit down and (almost unconsciously) work out how to tell it at all. In whatever medium — screen/stage, comicbook, live oral performance, or prose. Skill is usually medium-specific, but tellability is a property of the story idea. If a story idea lacks tellability, the story won’t get told. As with essays, there can always be major edits and surgeries later, and first-dump drafts might get abandoned. But the point is, the basic story idea has to be worth telling and be tellable in order to get told.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.