The stories we inherit about war and history don’t just describe conflict; they compress it into forms we can carry. That simplification is partly necessary—communication always trims reality to fit inside language—but it also steers us toward the kinds of situations those stories claim to explain. Myths of courage, sacrifice, and righteous struggle arise after the fact to make sense of suffering, yet the existence of those myths subtly prepares the ground for new cycles of the same.
What interests me now is how tightly narrative and experience coil around each other. War produces the trauma and memory that demand storytelling; the storytelling then becomes the cultural substrate from which the next generation draws its sense of danger, duty, purpose, and identity. We rarely notice how deeply this binds us to the events we narrate, or how the act of retelling gives them a kind of recursive momentum. In trying to explain why terrible things happened, we sometimes replicate the patterns that lead us back into them.
Daedelus Kite 