The Talking Skull

And other stories from outside The Wall.

Listen, listen. Here is a tale.

Once upon a time, in the old part of the world, back when kings and queens still ruled the land, a poor peasant was walking through the tall grass when he happened upon a skull—long since stripped of its flesh, bleached to pottery by the relentless sun.

“Good day to you,” said the old skull to the peasant.

The peasant took fright and nearly jumped out of his sandals. “Have mercy!” said he. “No skull should speak!”

“Just the same, good day to you,” said the old skull.

“Old skull, what brought you here?” said the peasant.

“Talking brought me here,” said the old skull.

Once the peasant had gotten over his shock, he thought, O ho, I have made my fortune now. I will bring this wonder to the sovereign and he will reward me handsomely.

“Come along, skull,” said the peasant, and bundled the skull up in his cloak.

“Careful,” said the old skull.

The peasant brought the skull to the palace where the sovereign lived. He spent all morning pleading and cajoling the guards—yes, yes sirs, a great wonder, a miracle, a spectacular sight such as the sovereign has never seen—and was finally granted entry to the throne room, where the sovereign spent his days handling the affairs of the kingdom.

“Step forward, peasant,” said the sovereign. “The guards tell us that you have been pestering them all morning, that you have brought a wonder which cannot wait. Produce your miracle. And quickly, for we are pressed on all sides by matters of state.”

The peasant swallowed, and bowed low to the floor. “Your Graciousness, mightiest of sovereigns, ruler of the known world, most beneficent—”

“Quickly,” intoned the sovereign.

The peasant swallowed and bowed again. “Certainly, Your Grace.” He reached into his cloak, and with a flourish, pulled the skull out and held it high. “Behold! A talking skull.”

Laughter snuck through the crowds of courtiers who stood around the throne room.

The sovereign frowned mightily. “Do you mock us?”

The peasant quavered. “Your Grace, by no means, just this morning, I swear upon my life—”

“Upon your life, indeed,” rumbled the sovereign. “If this dusty old bone does not speak, you will have all eternity to speak with it yourself in the Realms Beyond.”

Taking a deep breath, the peasant asked, “Skull, what brought you here?”

The skull gave no reply.

“Speak, skull!” said the peasant, trembling.

The skull stayed silent.

“Skull! I command you to speak!”

The skull said nothing.

Murmurs of anticipation rolled through the room. The sovereign sat like a stormcloud on a vast horizon.

“Skull, please, don’t be shy, in the name of all the gods, just as you did this morning, upon my life,” whispered the peasant urgently.

“Seize him,” thundered the sovereign.

As the sun set that evening, darkening the tall grass, the old skull sat upon the ground once more, with the bloody head of the peasant, bodiless, sitting beside it.

“What brought you here?” asked the old skull.

“Talking brought me here,” sighed the dead peasant’s head.

---

As I learned it, this story first came from central Africa, back before Africa had been invented. Who can say how far it traveled before it arrived there. Talking about the origins of a story like this is futile; it simply is, and has been, since the time before time. The central motif is extremely durable: the miraculous-talking-something-refusing-to-speak has been exported and transformed (often without the decapitation) into all sorts of children’s stories and jocular tales. It’s been with us for a long time.

It’s one of my favorites. Like any great story, it’s bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. And it’s a perfect contrast to the Big Story—the metanarrative that I’ve been teasing apart in this essay series. But we’ll get on to that in a minute.

In Part 1, I referenced Paul Kingsnorth’s quote about the need for “myth work”: the fundamental brokenness of the stories that shape our reality, and the urgency of repairing them with something more durable. I’m constantly struck by the number of people who think that we’re already doing exactly this—getting new stories, better stories, all the time churning out more stories, and fighting hard against Those Other People for the stories that we deserve. The reality is that there’s only one team on the field; they’ve been squabbling for a very long time over who gets to kick the same ball between the same goalposts, again, and what color everybody’s jerseys should be—but none of that frantic activity is actually advancing the game in any meaningful way. This is the Big Story: the metanarrative about how power works in our reality, which gets glossed and repainted and reinterpreted while still maintaining its essential function.

Part 2 was about defining the form and function of the Big Story. It’s recognizable in any children’s story for the past, lord, fifty years at least: the Good People fight the Bad People for the right to rule over the world within the (figurative or literal) Wall. This perpetual struggle is what necessitates power and violence within a closed system: without it, The Wall falls down, and we’re left to fend for ourselves in the wilderness, which is always a shrieking nightmare. So the story goes, anyway.

The world outside The Wall. AI-generated image, via DALL-E

I took a quick break to dig up everybody’s favorite cultural casualty from the past decade (Game of Thrones) and now I’m ready to think about how we move beyond the same old metanarrative—because, as described above, it’s fundamentally broken. Without that framing device for who we are and how the world works, things get very scary very quickly. But there are other alternatives.

I’m sure Kingsnorth has his own ideas about the source of that brokenness. For my money, the fatal flaw in the Big Story is this: a story about totalizing control can’t function in a world that refuses to be dominated.

At a civilizational level, the Big Story was a debt that would eventually be called. We borrowed heavily against it for centuries: let us build The Wall and put the Good People in charge of things. The more control you give us, the happier you’ll be. Eventually. Sacrifices will be expected, of course. But stick with the program, buckle down and do your bit, and you’ll get everything you want: a harem of housewives, a rocket ride to the moon, an endless menu of well-accessorized personal identities—whatever you want. And if you don’t make it, well, definitely your kids will. Just give us the keys. Let the Good People control the world.

So we did.

We’ve run out of superlatives for describing our technological development in the past five hundred years. We can do things that would absolutely cripple the imaginations of people from just a few generations ago. “We” tamed the wilderness, closed the frontier, left nothing on the planet outside of our dominion. The few remaining wildernesses are still wild because “we” magnanimously permit it. The uncontacted tribes still left in the jungle exist in little Edens that we’ve fenced off for them. (Provided they don’t make too much noise about resource extraction. Otherwise—clack-clack—maybe they weren’t so special after all.)

We run the world.

And yet—and yet—we’re still facing down roiling global instability from climate change and political malfunction. We’re still confronting the possibility of total systemic failure across huge swaths of the world. Collapsing ecosystems are almost guaranteed. “I hope the planet continues to be habitable for another hundred years” is a sentence you can now say out loud, at a party—not even a weird party, just a regular old cheese-and-crackers party—and have people nod earnestly along with you.

Any of the good stuff we were promised for sticking with the program now comes with an asterisk the size of a sea mine next to it: in the coming century, you can (theoretically) still have a shot at the space vacation and the cancer cure and the limitless renewable energy, as long as you are extremely goddamn lucky. Not even rich, anymore! A private bunker might buy you a little time, but only so long as your aquifer doesn’t dry up—as long as your private security team doesn’t start running the numbers on your noblesse oblige.

This all sounds very doomy if you think that this is the only way the world can be. And I am emphatically not a scientist of any kind. These are not data-driven predictions. There’s a good chance that control will be maintained or re-asserted, and the whole enterprise will find a way to chug along.

However. I think it’s fair to say that—for a large and growing number of people—the Big Story about controlling the world has become narratively unsustainable. That is terrifying when left unmanaged. Hence the need for that myth work, the job of digging down into the strata of stories and setting new foundations.

The Curse of Alexander, original.

There’s a pedantic-but-significant distinction between control and influence.

Control is a binary: you either have it or you don’t. Control operates within a closed system. When you’re living in a reality that’s based on control, the loss of it is terrifying: the only alternative is outwardly-spiraling entropy, the vacuum of space. It makes people desperate and crazy. Somebody needs to be in control! We need to make sure somebody’s still in control!

It’s not that closed systems aren’t real: it’s just that—at scales of increasing organizational complexity—people tend to overestimate (often by design) how closed a given system is, and what the limits of control actually are.

By contrast, if you’re operating within an open system, where control is impossible—too many variables and competing outcomes to manage—then what you’re really looking for is influence. Influence is situational; it functions by degrees of “more” or “less,” and can be tactically deployed by anybody who understands the variables at play in a given situation.

You can’t control the weather. If it rains while you’re outside (in an open system, versus indoors, in a closed system) can you control whether or not you get wet? Not really. There are too many variables to manage: where you are, who you’re with, what gear you have, what the landscape is like, how much rain is falling, how windy it is, and so on. Chances are, you’re going to get wet; it just depends how wet—whether your cuffs get damp, or whether you get soaked to the bone. Again, this might be pedantic. But being well-equipped, adaptable, and resourceful seems more like influencing the outcome (how wet) rather than relying on control in an environment that flatly does not answer to you.

We need to scale that thinking up, because the evidence is increasingly showing that, despite centuries of assurances, the world is not a closed system. Never was, never will be. Any promises based on that assumption are lies and fantasies. We built a lot of walls—created a lot of closed systems, all around the world—and they were always, always, always built to fail, because you can’t maintain control in an open system forever. Bad enough to build a bunch of independent closed systems that can fail sequentially; even worse to build an array of interdependent closed systems, which will produce cascading failures if one breaks down. (Insert obligatory Titanic reference here.)

So, hey, looks like we’ll be living outside The Wall after all, sooner or later. And if we continue telling ourselves that the Big Story is the only story—in an open system, where nobody’s in charge for long because control isn’t possible—it’s going to get dark real quick.

The good news is that we can start doing that imaginative work now. We can start experimenting with narratives that are built around influence in an uncontrollable world. In fact, we’ve already started: those stories have been around for thousands of years. We just stopped telling them.

The story I opened with isn’t exactly a happy one. But it does point toward the world outside of the closed systems we’ve created. The man in the story is killed when he tries to bring something from the Otherworld inside the confines of The Wall, to exploit it for mundane purposes by exercising control over it. That was a choice he made. It’s a cautionary tale, from that point of view: keep your mouth shut. Don’t try to scheme above your station. Don’t grasp at control when influence would serve you better. And don’t fuck around with otherworldly creatures.

On a level above that—what happens to the story if the protagonist chooses something different? Doesn’t go inside the wall? Instead of trying to turn the talking skull into a curiosity, what does it tell him if he listens to it? What would something from outside our reality tell us—metaphorically or literally—about how to maintain our influence in a chaotic world, without losing our heads?

These are the kinds of stories that people told for a very, very, very long time, because it corresponded to the world they inhabited. Talking skulls might not be real (depends on who you believe) but there are plenty of ways of knowing and relating to things that simply aren’t relevant in the closed systems we’ve created. Those stories point back in that direction—toward the world we used to live in, away from the one we’re scared to leave behind.

If nothing else, those old stories are reassuring because they tell us that the metanarrative we’ve been living in doesn’t describe the entire world. There’s still another world out there. We’ve got somewhere to go when this one breaks down. We already know how to live in that world, too; we just need to remember how, and those stories are there to remind us.

More than that—stories are liminal spaces that can be simultaneously real and not-real. Everybody accepts that as a truism. But we’ve given up the true power of that capability in favor of stories-as-diversion. Having the power to create something between reality and unreality is magic, full stop. The unreal can shape the real. And if we only ever use that power to reinforce the Big Story, over and over and over again, then we’ll have nothing left when it eventually falls apart. Better to live within the world as it currently exists, and start telling stories about the one that comes next. Just to see what happens.

Anyway. I think that does it for this series, finally. I’ve got some ideas about how the genres of magical realism and solarpunk fit neatly into the framework of cultivating influence in an open system, which is the work that I’m primarily interested in as a storyteller. More on that coming soon.

In the meantime, I’m going looking for a skull to talk with.

Thanks for reading.