A Fairy Tale, by Herzog - a MOLECULE story for Fairy Tale Friday, 5th September 2014

"Once Upon a Time" strikes me as a trite and staid way to begin my story. My stories are my babies, each one I care for in my own unique idiom, and depending on what they as individual word-sprites require. Must I be compelled to blindly imitate the fashion of countless generations of storytellers before me, who have chosen this prosaic, comfortable inaugural phrase? That should be like myself taking a new-born babe and swaddling it in suffocating rolls of narrative cloth, then hanging it on the wall by the fire because that is what the dull, unevolved savages have done before me in the name of that sickening sepulchral spectre known as "tradition". How I cannot stand that word. It conjures up all manner of fearful, small-minded obedience to some ancient, groundless idiocy. It is the enemy of inspiration, and progression, and growth. When I point a camera at something, I wish for the image to spill out from the margins and infect my audience, blurring the line between what is real and what is false. Indeed where I am concerned, there is no false. There is only real. Tradition is a barricade of falsehoods. "Once upon a time" is a keystone of an arch of lies, once used to gently encourage the wide-eyed, god-fearing hoards to seek an audience with that most deeply mistrusted of creatures, the Truth. It has no place in a society which is scrabbling towards enlightenment, which needs truth more than ever. Now it is but a distraction, a gauche, comically incongruous jester perched upon the shoulder of the sainted storyteller, making a mockery of all he strives to create. It is a cancer. It pervades the lower class of writer absolutely. And it is, ultimately, death.

Nevertheless.

I have been tasked with penning a "fairy tale", and by its very nature, caustic though it is, this mode of storytelling requires those four words to let the audience know, to put it crudely, "what I’m driving at". So in this instance I concede defeat. Just do not expect me to patronise you with a jaunty, bile-inducing "and they lived happily ever after" at the close of this jaundiced enterprise. If you are lucky, and you will be, I shall favour you with a sharp, functional, "The End". But even that I do against my better judgement. To me, stories have no end. The camera may cease rolling but the story continues until the players are mere bone fragments in a whirling void, then continues some more. Do not speak to me of endings, happy or otherwise. They are a cruel fallacy. A refuge for the unimaginative dullard struck dumb by the terrifying notion of oblivion. Now, without further musing on the more nauseating storytelling tenets of our age, I present to you, Herzog’s Fairy Tale. It is entitled, quite simply, "Peace":

Once upon a time.

There was a molecule.

And all around was dark.

The End.



I thank you.

Your obedient friend,

Werner Herzog

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