Planning a novel – 2

2. Remembering the Real

The idea that we “remember” meaning rather than invent it might sound mystical — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue.

We’re taught that we are born as blank slates, and that everything we come to know is learned from experience. I think most people just accept that as a fact, and don’t really think about it.

And yet we all know it isn’t true of any other animal.

Salmon don’t need to be taught to swim upstream by their elders. Wolves raised in isolation will still howl at the moon. These aren’t learned behaviours — they’re remembered, etched into instinct.

But when it comes to humans, the idea of instinct is treated almost like a taboo — as if we’ve evolved beyond such primitive programming. If you surveyed every known culture in history, though, you’d find any number of strikingly universal behaviours. Behaviours that are, for all practical purposes, innate:

Smiling. Dance. Play.
Ritual. Laughter. Story.

And those stories, as we will see, tend to have a lot in common.

There are some things that, for all intents and purposes, human beings are simply born knowing. Evolved to understand, is another way to see it.

Plato believed this. As Jordan Peterson puts it, he suggested that all knowledge is, in a sense, remembering — a glimpse, after birth, of something we already knew in a prior state. The examples Plato gave were abstract, but resonant: Beauty. Truth. Goodness.

You don’t have to be taught that truth is better than a lie. Or that beauty is preferable to ugliness. Or that goodness is desirable in a way evil is not.

Of course, our individual definitions of “beautiful” or “good” differ across time and culture. But that’s not the point. The point is that we know there is such a thing as Beauty. That there is some kind of ranking system on which we may judge how something presents itself to us, and that we recognize it before we can explain it.

Anyone can tell you that Chartres Cathedral is beautiful. Very few can tell you why. Most people find 1960s car parks ugly, and similarly struggle to explain what causes that reaction. The reaction comes long before they can think about it or rationalize it.

It’s the same with Goodness. With Truth. These aren’t just preferences: they seem to represent a reality deeper than our opinions: something that we as humans seem to have some sort of a relationship with. We can think of them as properties of Being itself.

Plato called these properties Forms — perfect patterns that exist beyond the material world. We live among their shadows. His famous Allegory of the Cave illustrates it best: prisoners, chained to face a wall, can see only the shadows of real objects passing behind them. They mistake the shadows for reality, because they’ve never seen the source.

Every now and then, one of them escapes the cave and sees the real world outside. But when he returns, he has no language for what he’s seen. Our entire vocabulary is built around shadows, and we simply lack the words to express the truth of the forms, if we ever managed to perceive them.

True beauty — if we are ever lucky enough to see it — leaves us speechless.

But some live in hope that we’ll apprehend these things fully, one day.

As Saint Paul, no stranger to Greek philosophy, writes:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.
Now I know in part; then shall I know, even as also I am known.”

Make it Beautiful – Akira the Don & Jordan Peterson

I was in this museum a while back, it was full of these paintings from the late Renaissance, there was like a dozen of them. Every painting on that wall was worth $300 million, like, minimum. You couldn’t buy those paintings. There was like a dozen of them in there, I thought “wow, there’s like $3.6 billion worth of paintings in this room, and people are making pilgrimages from all over the world just to look at them. What the hell’s going on?”

 

Yeah, no kidding. What the hell is going on? There is Beauty in those paintings. There’s Beauty and it’s magnificent. And part of what it does is say “You aren’t who you should be”. – Jordan Peterson.

In this view, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are not arbitrary ideals. They are portals into a transcendent realm — ruptures in the flat surface of the world, through which something greater breaks through.

Materialists — like the me of 2020 — can argue that a flower is beautiful because our ancestors were drawn to healthy plants. That moral instincts arose from group survival. That “truth” is simply whatever helps us predict and control. But that’s just hand-waving the problem away. It’s a “just-so” story.

You can try to explain why Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma moves us because it reminds us of the maternal voice in the womb, if you like — but I just don’t believe you. It seems more beautiful than any random song on the radio — but why? On what metric?

The truth is, I don’t know, and I don’t believe anyone else does, either.

But I know how I experience it. To me, it feels like Pavarotti, Puccini, and everyone involved were reaching — across time — to imitate some abstract idea of perfection they all knew from… somewhere else.

Does anyone really believe that the experience of standing before Starry Night, or looking up at Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, is just a reaction to some evolutionarily useful stimulus our ancestors once used to gather berries?

That might even be true in a narrow, mechanistic sense. But I simply don’t believe that’s all that’s going on.

It feels like something else is reaching through. Not just neurons firing, but the very kind of recognition Plato was talking about — as if, like on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the finger of the divine is stretching toward us… and something in us is stretching back.

In 2020, I would have been desperate to dismiss that. Because I knew, somehow, that if I let that door stay open — even a crack — a hundred other awkward questions would come flooding through. Like Pandora’s box, once you lift the lid on the idea that the universe is more than dead matter — that it thrums with meaning — you can’t put it all back again.

Platonic Forms aren’t the only things we know in our bones.

The woman in my imagined story understood something I was only just beginning to come to terms with — that to speak to someone’s soul, you have to tell them a story. Because stories are the language of the Forms.

Carl Jung called the Forms that live inside stories archetypes — patterns we recognize the same way we recognize Truth itself. But where Plato’s Forms describe the outer world, Jung’s describe the inner one: the moral world, the spiritual world.

Stories, Jung believed, teach us how to live in the world by showing us the patterns that we exist inside.

The patterns we encounter in myth and dream are a bridge between the transcendental Forms of Plato and the daily world we inhabit.

The woman in my story, whose name I had by now decided was Nass — Nassurellaya — understood this. She lived in a world inhabited by divine powers and magic. Everything that happened to her was imbued with meaning, which she interpreted through analogy with the stories she knew of her gods:

• Shisora (Meaning), the goddess who wove the world’s history from the threads of our choices.

• Imta (Memory), her daughter, who retained the knowledge of all things ever done.

• Akallaya (Light), who discerned truth from falsehood.

• And Shesun, king of all, who ordered everything toward the Good.

Delevin, the man, lived in exactly the same world, but saw no gods, no magic. Everything he encountered had a rational explanation. He was trained, like I had been, to dismiss anything that didn’t fit the materialist frame.

They were at an impasse. This was, in a sense, the central conflict of the novel: a struggle for worldview.

Nass knew there was one thing they still had in common — one thing that might open the door.

Story.

3. Archetypes and the Deep Grammar

All the best stories feel familiar.

It doesn’t matter whether they are from ancient myth, modern cinema, or dream logic. Somehow, I already know how they go:

The wizard who guides the hero.
The wise king who falls.
The journey into the underworld.
Temptation.
Sacrifice.
The Return.

These patterns weren’t invented by Hollywood. They are older than history. The oldest stories we know: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Genesis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, traditional Fairy Tales, Beowulf: they are all packed with motifs that recur over and over again. The Lion King is the same story as Hamlet. And Hamlet is the same story as the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Horus: the imposter King, the rightful prince who must decide.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, called these patterns archetypes — primordial images that live in what he called the collective unconscious of humanity. Folk memory, shared experience.

These are not learned symbols. Jung found that patients dreamed of symbols that recurred throughout the mythologies of ancient people, even though they had no conscious knowledge of such things. They just knew them, in their bones. They “remembered” them, from somewhere.

We see the archetypes in every culture, every tradition, every mythic structure. They’re in our stories, our dreams and nightmares. You don’t have to teach a child what the “mentor” is. They just know: he’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. Dumbledore. Gandalf. Mufasa. These characters are all the same thing. It doesn’t matter what form he takes — we recognize the archetype immediately.

Every advertiser and propagandist knows about the archetypes, and they use them to influence you, whether you believe in such things or not. They know that the archetypes speak deeply to us, and that we understand them even if we couldn’t explain them in words. They are pre-rational, just like our perception of beauty.

We all know that to be a hero we have to go out and fight the dragon. And that in doing that, you save the world. Even if we can’t explain it in words, we also intuitively understand what that means.

Kill the Dragon, Save the World – Akira the Don & Joseph Campbell

This is not coincidence. This is structure.

Joseph Campbell, building on Jung, called this patterning across all the stories the monomyth — the “hero’s journey” that underlies every major myth and story. Not because everyone copied one another, but because we’re all playing out the same psychological-spiritual drama in different costumes. Campbell mapped it: the call to adventure, the refusal, the crossing of the threshold, the trials, the mentor, the abyss, the return.

When George Lucas wrote Star Wars, he didn’t just follow that map — he used it deliberately. He designed Luke’s journey around the monomyth. And it worked. The story exploded into cultural consciousness because it spoke to something already living inside us. Not just excitement — but, to quote a phrase, underlying meaning.

To reach our full potential we need to learn what others (Obi-Wan, Yoda) have learned before us, but to go beyond it – to go into the heart of the darkness (Death Star) and confront our nemesis. In so doing, we become the salvation of our father (Anakin) and restore the link between past and present, bring harmony back to the universe.

What Jung and Campbell pointed to is what I’ve come to think of as deep grammar — a kind of hidden syntax beneath not just story, but consciousness itself. A language made not of words but of patterns, roles, movements, and motifs. It’s how the soul speaks the language of meaning.

Nass in my novel understood that. She could not explain the mission that they were on with formulae or data.

The only way to express it was through a story. Because, for her, story wasn’t metaphor. It was map.

The man, Delevin, wasn’t ready to hear it. Like me, he had been trained to treat stories as illusions, frivolous pieces of entertainment. But we have to grapple with the possibility that stories are more than that. That they are a mechanism for directing one of the most fundamental of forces in the cosmos: human attention.

What Nass understood and Delevin didn’t was that they were both living in their own monomyths. They were characters in each other’s hero journey, their “soul’s high adventures” that if successful would redeem their worlds.

In the final sections we’ll get a bit more esoteric as we consider magic in that world and in this: the “words beyond words” that enable communication with those aspects of the world that transcend our individual experience.