Storytelling and Community
By David
Sidwell
The breath of life,
The spirit of life,
The word of life,
If flies to you and you and you
Always the word.
Maori
Proverb
How could I ever
forget my father, goblin-like and fiery from the campfire?s glow, telling us
stories of my grandfather? He was so alive that evening. And we, huddled
together under blankets against the chill of the night, were never warmer.
Little did I know the gift my father was giving me that night. He gave us all
stories, sure, but he was also sharing something far more potent.
Storytelling is
one of the most ancient of the arts. For generations, this very democratic art
form has helped societies strengthen and form cultural bonds and has helped
people feel closer and more connected to each other. It can safely be said that
as long as societies have existed, storytelling has existed within them.
Without stories and storytelling, how else can a society discover and reinforce
the common bonds exist within its members?
Through the centuries, storytelling has been used to pass on traditions, community and cultural paradigms, and moral and ethical codes of conduct. In many instances, the telling of stories has been passed off as "entertainment," as it was with my father's campfire stories, but it is not difficult to see the significance they hold in our communities. Stories provide a golden thread of awareness in humans. They help us know, question, remember and understand. They help us realize how interdependent we are and how much we need each other to survive and be happy.
Noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."[i]
Those webs can be taken to be what we usually call culture. Storytelling helps us understand and explore these
webs and the many and myriad connections that ultimately make up our
communities. Not only that, storytelling also helps to create new communities
as paradigms, feelings and emotions are shared through personally experienced
narrative events or vicariously through fictional events.
Stories
themselves, when shared with audiences, are often signatures of cultures in
capsule form. They contain archetypes and standards for acceptable cultural
behavior. The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once maintained that
through the stories of a culture, that entire culture could be accessed and
interpreted in a meaningful way.[ii]
The storyteller gives her listeners such interpretation in subtle and
entertaining ways. Though this does not often happen deliberately or overtly,
the aims of the storyteller are to disseminate this important cultural
information and interpretation through channels that are more spiritual and
more subconscious than, for example, an anthropologist?s ethnographic
narrative. Valuable life ways, constantly threatened
by a quickly changing world, can be preserved through the telling of tales. As
we consider the positive ways characters in stories relate to events and people
in a story, these ways can be established or renewed. Of course, my father
probably wasn?t thinking all of this when he was telling stories around our
little campfire. But I think he knew, innately, that what he was doing was
important as well as fun.
Consider the story of Cinderella, for example. There is far more than an entertaining story that is being shared. There can certainly be a moral or morals—lessons for our lives should we choose to take and understand them. Themes surrounding human decency and kindness, true love, fortitude, and others can all be found between "Once upon a time..." and "happily ever after." These ethical codes remind us how we should behave. They are the commas and exclamation points that determine the grammar of culturally good behavior. But storytelling can go even deeper than these lessons.
When a group
engages in storytelling, a spirit of communitas ideally pervades the entire
group, regardless of the various backgrounds of each individual member. Communitas is a feeling of equality, a profundity of shared,
vital?and in a way spiritual?involvement that a group experiences in the
process of ritual or quasi-ritual activities. When communitas is present,
everyone feels welcome, everyone feels like they belong. Hierarchies and status
are left at the door for a little while in favor of total group solidarity.
Think of a wedding. If the President of the United States were present at your
wedding, would he be the most important person there? Of course not, YOU are!
It?s YOUR wedding! And while your wedding moves through the "We are gathered heres" and "I dos," the symbols of the wedding promote the cultural codes that we are all supposed to live by. The bride dressed in white may indicate purity, the ring, perhaps, a never-ending love between partners.
It is this spirit
of communitas that is the goal of the storyteller.
As a teller weaves
a tale, he becomes the most important person at that moment as his story
unfolds. With every hero?s action, conflict overcome, or personal reminiscence,
we are reminded of what is important to say, do, or prepare for in various
given circumstances. Our statuses are put on hold as ethical strands of
community behavior are woven into the tapestry of our verbal cultural
constructs. We willingly put our hierarchies aside to be entertained and taught.
All of these
rituals and activities have the common goal of reasserting shared paradigms and
celebrating the known and common social structures that exist around us.
Communitas is the most important step in bringing people together, and in a
world in which diversity and variety amongst our fellow community members are
becoming increasingly sought after, it is vital in helping to create
individuals who value themselves and others.
Not only are
cultural paradigms shared through storytelling, but personal and individual
interpretations of life and the moral and ethical codes that accompany these
interpretations are also shared. Thus society and individual are brought
together in a synergy of experience for both the teller and the audience.
It may seem complex
at first, but it is simply part of the magic of storytelling.
We should all want
to tell stories. It is tempting, perhaps, to leave it up to the new
storytelling professionals who travel the country, weave tales at festivals and
craft CDs and DVDs for our enjoyment. But we need to continue this age-old art
ourselves, create times and situations in which we know that stories will be
told. We can?t leave this important cultural task to just the artists. We have
to tell our own stories ourselves.
Our
personal stories are particularly important to us and to our communities. Our lives are made up of stories,
stored in our minds as memories and sensory images. As with anything that we do, sharing and giving is important
both to us and to those around us. Since life itself is a story that is
constantly unfolding, telling our own stories reminds us of where we have been
and where we may be going, both individually and as a society. As we think of
where we have been in our stories, we can begin to understand the patterns of
our past that have an influence on the way we behave in the present.
Discovering healthy and effective patterns also helps us maintain them in the
future. Likewise, as we discover unhealthy patterns and actions in our stories,
we can learn to avoid them in our lives.
Telling
our own stories also puts us in touch with the myths that surround us. The
fallacy of myths is that they are often taken to be untrue. ?That is just a
myth,? we might say. Whether a myth is ?true? or not is irrelevant to their
functions in terms of storytelling. It simply does not matter. Myths are our
ways of looking at the cosmos to understand how it works and how we relate to
all other things. Positive myths are healthy. They remind us that all the
things that we see around us are merely tips of extremely huge icebergs. We
remember our parents, siblings and friends, but we realize through telling
stories that they are complex and interesting individuals with a wealth of
feelings, histories, talents and shared experiences. To individuals who may
have few myths, or who may have negative myths, our beloved friends can to them
be mere icons walking around in a video game-like existence. The tip of the
iceberg is all that they can see.
"Why not simply write everything down?" Some might ask. "We have books that house our cultural codes—and they last a lot longer than a story. Stories can be forgotten." In response to such questions, it is good to remember Hamlet, that muddy skull in his hand, and his buddy, Horatio, at his side. Hamlet instinctively knows that now is not the time for writing. "Alas, poor Yorrick!," he moans, "I knew him Horatio!" As he describes the personality and antics of the court?s once-funny jester, Horatio is enraptured by Hamlet. This
is a story that he will not soon forget. This is information that is best given
orally. It is best told and remembered through story.
After
exchanging a few e-mails with me, Hank Kune, on a fact finding mission for the
Department of Transportation of the Netherlands, finally called me on the phone
from Europe. His English was perfect.
"We are knee deep in paperwork," he complained, "We keep sending memos to each other, thinking we're getting lots of things done, but these memos are all filed away and we never see them again. So what's the use?" A good question. When he finally came to Salt Lake City on his fact-finding tour in the U.S. to consult with me several weeks later, I had done some research.
"What are all of these memos about?" I asked him while he waded up to his knees in the Great Salt Lake, the only attraction he had really wanted to see while he was in Utah.
"Everything. Anything," he said. "The problem is, we have had these great successes, yes? Some people have done some great things, completed some wonderful projects and are good examples that we want everyone to know about." He paused, looking into the water. "But the memos just get filed away with everything else. Our filing cabinets are overflowing, but no one is really communicating."
"I used to think that writing things down made them more permanent," I told him. He laughed, deep and Dutch as if what I had said was a joke.
I
distinctly remember my grandfather. Before he passed away, I would visit him
nearly once a year at his house in San Francisco. We went fishing, took walks
in the neighborhood, and I enjoyed lazing around with him as he had his morning
coffee or smoked his many cigarettes. He would tell me stories about his life
when he was growing up: stories of the cars he had had, adventure stories,
stories of his life of youthful crime. I remember these stories vividly. They
have made a deep impact on me and have influenced me in many ways that have, at
times, surprised me. As he lay ill with emphysema for several years before he
finally died, he wrote down many of his stories, his pen racing the time bombs
that were his lungs. This is a sensible thing, writing things down. Once
written, it becomes ?permanent.? When I received his book of stories after his
death, I was delighted. I knew many of the stories already. Several were new to
me. I very nearly memorized the booklet. To this day, however, the stories that
were told me have had a much greater
impact on my life than those that were written. It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword.
This may be true, but sometimes the tongue is mightier than the pen.
Remembering
this, I told Hank Kune that some information is simply more effectively
communicated through speech than through writing. Living, evaporating speech is
our most potent form of communication. It is powerfully present even as it
vanishes. Such power is apt to remain in the mind and in the heart, if not in
the filing cabinet.
Why should spoken words be more potent than written ones? Just look at Hamlet's face! He is gazing at something that Horatio wants to see. Hamlet?s eyes are fixed toward the direction of the cemetery gate, but that is not what he is looking at. Horatio bends closer to see the vision his prince sees as Hamlet continues his story: ". . . He hath borne me on his back a thousand times . . ." Only through spoken words and living presence can Hamlet be so clear. Horatio gazes at Hamlet's image, envisions a younger, laughing prince upon the back of a motley goofball of a man and then he glances back at Hamlet again, whose face shows the love he once had for his friend at court whose skull now molders in his hands. Now Hamlet turns his attention to the skull itself. ". . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft . . ." Horatio notes the slight quiver in Hamlet's voice, he considers the pause between "kissed" and "I." He is only slightly startled to see a small tear begin its trek down Hamlet's cheek. This is communication! Horatio could not have gotten this in a memo or from a filing cabinet!
It
is this kind of communication that is so potent in our dialogues and also in
our communal communications!
Studying primary oral cultures—cultures that do not have writing nor can barely conceive of writing—is one way to see the awesome power oral language has the potential of delivering. Language historian Walter Ong has taken us great strides in understanding the methods of such cultures. In so doing, he also informs us about the power that resides in spoken words. Oral peoples have a completely different way of thinking and storing information. They actually can
remember, even word for word, a huge wealth of important information without
writing it down. These skills are lost as soon as spoken words become referents
to visual symbols written on a page.[iii] Still, there are elements of orality that still exist for us: "In all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives."[iv] As for written words, he asserts that they are "in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection."[v] But only if those written words somehow grope their way
out of the filing cabinet and into our community storytelling circles.
Of
the many elements Ong defines as belonging to an oral culture, at least two are
outstanding and universal to effective oral speech even in written-based
cultures: spoken words are often events unto themselves and oral speech can
carry great power. The great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky suggested that
to oral peoples, language is a mode of action. It is not simply a referent to
thought.[vi] Perhaps it is not surprising that the Hebrew term dabar means both word
and event.[vii] Oral speech is also power. Oral peoples generally, and perhaps universally, consider words (and hence speech) to have great power. Combing both event and power into a description of speech, and watching Hamlet breathe heavy on the images he relates, indicates that speaking is a powerful event. As we tell stories in our communities—our families, our workplaces, our circles of friends, our churches, and our neighborhoods—we can also tap into this power.
Perhaps this is why it is difficult for many of us to actually come out and say, for example, "I'm sorry" when one has transgressed. One actually has to be in the "sorry mode;" one must actually be in the act of being sorry as one says the words. In an altercation with my father once, I remember vividly the inability to say those two words. I wrote them down instead in a letter with a gift. Spoken words in the living presence of my father were simply too potent at that time for me. Likewise, saying "I love you" is oft times challenging. These words do not come easily in every situation, and when demanded in a relationship, the words carry great meaning and power. My wife would not stand for me to simply write love notes to her. She needs (okay—I need it too!) to hear it, to experience the event and power of love that comes with the speaking of it.
Is there a time for writing? Certainly. Ong suggests that without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations[viii] like computers and automobiles. Complex and detailed
instructions and information are often the times for writing, simply because
we, as a writing-based culture, do not have the capacity nor the techniques to
store and remember such information. Even stories that are told can be later
written, but a system must be in place for oral retrieval of such stories, or
they will simply add another meaningless inch to the pile of memos that are
already knee deep.
So
when is it time for speaking? When is telling a story a better choice than sending a memo? In classes and workshops I teach about storytelling, I have a saying that has become canon: "When you want to give information, write it down, but when you want to give images, tell a story." To motivate and inspire a community, images are a necessity. Storytelling is all about images!
Stories
are image producing. Any sensory event or object in a story is an image. Images
are things one sees, hears, feels (both tactile and emotionally), tastes,
smells or intuits. As such, they bring to the mind pictures or sensory feelings
that allow the listener to remember what is being said in a unique way that
goes beyond mere intellectual understanding. Simply knowing information may never lead to change, but
images can inspire. This is the difference between information and real
knowledge. Stories with their images can stimulate emotional responses that
motivate individuals to do things and to take action, leading us to the Hebrew
word dabar again. Once inspiration, motivation and action take place, the mind can later, when it needs to, make intellectual connections and begin the process of rational understanding. Storytelling guru Ruth Sawyer once said, "What the heart knows today, the head understands tomorrow."[ix]
How to tell a good story is a topic too big for discussion here, but since stories communicate images, the visualization of those images is important to mention. When Hamlet stares toward the cemetery gate and sees in his mind's eye himself on Yorrick's back, he is visualizing.
Simply put, the clearer the image in the mind of the teller, the
clearer the image the audience will receive. The mind is a wonderful thing, and by visualizing images completely, it is the first step in telling the body how to gesture, how one's face should react, how the words should come out. By clearly seeing himself gaily laughing on Yorrick's back, Hamlet's mind told his eyes to focus in a certain direction, told his face to react a specific way. Horatio, seeing Hamlet visualizing, was able to form an image in his own mind, too. Visualization—clear and complete—is by far the most important skill in storytelling.
So mix all of these elements together: images, personal sharing, communitas, ethical remembering, ritual, entertainment and more. That's quite a stew! It's one that is important to eat in a community setting. Dig in!
And
now, you can have your supper,
And
say your prayers,
And
go to bed.
Morning
is wiser than evening.
Russian Ritual Closing to Storytelling
End
Notes
