The charm is in the telling

by Sylvie Shaw

A story can lead anywhere. We tell it. Write it. Film it. Musicalise it. Consume it. We embed a story's narrative into our own narrative. We tell and retell ourselves to others, extending the narrative of self with other.

Walking to work today, something grey in the distance caught my eye. I got closer and my heart sank. Lying in the middle of the pavement was an owl, a tawny frogmouth to give the bird its proper name. It looked so peaceful. It was lying on its back, its feet in the air and not a feather out of place. It was dead - but there was no sign of what it had died from. Only one whitish eye gave any indication of what could have happened. 

Whenever I see a roadkill I take the animal off the road and place it under a tree, covering the body with leaves and reverence. I gently cradled the tawny owl, carried it to the nearest quiet place and covered the body with earth, sticks and leaves, said a silent prayer for the journey and continued walking, reflecting, saddened.

Possum, lizard or cockatoo, magpie, crow or snake, I lift the creature off the road so they can have some kind of dignity in death. But one day I made a mistake. A black snake lay in the middle of the road. Blood was oozing from a wound in its head. I decided to shift it to a safer place. In the middle of moving it, the snake woke up. Gingerly I moved it under a tree, and slowly backed away.

I would have liked to tell the story to you personally. it's not a written story but one that grows with the telling. I wanted to share this story face to face and watch and listen to the way you responded. Story telling is a two way process between teller and listener and that is its charm. The listener takes the threads of the story and reframes the telling internally. Then they spread the story to others, widening the narrative and embedding their own narrative within the original tale. 

Stories are about relationship. The relationship between teller and the imaginative creation of the listener in receiving that story. There are stories we remember as tender or as frightening. Then there are stories we choose to forget. Stories become experience, become memories, become our lives. Some we pave over.

Philosopher David Abram (2014) tells the story (in writing) of the way writing displaced the story of nature. We know we are part of nature but within a western or most-modern worldview, humans tend to see themselves as distant or apart from the natural world that sustains us. Perhaps one reason for this separation is in the telling. Abram writes that as writing became a mode of story transmission, stories became displaced, dislocated, 'stripped off of the particular sites where they are believed to have occurred, and...planted on the page of the book'. He writes:

'... the ink's traces made by the pen as it moves across the page begin to replace the tracks made by the animals and by one's animal ancestors as they moved across the land so that the page now becomes the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger for remembering the linguistic information. And, the land begins to seem superfluous. It's no longer necessary to the act of thinking. You no longer need to see those cliffs, and these mountainsides, and these kinds of trees, to remember clearly the stories that form the whole matrix of your thinking awareness. The stories now, in books, can be carried elsewhere. They can be read in distant cities, on distant continents, and they're read by people who read about these curious stories, these folk tales and fairy tales.... So, it's quite a dramatic change in our felt experience of the more than human natural landscape once we step into a regime of writing.' 

Noting this gap between orality and writing, Walter Ong (1984:2) points out (or warms?) that we [does he mean all humans?} are 'so literate [in the modern world] that it is difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe'. What have we lost in the transformation of story to writing, print and electronic media or what Ong calls a 'second orality'?

Perhaps the loss is experienced in relationship to the sacred. Ong notes the 'interiorizing force of the oral world which relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence' (72). The language of the sacred, of scriptures and other sacred texts are honoured and are powerful. Using oral modes of telling and honouring, they move whole populations, communities and individuals. Ong states that such texts 'authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways' (73). Words, spoken words have power. We must take heed and take care.

Ong stresses that losing the sense of intimacy of face to face story telling and listening has not, diluted the strength of orality. In fact it continues to uphold the place of story and narrative, teller and receiver, within the wider realm of sacred scriptures. Referring to the biblical narrative, Ong cites Letters to the Romans (10:17): 'Faith comes through hearing', and a passage from Corinthians (2:3:6): The letter kills. The spirit [breath on which rides the spoken word] gives life'. How is that word played out in practice?

Indigenous people still know and tell the stories embedded in land and place. They sing, ritualise and dance these places, keeping the spirit of the land and the land-people-ancestor relationship alive. Western and other most-modern cultures pave over places, memories and dreams, often without realising, understanding or feeling the presence of place or being able to hear the stories framed by country and intimacy.

In the process, Indigenous people's voices and memories and their experiences over generations have been disavowed. But they still surface, are told and retold, sung and danced and sung and danced again. In the fading light, the dancers feet in the earth stir up a film of dust that spreads across the land - the spirit of the wind, breath and voice combine to spread the stories of nature and peoples like fertile seeds to be planted into a flourishing world.

References

Abram D. 2014. The spell of literacy. http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm#Writing_Displaces_Nature:_

Ong W. 1984. Orality and literacy. London and New York: Routledge.

Image source

Fantasy, landscape, mountains, fields, road, clouds, http://pixabay.com/en/fantasy-landscape-mountains-fields-220092/