The Scattered Brain, part 3

*This is a parsing of an article that originally appeared in Storytelling World magazine in 1997

Version x.x.x 

Each new software package is incrementally defined as version x.x.x of an incomplete and never-finished idea-set.  Are we cracking the silly idea that a thing is made and maintains its shape immutably?  That meaning is constant? All things change.  All things are in some state of iteration, always shifting.  Set in stone?  It is the property of stone to diminish.  Organic?  Living?  If so, then growing and evolving.  We live between the last version and the next version. Storytellers have always known this. But the market place has a vested interest in keeping things unfinished in order to keep the customer.  "Keep the customers satisfied" becomes "dissatisfy the customers in order to satisfy them."  This is how Scheherazade survived: with perpetually unfinished stories. We are sold software and systems that are not ready and then charged for the more complete (but still unfinished) version, paying for the privilege of beta-testing someone else's product. While we rush ahead to get the latest version, all new and improved, we are littering our lives with all the old, obsolete versions.  Our lives are cluttered with the hard and soft wares we abandon on impulse as our scattered brains chase the latest hot item.  The more we neglect the past, the more we will be burdened by it. How did grandma get to be sick and alone in a wolf-infested woods, anyway?

Story Technology 

Stories, as technology, enhance memory and understanding.  Storytellers are a sensual, human medium.  Modern electronic media pretends to respond to its users, but is hopelessly remote and uninvolved.  The user who stays too long at the hearth of such media may suffer a kind of sensory deprivation.  The storyteller brings touch in the form of aural stroking and warmth in the form of being truly present.  Neuroscience now confirms what ancient voices have always known: storytelling is important emotive and cognitive technology.  Storytelling as true virtual reality, transfers experience while massaging the listener and influencing growth. 

Storytelling is re-minding the user at the center of the scattered brain; directing attention back to the primary and the near.  Storytellers are strengthening our ability to endure long, considered thinking: to listen, to reflect, to discern, and to feel deeply and knowingly. McLuhan and Powers continue: "There is no inevitability where there is a willingness to pay attention." 

Within our scattered brains we seek something, hungrily, in the bright distracting lights around us.  Yet we are perpetually dissatisfied. We are like Nasruddin searching in the sunlight for the gold coin he knows he lost in the dark. 

Clockwise 

So busy were we 

moving papers around the room 

we failed to see the East 

and the dawning of the day. 

So worried were we 

at the tallying of doom 

we failed to see the South 

and the brightening of the bay. 

So certain were we 

at the importance of our task 

we forgot to note the West 

and the fading of the light. 

So lost were we 

we forgot to ask 

 the sirens of the North 

the meaning of the night. 

Continues in Part 4

The Scattered Brain, part 2

*This is a parsing of an article that originally appeared in Storytelling World magazine in 1997

A Gentle Reminder 

I have just finished a story program for a family night at a local school.  The occasion is a combination of book fair and turn-off-the- tube week.  During the program I presented some cats cradle figures and used them to tell Jack & The Beanstalk (see Storytelling World vol. 2, no. 1, Winter/Spring 1993.)  Children come up to me, chiming the giant's refrain and asking how they can learn more about string figures.  Adults come up to me with a slightly different response.  For the children, this is new information.  For the adults, this is old information that was lost until they were reminded of it.  I will call these two responses: minding and reminding.

First of all, minding.  The telling experience brings a wealth of stimulation to the young listener in the form of images, rhythms, patterns, sequences, emotions, and ideas.  The aural stroking between real-time-and-place teller and real- time-and-place listener is something that our sciences have begun to verify as essential to brain growth in early childhood.  The recognition of this importance is bringing a new validation to the storytelling art in a culture obsessed with technology. 

4/18/97  AP-Washington - In a day of "talking about baby talk" and how brains grow, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton offered parents simple child-rearing advice: Songs and storytelling fire up infants' brainpower. 

When we tell stories to children we are truly minding them. 

Next, reminding.  Adult listeners at storytelling events are often surprised by the recognition that storytelling evokes.  Listeners tell us, "Gee, I haven't thought about that in ages..."  "I'd forgotten what it was like to..."  "I remember when..." and so on.  A wealth of dormant memories and experiences are invited up from the deep past to the surface of our present minds.  Such storytelling reminds us, literally re-minding: giving us back our minds.  It is as though we have lost cognizance of who we are amidst our scatter-brained lives. 

What's going on?  Why are people having little epiphanies in the company of storytellers?  I believe that there is something missing in our modern media saturation that the storytelling revival is providing us.  Something primary to who we are.  Something that our daily distraction has lead us away from. 

In a prophetic essay for Harper's in 1938, E. B. White wrote: 

"Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God.  Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound "effects" are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself.  Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere.  Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.  More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images - distant and concocted.  In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar than their originals." 

These days we are enchanted by the Elsewhere and attend to matters "distant and concocted" at every turning.  Admittedly, storytelling itself advertises the Elsewhere: "Once upon a time, long ago and far away." But there is a difference.  The medium is the message and the very medium of the told story carries a message distinct from other media. There is a different kind of Elsewhere being advertised by storytelling. We are urged to look away from that which distracts us to that which has become the most remote: the primary and the near. 

(continued in part 3)

The Scattered Brain, part 1

*This is a parsing of an article that originally appeared in Storytelling World magazine in 1997

The Scattered Brain 

by David Novak 

"I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies 

I saw boys, toys, electric irons and T.V.'s 

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare 

I had to cram so many things to store everything in there" 

David Bowie, Five Years 

I'm dreaming about a legless blind man when the radio alarm wakes me.  In the short time it takes me to crawl to the bureau to turn off the radio (an arrangement designed to get me out of bed) I hear the DeeJay tell me that 5% of men surveyed admitted to wearing women's underwear.  I drift to the kitchen to feed the cat and dog and pour the coffee and juice.  I go to the front door to collect the morning paper which informs me of the multimillion dollar judgement against O.J. and of an area magnet school which teaches children how to play the bagpipes.  By the time I step back inside, my son is awake and Darkwing Duck is "getting dangerous" on the TV.  I've been awake for less than 30 minutes and already I'm drowning in a sea of information, images and stories. 

The day is far from finished.  Everything is far from finished.  I feel like my life is in the hands of an insomniac channel-surfer: unfinished stories in constant collision with one another adding up to one story: life today. It is all so scatterbrained. I worry: what am I adding to the noise as a voice telling stories in the thick of all this? Who am I to enter the fight for everyone's attention?  What is the point of storytelling in the technologically determined culture of today? 

Exo-Brain 

Technology enhances us: clothes enhance skin, glasses enhance eyes, wheels enhance walking.  Such enhancements extend our physical bodies outward.  Our techno-bodies can "see," "hear," and "reach" farther than our bio-bodies.  We technologically express our bodies outward, forming an exoskeleton of clothing, cars, and houses.  Inasmuch as our communication media express images, ideas, and information, we express our minds outward too, forming an exo-brain.  The exo-brain is the scattered brain. 

In The Global Village (1989) Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers discuss the way technology affects cultural change.  New technology, they suggest, begins as a distinct figure set against the current cultural ground.  Eventually that technology becomes the new cultural ground.   As our new technologies become assimilated they reform the ground which determines our culture.  McLuhan and Powers: 

"Media determinism, the imposition willy-nilly of new cultural grounds by the action of new technologies, is only possible when the users are well-adjusted, i.e. sound asleep." 

To be "well-adjusted" in this sense, is to be accepting yet unthinking; to be an open receiver like a well-adjusted antenna.  For such media determinism to be possible, it helps to have a populace that is illiterate, anti-intellectual, inarticulate, and emotionally reactive.  The well-adjusted user is hungry (literally and figuratively); dissatisfied with what he has  ("been there, done that"); afraid of the unknown ("brand x"); afraid of the outside (the only safe places, we are told, are the places where you find an approved point-of-sale that accepts the right credit card); accepting without thinking (uncritical and thereby open to shallow rhetoric and "sound bites"); has a short attention span (being therefore less likely to scrutinize merchandise or ideas very closely); and is impulsive (reacting to ersatz emergencies from headline news to one-day-only sales.)   In short, the well-adjusted user lets the scattered brain do its thinking.  The scattered brain directs our attention to what it considers important, leaving what does not interest it to be forgotten. 

If this is the culture we live in, it is also the culture that welcomed a revival of storytelling.  Why? 

(continued in part 2)

Daddy's Coming Home

"Finding the Father" is an ancient story motif. Since the beginning of families, a defining feature of fathers is their constant leave-taking and return. As a boy, I marveled at my father's mysterious excursions into the great beyond to engage in manly tasks and challenges. They were likely board meetings, sales presentations, bank negotiations and other similar aspects of the modern business hunt. Nevertheless, his going and returning was a source of wonder and anticipation. Especially because he traditionally returned with surprises.
Now I am the hunting, gathering, father. I endeavor to keep up the tradition of providing for my children. Thinking of all this, I penned a short story poem for Father's Day. Enjoy!

Daddy's coming home today
He took a journey far away.
He set out in the early morn
with a bleating blast of his hunting horn.
Perhaps he's caught the questing beast
and brings us back a royal feast.
Perhaps he met a grizzly bear
and wrestled with it in its lair
to free the captive maiden there.
Perhaps he found a secret cove
and got a pirate's treasure trove.
Perhaps he put some in a chest
and stuffed his pockets with the rest
to bring us baubles, gems and rings
and other fascinating things.
Perhaps he went where penguins go
and rode his sled across the snow.
Perhaps he went to jungles dense
and rode an elephant, immense.

Whatever regions he did roam
today he's coming home.

That is, unless he met with strife
and suffered threats upon his life.
What if a shark bit him in two?
Or an  angry rhino ran him through?
What if he was thrown from a speeding train?
Or struck by lightening in the rain?
Will we ever see our dad again?

But wait, his car is coming up the drive...
He's stepping out... He's home alive!
And look, he's carrying a sack
with all the treasure he's brought back.
Let's see.. there's eggs and milk and apples too
and celery for us to chew.
There's pancake mix, a lettuce head
a bag of chips, a loaf of bread,
some cheese and burgers for the grill
peanut butter, pickles, dill
bananas, carrots, cantaloupe
toilet paper, laundry soap
diapers, wipes and teething rings
Epsom salts and first aid things.
But there, the best, is something sweet
an icy, creamy, chocolate treat!

There's yet more treasure to be told.
It is a wonder to behold.
We marvel, awestruck, and are glad
for such a bold, heroic, dad.

Happy Father's Day everyone!

Gags into Stories

Back in 1995 and 96, I had the privilege of being on the opening team for the Disney Institute. I was the resident storyteller in charge of Story Arts. One of my favorite programs was one I called "As Walt Would Tell It" in which I could lead guests through an exploration of Walt Disney's development as a storyteller. It is well known that Walt stopped drawing pictures early on and focused instead on story, developing the story board process and using storytelling to lead his company.

You can follow his maturation as a storyteller by following his creative work. In the early days, he and his artists were turning out gag-driven comedies. All they needed to do was find a good situation and string a bunch of gags around it. This was during the early "rubber-hose" animations with the Alice and the Oswald comedies. He was still doing heavily gag-driven stories when he began his Mickey Mouse shorts. You can see how a set of gags dominates the film in this Mickey Mouse short, The Fire Fighters, from 1930:



A few years later, in 1936, Disney releases a Silly Symphony called Elmer Elephant. You will find the same kinds of fire-fighter gags, but now they are in service of a story about an underdog becoming a hero:




As an aside, part of the special alchemy of Disney's power is the way in which his technology developed as his story sense developed. I will explore that in more detail elsewhere. Simply put: as the films went from Black & White to Color, the stories likewise became more colorful.

By 1941, Walt and his team are really growing up. they are entering their 40s, becoming family men and women and watching their children grow. (This development will ultimately lead Walt to conceive of Disneyland.) You can see their maturation in the growing maturity of their stories. This is the year of Dumbo. The following year will see Bambi. These are two of the most enduring, sophisticated films of Walt's career. All artists, of any merit, invest their work with their own life experience. In Dumbo, you can sense the gravitas of parenthood. Story artist, Bill Peet, famously watched his wife bathe their newborn as he created the storyboards for the Dumbo bath scene. Also in Dumbo, we can see how the same gags that drove The Fire Fighters and Elmer Elephant, have been completely subsumed by the story. Here is the clown sequence from Dumbo. You will see the same kinds of gags from the earlier years. But, ironically, you will also see that the effect they have is the opposite of a cheap laugh. Instead, they deepen our empathy for the hero.




Walt discovered that gag-driven stories can only take you a short distance. But gags used in service of larger themes and ideas, can take a story far. Bad gags are self-centered distractions. Good gags are a glittering refraction of the larger story.

May Day / Beltane

Several years ago I wrote a story for my friend and colleague, Milbre Burch, and her husband, Berkely Hudson, on the occasion of the birth of their daughter, Katie Blake. I recently adapted the story for our May Day festival at The Odyssey school here in Asheville where my step-daughter, Kaiya, is in 3rd grade.  We gathered in the green wood making fairy houses, playing games, dancing the maypole and eating strawberries and cream.  Here is my story:

White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lily--of-the-valley on my garden walk
O how I wish that you could hear them ring
That will only happen when the fairies sing

There was once a Keen-eyed Woman and the Kind-hearted Man, who lived in a rich green valley below a snow-topped mountain. They had a fine garden full of vegetables, fruit and nut trees, and flowers. They were especially fond of the May Lilies they planted along all the garden pathways.

The valley was so green because of a winding silver river that ran through it, fed by many mountain streams that sprang from the deep heart of the mountain. Often the Keen-eyed Woman and the Kind-hearted Man would go down to the river bank to dip their baskets brimful in the cool waters. Then they would meet the many other folk that also lived in the valley, exchanging news and greetings.

One day, as the people knelt by the water, a rumbling boom was heard in the skies above and the earth was felt to tremble. As they looked up, they saw great flashes of fire and clouds of smoke rising from the mountain peak. They watched the fire and smoke long into the twilight and then retired to an uneasy sleep.

The next morning a dense fog sat upon the valley, obscuring the mountain and muffling all sound. As they stepped tentatively out, a painful moaning broke the morning quiet. An old woman approached through the fog. She was wrapped in a green shawl and had white hair falling upon her shoulders like snow on the mountain. As she drew nearer, they could see that she was badly burned in face and hands and that her shawl was singed and steaming. She stumbled to the river bank and fell upon the water, soothing her burns and drinking deep. As she knelt there, the river shrank to a thin silver thread. Many fled from her sight, most turned away. But the Keen-eyed Woman and the Kind-hearted Man saw her distress and came to her aide.

They helped her into their home and nursed her with soothing balm from their garden herbs. As she huddled there, she muttered one trembling word, "Dragon!" And they understood. A dragon had come to the mountaintop and was busy now making its nest.

There are many kinds of dragon, but this one was clearly a fire dragon. It sought a high place of stone to nest upon. It would scratch and crumble the living stone to make a rocky eerie, and it would dry up any water there.

The strange old woman regained her strength under the good care of the kind couple. One night she stepped to the door and proclaimed, "A blessing on you for your caring hands and your generous garden. May you always have plenty to serve you in need. May your garden bring hope back to a desolate land." With those words, she vanished into the dark.

Soon the mountain's heart was sealed and the mountain springs ceased to flow. The land began to die as the earth cracked and the air filled with smoke. And the hearts of the people parched as well. Yet the parched earth did not reach the garden of the Kind-hearted Man and the Keen-eyed Woman.

One morning, as she was working among the May Lilies, the Keen-eyed Woman heard a gentle lullaby and a tiny ringing as of little bells. There, nestled in a lily blossom, she saw a tiny baby girl. The child opened its eyes and smiled at her, then rolled out of the flower and onto her hand.

The kind couple tenderly cared for the fairy child. She grew swift and bright and happy, and they called her Little Lily Girl.

Their home was blessed all the while Little Lily Girl was with them. The garden was always moist and green, the butter came quickly in the churn, and the milk never soured. Yet all around, the valley was drying up. Though the dragon was seldom seen, its presence was felt everywhere. The sky was always dim and the air was ever smokey. The land and the hearts of the people were parched. Each kept to each.

When Little Lily Girl was old enough, she asked her kind parents "Why is the land parched, the sky filled with smoke, and the mountaintop burning?"

They told her "A terrible fire dragon has come to nest on the mountaintop. It choked the springs of the mountain, dried the river, and burned the land. It broods ever above us and is drying even the hearts of the people."

Hearing this, Little Lily Girl said "I know now what I must do and why I have come to this place."

She gathered seeds from the garden into the folds of her apron and then stepped to the dry edge of the riverbed. Lifting a delicate dandelion tuft, and said, "Dandelion, you can fly. You have the power to lift me high."

With that the wind lifted the Little Lily Girl as she held fast to the dandelion tuft. Up high along the mountain slopes she flew until she hovered over the great dragon's nest. Below, she could see a black scaly body coiled round upon itself, steaming, smoking, and flaring its fire.

Little Lily Girl reached into her apron and withdrew a honeysuckle seed, saying "Honeysuckle, with your vine, you have the power to entwine." She dropped the seed into the center of the dragon's coil. Instantly the seed shot vines out in every direction, making a green net about the great worm. The dragon struggled and roared and became more and more entangled in the living net.

As the beast raged and rolled, Little Lily Girl dropped down to the edge of its stony nest. She withdrew a sesame seed and said, "Open sesame, with your root in rock, you have the power to unlock." She dropped the sesame among the rocks. Immediately the seed put down roots, cracking through the rocks and stones and reaching deep into the closed heart of the mountain. When the roots tapped through to the deep spring, its water came shooting upwards.

A fierce geyser of ice water burst beneath the struggling dragon, carrying the creature over the mountain ridge and down through the valley. All the while the beast raged and steamed within its net. The water bore the dragon far off in its fury. The people saw a massive black cloud, flashing and thundering, rise up in the distance as strong winds blew it out of sight.

Soon after, the river ran free again, the valley grew green again and the people came together again. They gathered seeds from the garden of the Keen-eyed Woman and the Kind-hearted Man. With these, they replanted the valley and regained their community.

Ever after that, they would sometimes here a distant roaring thunder and look up to see a black cloud flashing in the sky. Yet soon after, the waters would fall to quench the dragon's fire.

The Little Lily Girl was never seen again in that valley. Yet a short time after the next new moon, the belly of the keen-eyed woman began to grow wide and round. And when it was full and silver like the moon, she bore for them a child. A keen-eyed, kind-hearted daughter.

Tellin' About Jack

Saturday, I was honored to join Ted and Rosa Hicks along with Connie Regan-Blake, Gwenda LedBetter, Joseph Sobol, and Vixi Jill Glen, to raise support for the family in memory of Ray Hicks, the great mountain Jack Tale Teller. We had a great day tellin' about Jack!
Read all about it here.

And enjoy the stories: