Gravity

At the National Storytelling Festival last month, I performed an hour long "set" of stories on the problem of feeling like an alien on Earth. The response was mixed, some folks drifted away because I was not funny enough. Others, however, were visibly moved. For the second group, I hit a nerve; I found my tribe.

What was it about? It came from the sense I have that we live on earth as if we are not from here. All my life I have been "not from here." The name "Novak" means "new comer" or "new man" and the name comes with a deep felt sense of strangeness.  As a child of the Baby Boom, raised during the Space Race, it was easy to imagine that Earth was some kind of cosmic way-station, the place we were stranded while repairing our spaceships. Our religious cosmology certainly reinforced that notion, characterizing our time on earth as some kind of penance for unforgiven sins. Such was the story that raised us, that goes deep in Western Civilization and finds new iterations in the present day. Whether you are awaiting the Rapture or simply looking to be retrieved by our sundered extraterrestrial ancestors, the attention is directed away from Earth.
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But there are other stories. My favorite is the Maori story of Tane (recounted below) which suggests a different relationship to Earth as home. The recognition that Earth is our home has been rising in the mythic mind of the West ever since we saw ourselves from the moon in 1969. That mythic realization is finally showing up in our popular imagination as well. I recently saw the new film, Gravity, and saw very clearly a myth of return. It is time to get back down to Earth and stand upon it as true children rather than cosmic orphans.

So I am re-posting an earlier blog on the topic:

DOWN TO EARTH

I find it interesting to compare two stories of the separation of heaven and earth:

First is the familiar story from Hesiod's Theogeny, concerning Ouranos, Gaia, and Kronos. Ouranos, father sky, and Gaia, mother earth, are separated when Kronos castrates Ouranos with a scythe he received from Gaia. Thus begins Time according to some who associate Kronos with Chronos, though this is disputed.

Second is the Maori story, from New Zealand, of Rangi, father sky, and Papa, mother earth, separated by their son, Tane. Tane separates them by placing his head upon earth and feet upon sky, then pushing them apart and becoming the first tree. In this way, Tane, the tree, separates heaven and earth and holds them together at the same time.

It is meaningful that in the first, separation is caused by violence - cutting and castration, whereas in the second the separation is accomplished in a more gentle, and conciliatory manner. This certainly presents inherently different cosmologies. It is worth noting that trees play a role in creating an atmosphere and thereby separating earth from sky (space) making life possible. It is also worth considering how the notion of psychic separation from spirit and matter creates an alienating sense of self moving through time. Without a sense of time, narrative could not exist.

But the thing I think about most, lately, is how Tane becomes Tree by putting his head upon his mother's breast and feet against his father's chest, stretching upwards in a deep-rooted head stand. The storyteller could have had Tane simply stand on earth and push on sky like Kronos' younger brother, Atlas, holding up the sky. But the story has the head of trees in the earth. As I look out at the trees, I imagine them that way. The visible part of trees is only half the whole, waist to toes if you will. The head and arms are below ground.

If the Western Mind, inheritor of the Greek cosmology, is alienated from earth and sky, perhaps we would do well to take an idea from the Maori and turn our heads around.

Ibis and the Origins of Writing

This is a re-post with emendations.

Last week I received a call from Susan O'Connor at the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN. They produce a weekly teller-in-residence program and the week's featured storyteller, Willy Claflin, had to cancel because of illness. Susan called to see if I could fill in for Willy. I rearranged my schedule and managed to cover 5 of the 7 scheduled performances. [BTW, Willy reports feeling much better and ready to roll!]

The opportunity to tell stories for an hour every day invites invention and the rediscovery of old stories in new combinations. Each day I endeavored to find a fresh prompt to begin my discourse. On my last day (Friday) I decided to share a simple trick I learned from my mother re: tearing paper. [Mom is now in a memory care facility in Asheville, where I can visit her often.]

This thought connected to a conversation I had with my mother while folding paper cranes at her condo in south Florida many years ago.

That thought connected to the first trip we took to the Everglades when I was quite young and my mother (a New Yorker) was quite naive about the region. For her it was a trip of high anxiety and crisis management with 4 children, little gas, no money, and no idea where she was. For me, it was an introduction to the wonder of wilderness.

At any rate, while I was off in the wings of the ISC Storytelling Theatre, thinking of these things and folding a paper crane, I found my thoughts connecting with the ibis of the Everglades and the bird's long history in the earliest civilizations of Sumer and Egypt. The paper crane in my hands, I saw, could morph into an ibis in a few extra moves. In the same way, I saw I could connect to the origins of writing in a few extra moves from a childhood in Florida, to the Everglades, to the wetlands of Sumer (Tigris/Euphrates delta), to the Nile delta.

Here is the paper ibis I invented, and here is the re-post of an earlier article on the origins of writing:

I always enjoyed watching the ibis in Florida poking about in the mud flats. It makes perfect sense to me that the Egyptians chose the ibis for the god, Thoth, who invented writing. Ibis mark mud flats in a way very similar to the earliest examples of writing we have: cunieform. That suggests to me that reading as a behavior for attending to the world around, precedes the concept of writing as a behavior for recording narrative. For example, a hunter "reads" signs such as animal tracks. We "read" the sky for a sense of the weather, and so on. That the Egyptian god, Thoth, Ibis-headed, invents writing may come from close observation of ibis and the marks left behind after the ibis passes through.Though Thoth is Egyptian and cunieform is Sumerian - both regions share a similar landscape of wetlands, delta, and mudflats. Habitat for ibis.

Sumerian cunieform writing results from pressing wedges of reeds into soft clay.

Uncertainty

“In this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come— Or for night to fall.” -- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Are you sure of yourself? Ever think I've got this under control, just before blundering badly? In stories, the moment everyone is sure, things go wrong. Curiously, blunders can be blessings. Blundering brought me to storytelling. Thinking I knew what I was doing, I was blind-sided by storytelling. It's a common storyteller's story, a type of “naive epiphany.” It goes like this: “I didn't know I was a storyteller until I did.”

Storytelling is a wayfinding art. Today, we cling to certainty and eschew “hypotheticals.” But storytellers deal in hypotheticals. What do I mean? Hypothetically, we try to find our way by standing, however momentarily, upon narrative suppositions, a.k.a. Stories.

Storytellers are often concerned with analyzing folktales. That is important. But, also, folktales are useful for analyzing experience. Early in my career I got by with stories sure to entertain. Given my training in performance, I could “hit the mark” fairly often. After awhile, I asked: “What do I have to say to these folks here today and why?” Then I set about answering my question one story at a time. Sometimes I blundered badly. But sometimes I found new insights, connections, community, and love. Really, love. How? I'm uncertain. It has something to do with finding my way out and then in. Out of the narrow anomalies of daily life and in to the ocean of story that evolved daily life. What does that mean? It's a forest-for-trees kind of thing. News stories need new stories. Stories of the moment. But daily stories are expressions of a larger Eco-system just as trees are expressions of forest. (I've jumped from oceans to forests, stay with me.) Like tree-huggers we cling to our news stories. That kind of makes sense, you can hug a tree more easily than you can embrace a forest. This is what I think I see in the fixation on “true” personal stories (all “narrative suppositions” IMHO.) Me too. Swinging from moment-to-moment, tree-to-tree, it is easy to think my troubles are mine alone, you wouldn't understand. But down under the trees, we find the vast biome of forest, and earth. And beneath our isolating, first-person troubles, there are collective stories. When I lost my house in the mortgage collapse, I looked down and saw Parsifal. I did not find answers. In fact Parsifal showed that things were about to get much worse before getting better. But “better” was a distinct possibility. When three women escaped that Cincinnati basement, The Giant with No Heart in his Body rumbled beneath me, telling how, needing a surrogate heart, he held a princess in thrall.

So what? This is our function as storytellers. Navigating uncertainty. Telling is our action, and telling means finding out. That's the name of the game and it starts with not knowing. When a speaker addresses me with answers, I have two options: take it or leave it. But when a speaker approaches me with questions, I become involved. We involve our community by posing questions and finding out stories underneath them. The answers, if any, come later. The uncertainty is what calls us. But I don't know...what do you think?

The Tangram Effect

"Who are we, who is each of us if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?  Each life is an encyclopedia, ... and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable." –––– Italo Calvino 

Lately, I have become obsessed with tangram puzzles. I think that the challenge to make endless configurations with a limited number of shapes is good training for coping with the uncertainty of the times. The more I work with them, the more clearly I see the inner patterns of various shapes, and the possible ways the smaller shapes fit into the bigger picture. That gives me a powerful metaphor for handling experience: finding the “fit.”

Originally developed in China, a Tangram is a square composed of seven shapes called tans.

The seven pieces can be rearranged to form thousands of shapes. They have long been used in storytelling and I am using the pieces on an overhead projector for some of my preschool stories.

I’ve been playing tangram games with my 4 yr old, Jordan. (There are a number of free tangram apps for the iPhone and iPad. But I also like having the pieces in hand and shifting them across a table-top into various forms.) I notice that he is noticing patterns more frequently now. It may be a simple developmental step - the sort of thing you expect at his age - but it may be the tangram effect. Anyway, the other day, we were playing ball in the backyard, when he announces “One plus one plus one plus one is four.” I agreed, and showed him my four fingers as example. But he pointed behind me to a row of 4 tall pine trees standing in the distance. “See?” He says. “One plus one plus one plus one.” 

This morning, in the kitchen, (we are often in the kitchen circa 7am) he starts counting the rectangles inset in the kitchen cabinets: "One, two, three....” all the way to 12. We spent some time working with the pattern: how many rows? How many in each row? etc.. The tangram effect.

I find the tangram effect in the combinatorics of storytelling. Certain arrangements of short stores can form larger story shapes, entire programs. The same stories can be re-assembled with different elements emphasized for various intentions. Telling stories is a puzzling business. We tease out meanings and possibilities, finding the fit for the story.

Recently, as I was lying in bed, I felt a mild oceanic sense of being a small piece fit into the cosmic shape of the Universe. (An echo of Bucky Fuller here.) It was somewhat thrilling, but also empowering and reassuring. I felt as if the “I” that was thinking was in a much greater position than the mere “I” that was lying in bed. I felt I could incorporate everyone and everything else into my sense of Self. It is an exercise I intend to repeat until, as with  tangrams, I can sense the fit all around me.

A Dish of Lime-Vanilla Ice

Lime-Vanilla Ice

“Where would you like to go first? I can take you there. I can weave the spell.”

Bren & Lucille Brenemen with Jackie Torrance, 1984 

So says Helen Loomis to Bill Forrester in a chapter of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Dandelion Wine. So said Lucille Brenemen to me as we together told the tale. Lucille was a great fan of Ray Bradbury’s work in general, and Dandelion Wine in particular.  With his permission, she shaped and edited it for our tandem telling at the National Storytelling Festival in 1992. I met Lucille a few years before. She and her husband, Bren, relocated to San Diego from Honolulu when Lucille retired from 35 years teaching in the Speech Department of the University of Hawaii. The two of them were well-known for their excellent adaptations of literature and a charming tandem storytelling style. (They were featured at the National Festival in 1988.) Their book, Once Upon A Time: A Storytelling Handbook, remains an excellent  text on the art and craft of storytelling. I first saw them tell Andersen’s It’s Perfectly True. The storytelling was witty and charming, and immediately won me over. 

Lucille Brenemen
1914-2012

Lucille was a poised, intelligent, and attractive woman who loved life and greeted each moment with an open heart and a ready smile. She had what we used to call “class.” Outwardly she was cultured and delicate, with an easy grace. Yet within, she was strong as steel and nobody’s fool. Born in Texas in 1914, she went to Baylor University and thence to California to earn a Masters in Speech and Drama at UCLA. Considering the times and the status of women, this was no mean feat. She made a career of portraying another strong woman as Ramona in The Ramona Pageant, a romantic melodrama of the Califorinio era. In Hawaii she continued to appear onstage in roles as diverse as Medea and Emily Dickinson. Her tandem work with Bren was expertly crafted. Bren had an impish, earthy quality, coming across like an Irish Seanachie, and Lucille was his Faery Queen.

Lucille approached me about working on the story she called A Dish of Lime-Vanilla Ice. The confection represents a taste for the extraordinary and adventure. In it, young Bill Forrester is befriended by Helen Loomis, age 95. During visits over tea, Helen takes Bill on virtual excursions to the exotic places she visited in her youth. The storytelling sweeps him away. 

I loved my afternoons with Lucille. When I learned recently of her death last October, I was saddened; not only at the loss of her, but at the lost years since I last saw her. Yet I do not grieve for her. She showed us the way to live life fully. With her second husband, Richard Koproske, she spent a joyous time traveling, dancing, laughing, and befriending everyone. She outlived Richard as she outlived Bren, and I daresay, she out-lived many of us.

In the story we shared, Bill was a newspaper man, a reporter. Through her character, Lucille showed me that telling a story is more than giving a report. The true storyteller gives an experience, and experience endures in the heart longer than any report. Just so, Lucille endures in the hearts of all who knew her and were drawn to experience storyland by her enchantment.

Sea Changes/See Changes

Buckminster Fuller came back into my life in a big way last year. I was invited to portray Bucky in a solo play written by D.W.Jacobs called "R. Buckminster Fuller, The History (and Mystery) of the Universe." (Doug is the former Artistic Director of San Diego Repertory Theatre - one of many strange synchronies to this business.)  Bucky's words and insights have great relevance and immediacy to them. I will write more about him and my involvement with his work over time. This thought of his about seeing changes keeps coming back to me lately. In his book, Critical Path, Fuller writes:
"Most of the important trend patternings are invisible - ergo, their eventuations are unanticipated by society [...] When humans cannot see something approaching to destroy them, they do not get out of the way.
"Question: Is there not an instrument that can inform humanity about its invisibly trending evolutionary challenges - and do so in time to allow them to satisfactorily anticipate and cope with inexorable events?"
Bucky's answer is the Geoscope, a brilliant effort to create a full view of our Spaceship Earth employing his Dymaxion Map and a Geodesic Sphere coupled with all current data on Earth processes such as energy consumption, enivronmental change, population, etc..
[As a relevant aside, the National Climatic Data Center is located here in Asheville, NC, and providing the National Climate Service and many useful data streams.]
Out of this concern, Bucky developed the World Game.
All of these projects and efforts address the physical changes we are facing and attempt to bring us to see the invisible "trend patternings" approaching us. BUT Bucky often spoke of common structures to both Physical and Metaphysical reality. Can we answer his question in regards to Metaphysical "trend patternings"? If so, how?
What comes to my mind is: Storytelling. What do I mean by "storytelling"? The word is too easily thrown around and has many uses. Here is what I mean: Story + Tell. While that is obvious, what we often overlook is the meaning of "Tell." Tell is related to Tally inasmuch as it involves counting and recounting. The physical data streams accessed above are tallies. A narrated story likewise requires a tallying - recounting - of events. But Tell has another, less denotative, more connotative, meaning. Discern. This is how we use the word when we watch for the "tell" on the face of a poker player or when we ask a doctor to "tell" the cause of our suffering. Storytelling, then, is the recounting of events AND the discerning of those events. When we tell history, we are not merely reporting the data count of events, but we are attempting to tell it - that is, to understand it.
So my answer to the metaphysical half of Bucky's concern is: Tell Stories. Tell Histories, personal, social, and global. But also tell myths, legends, fairy tales and fantasies. For these are all made up of patterns which will help us to perceive (discern) the "important trend patternings" approaching us to change not only our physical experience, but our souls.

No worst, there is none

Here we are now collectively undone with grief. Thinking of the Sandy Hook news...

'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.'

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.