By Dan Yashinsky
Don’t be alarmed. In the months
leading up to the annual Toronto Storytelling Festival, you may see more than
the usual number of your fellow citizens walking around Toronto talking to
themselves. This isn’t a sign of the spread of handless phone technology, or a
phenomenon with public health implications. More likely, these are storytellers
rehearsing for an upcoming session.
This tendency to talk to ourselves
is one of the job hazards of storytelling. I do it all the time, sometimes on
long walks through my neighbourhood ravines, sometimes riding my bike to work,
and sometimes – although I always feel I should be especially discreet in
public places – on the busiest sidewalks. A high collar on my parka helps, or a
scarf I can mutter into without attracting attention. I also rehearse in my
car, and have often seen alarmed drivers give me a particularly wide berth as
they pass me on the 401 (or, if I’m working on an exciting passage, as I pass
them).
It can get embarrassing. I was once
trying to learn “The Princess and the Pea”. It’s short, but the devil to memorize.
As I was walking by the Brunswick Tavern in a heavy fog one night, I yelled
out, “But she must be a real
princess!” A surprised woman walked by, shaking her head at my outburst and
wondering what kind of princess-loving idiot had just gotten stewed at the
Brunnie.
I also get in trouble when I’m
going over my lines for “The Miller’s Tale,” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Many years ago, in a
burst of literary enthusiasm (and inspired by the greatest Chaucer teacher in
the world) I memorized the whole thing,
all six hundred lines of rhyming Middle English couplets.
I’ve recited it many times since, usually to
an audience of one: myself. My ride to work usually covers about a hundred
lines – say from when Absolon kisses Alisoun’s behind (“Abak he sterte, and
thought it was amyss, for wel he wiste a woman hath no berd; he felt a thying
al rough, and longe yherd…”) to the part when Nicholas, her lover, sticks his
tush out the window in the dead of night and blows one directly into the
hapless Absolon’s face.
It’s fun for me but strange for the bystanders who hear
a guy on a bike chanting Middle English lyrics such as: “This Nicholas let flee
a far as grete as it had been a thonderdent, that with the strook he (i.e.,
Absolon, the fartee) was almost yblent (blinded).”
Students don’t seem to learn poetry
by heart any more, let alone folk tales and fairy tales. I think that’s a
shame, not because I think they should be forced to declaim verse in public,
but because it’s an eminently useful thing to know poetry and stories in your
head.
For one thing, you always have to
have a quote ready for any occasion. My friend, Belfast-raised Canadian storyteller
Alice Kane, knew thousands of poems, hymns, plays, and stories. Whenever she
saw me, she chanted a verse from a Presbyterian hymn: “Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone, Dare to have purpose firm, and Dare to make it known!” And
whenever I, more than forty years younger, kvetched about my life, she’d always
come out with her favourite Irish saying: ‘Tis
a poor heart that never rejoices’.
A community needs word keepers,
people who can keep stories and poems from being forgotten.
We’ve been called many things over
the centuries: bards, troubadours, Irish shanachies,
African griots, tradition-bearers, First Nation elders, yarnspinners, myth
tellers, purveyors of bull manure, or just plain storytellers.
Our purpose has always been to keep
alive the words, ephemeral and powerful at the same time, that can be so easily
lost in the rush and distraction of everyday life. Especially our everyday
lives, here in the early years of the twenty-first century, when we can hoard
massive quantities of data but forget our ancestral tales, and when we’re only
now discovering that we can’t double-click on wisdom.
So if you see someone walk by
muttering and gesticulating, they just might be rehearsing a story, or, if it’s
me, revelling in Chaucer’s magnificent, medieval, irresistible words.
“Why Storytellers Talk To Themselves” is
published on-line with the author's permission. Copyright © 2013 by Dan
Yashinsky and Insomnia Books.
Dan’s website is www.tellery.com
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