WHY STORYTELLERS TALK TO THEMSELVES

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 .

THE CONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS: A REFLECTION ON RITA'S INTEGRATION OF MOTHER BEAR AND FOREST SPIRIT

By Deanie LaChance

Above left: Forest Spirit mask   Above right: Bear Mother mask

Can we, as humans, really know what it is to be a Mother Bear or a Forest Spirit?

After reading Rita’s final blog posting about her experience of telling ‘The Boy Who Lived with Bears’ in the Mother Bear mask and the Forest Spirit mask, this is the question that comes to mind for me. And her answer, of course, is a resounding “Yes”.  

Rita describes how the experience “… obliterated the cognitive function of my mind” and how she experienced “… a real tangible presence, inside my body, of the spirit reality of nature” and that “… once I accepted the power of the bear into me it swept over my body like a wave of strength”. But how?  How can a human, any human, know what it is to be a creature other than herself? We are often taught about empathy by being asked to walk a mile in another’s shoes; to see what they see and to feel what they feel.

But can a human empathize with an animal or even more obscure, a forest spirit?

I would like to draw on three schools of thought that believe that we are all connected. First, the Hindu tradition of the Jewel Net of Indra in which an infinite fishing net envelopes the world and, where each line of the net is knotted, a jewel is placed such that it reflects back every other reflection from every other jewel. In this way, everything we see and experience can be seen and experienced by another.

Second, the Zen Buddhists in Japan talk about “nothingness” in the sense that everything begins as an energetic formlessness that takes form in the world then returns to formlessness at the end of its time. Each and everything: people, bears and forests are created from this formless “stuff” that then returns to the formless nothingness to be formed again. In this way, we are all connected by being made from the same “stuff of creation”.

And finally, Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” in which, beneath our unconscious, there exists a pool of archetypes, pre-existent forms that can potentially be accessed by everyone and, in this way, connects us all to each other.

Rita has spent decades relating to her characters through her use of storytelling in mask. It seems to me at this telling, she was able to suspend her intellectual filter and to access, for a prolonged length of time, her deep self where we are all connected. She let fall away her ego-self, and let rise to the surface “…overwhelming feelings of different forms of identity…”

If the connectedness of all things really means “all things”, including a Mother Bear and a Forest Spirit, then I have no difficulty understanding how an artist like Rita, after years of practice and discipline, could experience the emergence of these archetypes from her collective unconscious. I can understand that her form accessed the deep formlessness of the creation of all things, and that she was able to reflect to herself and through her art, the experiences of others.

And finally, I can understand that she experienced them as reality and was able to integrate characteristics of them into herself long after the telling was over.