by Tim J. Myers.
“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
–Ben Okri, Nigerian novelist
A powerful narrative, whether actual or fantastic, is a landmark in the psychic world, that human interior so endlessly swept and cross-lit by darknesses and luminosities. Just as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia memorize the outcrops, ridges, billabongs, or delta channels of their homelands–giving each a story–so we too use stories to fix our cultural and spiritual locations, to know where we are and where we’re going.
Or stories can be seen as flowers scattered across the wilderness of the world. And like bees or hummingbirds as we seek to live and grow, we can do more than merely behold the flower of a story: We can enter it, push deep toward its center and find sustaining nectar there–as well as the pollen we inadvertently carry away and scatter wherever we go.
And we never know what a story might do as it comes into our lives. “A narrative line,” Eudora Welty says, “is in its deeper sense, of course, the tracing out of a meaning…”–and I can only add, often of many meanings. In some cases, a particular story will work in a conventional way–we’ll feel a certain moral insight, for example, or laugh ourselves clean. But other stories can have less predictable results. We may heartily dislike a story or something in a story, and yet in our negative reactions find different kinds of insight. A story may lead us to a sense of irony, or of satire, or of human triumph or depravity, or even to something like spiritual vision–and some stories, of course, do all this and more. It’s even quite human to react in different ways, at different times, to the same story. But in general, stories often go straight to the roots of our being, and keep lifting meanings up out of our fundamental silence.
I feel all this keenly in my own experience. As a teacher and writer, I see how stories can connect with readers or listeners, sometimes deeply; I’ve been involved in many a fervent discussion, for example, with my own university students. And as a professional storyteller I continually put my lips around stories, feel the ghosts of them trooping through my mouth. This brings an intimacy that shapes my life, how I think and feel, how I love and fear. Sometimes I feel it shaping my listeners too.
Anthropologist Marvin Opler reports that it was customary among the Apaches, after a night of storytelling, for a listener to paint his face with red ochre. This showed that the sacredness of the stories was still with him, still warm in his heart. I can’t think of a better way to explain what a story can be.
I often feel a strong desire to make stories even more real for myself by imagining further details, particularly for stories with fantasy elements; I “enter” the story and look around, trying to create a whole world out of a single narrative strand. It’s as Tolkien says:
“What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful
‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can
enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’; it accords with the laws
of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were,
inside.”
This has always compelled and delighted me–to go “inside” like that, and be there, in those strange, amazing places. It’s something that, Paul Zweig says,
“…all stories have…in common: they beckon us out of the visible,
providing alternative lives, modes of possibility.”
But when I return, I find an equal longing for some kind of bridge between visible and invisible, between the story and my actual life. The paradox of powerful narratives, even the fantastic kind, is that they’re usually so utterly practical, so mysteriously relevant to the world they seem blithely to ignore. “If the world were clear, art would not exist,” Camus says; “Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world.” Powerful stories act in exactly this way. Barry Lopez praises the Inuktitut word for “storyteller,” isumataq: “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.”
So I often go into stories and pretend they’re somehow “real” in the ordinary sense, seeking to balance the story’s deeper truth with the realities of my society and my own psyche. Sometimes such musings lead nowhere; I have to remind myself that “it’s just a story.” But sometimes they lead to fruitful extensions. Often enough, my fascination with a particular narrative spills over into a poem; I just can’t resist making more of it. My Nectar of Story features poems inspired in this way, a partial record of the profound way stories have played out in what I think, what I believe, how I live.
I suppose what moves me most, though–aside from the pure gorgeousness so many stories grant us–is, again, how real they already are. Anyone who thinks about art knows this paradox, and feels, with Picasso, that “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” In the myths, legends and folktales I tell, art’s gracious mystery seems to go even further, since so many of them are based squarely on the most improbable fantasies. And yet that seems, somehow, only to clear away irrelevance, to offer glimpses of fundamental truths. I think of Kipling’s statement that “…fiction is Truth’s elder sister.”
And it’s strange for me, as a twenty-first-century American, to feel the astounding immediacy of what are often ancient and sometimes obscure tales, and to watch how images, ideas, and archetypes keep repeating themselves in the ongoing flow of human culture. It’s as if some form of chaos theory also governs the relationships between our wildly varied lives and the wildly varied stories we tell each other.
This is not to say the influence is always positive; sometimes it’s quite the contrary, as we in the West have seen in certain cases where, for example, biblical stories are concerned. But it strikes me as true miracle that the real world we all live in, with its city centers and farmfields, its pigeons huddled on stone facades, its dams and suburbs and landfills, its offices, churches and temples, its villages and wind-blown litter, its addicts, bus-drivers and business people, its mountains and beaches, nursery schools and factories–that in this enormous, uneven, lovely, and sometimes bleak place, human beings should so often be visited by powerful and compelling images such as we find in stories. We might almost believe that stories themselves are invisible beings whose aim is to teach, strengthen and purify us.
The Chaga people of Africa, I’ve read, teach their children that songs are “a means of controlling the emotions,” a practice, the writer says, also common to Native Americans. In some ways our contemporary American culture is in a similar state–like someone losing control of himself. Stories are one form of the song we sing to find balance and inner peace. And this can be as true for “negative” stories as for “positive” ones. Consider some of our modern urban legends–like the one about Liz Claiborne creating perfumes designed specifically not to smell good on African-Americans, or the one about Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker creating be-bop specifically so white musicians couldn’t play it. As unlikely as these stories are, they reflect some deep truths–and deep emotions–about race in America. They can be a way of facing the problem, a necessary step in the process of regaining our balance.
I don’t mean, of course, that we should indulge our collective urge to fantasy without restraint; many of us waste our lives or sin heinously because we’ve given ourselves too readily to airy narrative constructs. Self-righteous war-mongering, the Inquisition, and the Heaven’s Gate suicides are salient examples. Stories are ways of looking at life–but they’re not life itself, and they’re far from infallible. In my head, I have no trouble distinguishing these fictions from the real world. But in my heart I’m often richly confused, and it’s that confusion I can learn from.
Modern Americans have only recently begun to show renewed interest in traditional oral storytelling, though most of us even now have little or no experience with it. But human beings are storytelling animals; our love for telling and hearing stories is endless. And with so much besetting us at this point in history, it’s an especially good time, I think, to walk again what storyteller and writer Joseph Bruchac calls “the roads of breath,” to explore the way stories let us think, feel, and examine our lives–often with far more depth and freedom than direct rational analysis allows. My friend Wally Ingebritson says it another way–that we must “re-enchant the word.”
Beyond that I can only quote Tolkien once more, who in Tree and Leaf wrote words I’ve come back to again and again: “Fairy [s]tories,” he says, deny “…(in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat…giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
Finally, I can only recommend that everyone find a way, if they can, to sit before a master storyteller and listen. There’s nothing quite like the wild, unpredictable, and charged utterances that can emerge when we’re “beckon[ed] out of the visible”–that is, when a good storyteller and a good audience come together for this profound and social ritual. Magic may befall you.
Tim J. Myers is a senior lecturer in English at Santa Clara University. About his Nectar of Story: Poems (BlazeVox Press), poet Grace Cavalieri writes that “Tim J. Myers is indeed Our Patron Saint of Story.”
(This essay originally appeared in Storytelling Magazine February 2019)