Dear Friends,
Many thanks to those of you who supported and participated in Story Euphoria. Your contributions to the project made it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, it's now my regrettable duty to put the Story Euphoria project on hold. Due to demands from the most dominating commitments in my life (i.e., school, work, etc.) I don't have the time required to keep Story Euphoria alive--for the present time. There are still so many stories and storytelling topics I wanted to share with you--many suggested by friends of Story Euphoria. We'll see what we can do to bring those to light this summer, when I hope to resume work on Story Euphoria.
In the meantime, thanks again to all who encouraged this project, and also to those who may just now be discovering Story Euphoria for the first time: I hope the foundations here laid will stir in your mind and your heart a greater appreciation for the power and art of stories.
Regards from Story Euphoria,
Amanda Haldy
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Story Euphoria 14: Prufrock
It’s easy to focus on the literary forms most conventionally associated with storytelling, like novels and short stories, but poetry has its own brand of storytelling power. This week’s podcast features The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This poem was first introduced to me many years ago by my English teacher, Mr. Stewart of Monticello, and over the years I have delighted in discovering something new every time I revisit it. In a mere 131 lines of delicious, rolling verse, Eliot manages to coax from scattered images and half-formed arguments the entirety of the title character’s life. Download and listen.
If you would like to read this and other poems by T.S. Eliot, you can follow along with the text I used at Project Gutenberg, check out a volume from your local library, or buy a copy for your home library:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Material for a Dream by Josep Anton Garcia Rami.
and Better Than Me by Celeste Astara.
Song and Story
There is nothing like a song for cutting straight to the heart, for establishing mood without any ado and igniting the senses. Of all the art forms, music is perhaps the least reliant on intellectual processing—unlike stories, which are expressed through a layer of language that the brain must interpret and whose interpretation must be learned.
The very first installment of Story Euphoria explored the idea of story as a mighty unifier, a channel causing readers and listeners to identify with others. Song, too, is something we identify with, become one with as it transports us. And, being written in a universal language that all who hear can understand, a song we listen to together causes us to identify together, building a bridge of identity. People bond while listening to music.
Interestingly, from what clues we have today, it appears that the oldest stories—like the myths discussed last week—were also songs. Inanna’s Descent, for example, was likely chanted during religious rites. Modern songs also tell us stories, sometimes using nothing more than shifts in pitch and rhythm or the choice of instrumentation (as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). Other musical stories can be more obviously interpreted in lyrics that fit snugly with the melody.
A poem is a little like lyrics without music. But poems also create their own music using melodies of assonance and alliteration; rhythms of syllables and punctuation. More than that, poems are like sheet music for the imagination, and when we read a poem we create images instead of sounds. The effect is immediate, distilled. A poem is to prose like a shot of Turkish coffee is to a cup of decaf. I think Archibald MacLeish said it well in his 1926 poem, Ars Poetica, as he begins:
It seems ridiculous to try to imagine a wordless poem, and yet such a feat is ultimately what everyone who transmutes life into language strives to achieve: the experience and sentiment of the story-moment is what we really care about. The words are ancillary.
And poems and songs tend to be very good with moments, focusing on a certain mood or epiphany. While there are ballads that indulge in more lengthy stories, such as L’Morte de Arthur, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among countless other examples, even these tales-in-verse rely more on moments of metaphor and sudden imagery than on novelistic elements like character development—are more akin to the stories your dreams make from the mishmash of nighttime visions than to what you would write about the dream in your diary next morning. So perhaps poems and songs imitate life more closely than prose, as life is made up of these bright moments and is equally without the helpful framework of exposition. As Archibald MacLeish concludes:
The very first installment of Story Euphoria explored the idea of story as a mighty unifier, a channel causing readers and listeners to identify with others. Song, too, is something we identify with, become one with as it transports us. And, being written in a universal language that all who hear can understand, a song we listen to together causes us to identify together, building a bridge of identity. People bond while listening to music.
Interestingly, from what clues we have today, it appears that the oldest stories—like the myths discussed last week—were also songs. Inanna’s Descent, for example, was likely chanted during religious rites. Modern songs also tell us stories, sometimes using nothing more than shifts in pitch and rhythm or the choice of instrumentation (as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). Other musical stories can be more obviously interpreted in lyrics that fit snugly with the melody.
A poem is a little like lyrics without music. But poems also create their own music using melodies of assonance and alliteration; rhythms of syllables and punctuation. More than that, poems are like sheet music for the imagination, and when we read a poem we create images instead of sounds. The effect is immediate, distilled. A poem is to prose like a shot of Turkish coffee is to a cup of decaf. I think Archibald MacLeish said it well in his 1926 poem, Ars Poetica, as he begins:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown --
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
It seems ridiculous to try to imagine a wordless poem, and yet such a feat is ultimately what everyone who transmutes life into language strives to achieve: the experience and sentiment of the story-moment is what we really care about. The words are ancillary.
And poems and songs tend to be very good with moments, focusing on a certain mood or epiphany. While there are ballads that indulge in more lengthy stories, such as L’Morte de Arthur, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among countless other examples, even these tales-in-verse rely more on moments of metaphor and sudden imagery than on novelistic elements like character development—are more akin to the stories your dreams make from the mishmash of nighttime visions than to what you would write about the dream in your diary next morning. So perhaps poems and songs imitate life more closely than prose, as life is made up of these bright moments and is equally without the helpful framework of exposition. As Archibald MacLeish concludes:
A poem should not mean
But be.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Story Euphoria 13: Myths of Odin
This week, Story Euphoria presents two myths about Odin, the All-Father of the Norse pantheon, as retold by Padraic Colum in The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths. Download and listen!
You can follow along or read more myths at Project Gutenberg. You can also check your local library or get this book for your personal collection:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Transgenesis and Mountain by Megaplasma Factory Recordings
Suspense by Stephen Gashler
and One Good Eye by Doug Tapper.
Realms of Myth
Last Week, Story Euphoria contemplated one of the greatest powers of story: the power to illuminate truth. Truth is different from fact. Truth is understood on a more intuitive level than the cerebral cortex can make sense of, and it resists definition by language. Truth is why humanity has the arts at all and why we started telling stories—in a struggle to understand, and to chart the strange roads we all must travel through life and into death. Stories are the signposts of the spirit. And from the first moment a cold, bright-eyed hominid painted the first antelope stampeding on a cave wall, we have been driven to tell stories.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Story Euphoria 12: The Open Boat
Stephen Crane is often noted as a forerunner of realism, inspiring the spare style of writers like Ernest Hemingway. In this story, Crane draws on a real life experience to explore the strain that so easily appears when modern man is stripped of the comforts of civilization and sees his own death through nature's eyes. Download and listen to The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Fantastic Fly by Electro Wave
If you would like to read more by Stephen Crane, you can peruse the collection I used for free at Project Gutenberg, check out your local library, or buy a copy for yourself:
Truth and Fiction
Story Euphoria is concerned first and finally with fiction, but there is a place where fiction meets reality, a place where real life inhabits fictional characters. Apprentice writers are often told to “write what you know,” and the storytellers we best love are keen observers of life because we expect stories, whether realistic or not, to reflect something true about life—and better yet, about our own lives. Reading a fiction is an experience, and some fictions are real experiences thinly veiled with false names, such as the story in this week’s podcast. Given all of this, why bother with fiction at all?
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
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