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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

Oral Origins

The Odyssey, as (presumably) created by Homer was composed primarily in dactyllic hexameter, which was very much the thing at the time. This means the lines of poetry had six beats each, with each measure being a triplet, so the rhythm would have been: BUM-da-da BUM-da-da, BUM-da-da, etc., wash and repeat. This might very well be musical in Greek, but in English the result tends to be awkward at best, or, as one anonymous translation reviewer put it, akin to “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.”

So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?

This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”

Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.

Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).

At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word.

If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.

So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan:

More Than Words Can Say

It’s been said that writing a story is the art of trying to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This thing which cannot be put into words is often summed up with the pat phrase, “the human condition,” and capturing this condition is the artist’s constant labor. The big, foggy idea of the experience of humanness, in turn, comprises a number of slippery notions such as mortality, love, confusion, joy and, well, a lot of things that are hard to put into words. In fact, the words I just listed don’t mean a whole lot. Words like “love” and “mortality” feel especially worn thin: flimsy. They don’t hold.

So what is it that takes hold of us when we read a compelling story? What makes a story live? Is it the theme of the story? One way of identifying a story's theme is to look for a pattern of bright images throughout the story, pictures that keep cropping up or changing as the climax mounts. These images work their way into our subconscious and we translate the story using the lexicon of our own life experiences to give meaning to the imagery.

Of course, the theme of a story would not impact us as soundly if we did not get wrapped up in the events of the story itself, and the characters that populate it, so these elements must excite our imagination and sympathy. Also, the way a writer chooses to tell a story may be more effective in some cases than in others, either engaging our senses in the story’s world…or not. Ideally: The poetry of the story’s language plays like sunlight over the waters of our senses, illuminating surprising depths.

Honestly, it’s hard to isolate the various aspects of craft that turn a story from a mere collection of words into a work of art. The easy answer would be to say that all of those things I mentioned above (and more) are necessary if a story is to bash us over the head and grab us by the heart—in a good way, of course. Yet, there is no denying that some stories have a more lasting impression than others, and some stories speak to us more loudly than others. If you are following Story Euphoria, chances are, right now you are carrying around inside you precious stories that have shaped your life and the way you see the world.

We are treading murky waters now. We have entered the realms of dream and myth. There are no concise answers, no literary terminology that explains this mystery. Yet this mystery is perhaps the greatest power that can define a “good story”—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—and to impart such a power is no doubt the ultimate ambition of all who create stories.

In one way or another, this mystery is at the heart of all we explore at Story Euphoria. What makes a story come alive for you? What are some of your favorite stories, and how do they express “that which cannot be put into words?” Fortunately, we live in a world brimming with powerful stories, and one such I share with you today. Katherine Mansfield’s The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a tale that sneaks up on you and strikes when you least expect it—delightful, funny, compelling and surprisingly vast for a story told from such limited perspective: Through Josephine and Constantia, Mansfield speaks to us all, placing her finger on that awkward little something inside us so commonly called “the human condition.”

If you want more Mansfield, read from the text I used at Project Gutenberg, or fetch a collection of her stories for yourself from your local library. You can also buy a copy you’ll be sure to return to time and again over the years:

Identity and the Arabian Nights

Alf Layla Wa-Layla, the One Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as the Arabian Nights, is a work with even more faces than it has titles, which makes sense considering it can claim many authors, as the living and fluctuating result of many hands toiling over many centuries, compiling Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian tales. However, the diversity of story elements comes close to making the work contradictory: Women are portrayed as wicked adulteresses who deserve to be killed or beaten for impudence, while the central heroine is unquestionably wise, brave and virtuous. Genie are strong and terrifying beings, though the child of one such is so weak as to be killed by getting hit in the eye with a date pit. The contradictions coexist in a fantastic dance, cavorting one around the other until the laws of the book’s world become uncertain.

Much like these examples, images of the Middle East have long been contradictory in the West. On the one hand, there is the “exotic” and magical Middle East, influenced by the Arabian Nights since medieval times, with flying carpets, genies and caverns of riches that “open sesame.” The other image, more prevalent today, is of a land torn by unrest and terrorism. One popular explanation for the prevalence of these two mixed images is the concept of orientalism, as posited by Edward Said in his 1978 book of the same title, which has greatly influenced academia since the late 20th century.

For a solid grasp of Said’s conjectures, one ought to read his book, but in a nutshell, orientalism is Said’s term for describing a perceived tendency of Western political (and cultural) forces to caricature the Middle East out of an imperialistic need to place the “Other” at a disadvantage and to exonerate military aggression. Furthermore, Said is very specific that he does not suggest orientalism to mean a misrepresentation of the “True Orient,” as he is skeptical of such an idea. In fact, he notably remarked in an article called On Orientalist Scholarship that no American or European scholar can ever “know” the Orient.

But perhaps any goal to know the Orient is nonsensical anyway, because on the human and individual level, boundaries between Oxidant and Orient are fluid, even meaningless—borders that only exist in maps and ideologies, and stories have never been confined by them, as the universal popularity of the Arabian Nights can testify. The appeal of this unconventional body of work is more than simple curiosity for that which seems “exotic;” there is something immediately exciting and familiar in the power of a cliffhanger: in this case, a cliffhanger that can cause the most powerful man in the book’s world to put off an official execution so that he can hear the next installment.

Of course, there are many examples of stories that excite the imagination and sympathy of people the world over, regardless of cultural origins, from A Christmas Carol to Like Water for Chocolate to Musashi. The cultural context of great stories informs the characters without preventing us from identifying with them. Maybe it’s the ego that always puts I at the center of the story, or maybe it is the empathy inherent in imagination; whatever the case, a story, by concern for its inhabitants and the power to place us in their skins, is humanistic by nature. As George Eliot in her essay, The Natural History of German Life, explains it: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

All who read stories have on multiple occasions identified with people very different from themselves. It is no coincidence that Scheherazade’s wisdom is attributed to her learning and manifest in her wide knowledge of stories. The characters of the Arabian Nights often use stories as ambassadors to make their points, such as Scheherazade’s father telling her the tale of the ox and the ass, or the multiple instances where stories are told in an effort to save lives. The Arabian Nights isn’t merely a collection of tales, the tales are currency in the book’s world; they are alive and impact the events of the narrative at large.

And it is a large narrative. The centuries have seen multiple versions of the Nights, by scholars of both East and West, and the stories themselves come in multiple layers, with characters inside stories telling stories about characters who again tell stories. These complex mirrors of narrative are truly the signature of the Arabian Nights, and perhaps are appealing because an infinity of stories feels like an honest reflection of the infinite possibilities of real life, no matter how fantastic the tales themselves. Like these stories, life is complex and often appears paradoxical. Though it may on the surface be easy to look at these stories and identify a decadent and “otherly” Ottoman Empire, or a “mystical East,” the real paradox is that this collection of folktales has lived so long because it excites our sympathies, invites our imaginations to wander through a mirror tunnel of adventure after adventure until, in the end, we see only ourselves.

We are the Other, and always have been. As an idea, we are Its creator; as a fear, It dwells inside us. As Joseph Campbell’s studies of folktales led him to surmise, this theme dwells in legend and lore the world over as an essential aspect of the Hero’s Quest, organic to the human experience. Think of Luke Skywalker training on Dagobah with Yoda: when he enters the darkness and confronts an apparition of Darth Vader, cuts off the hated villain’s head, whose face does he find beneath the helmet? This is one trick stories can play on us: we meet characters who excite both affection and revulsion, and for the duration, we see ourselves inside each, see the world through their eyes and apply our own world to their circumstances.

As a story about the sympathetic and enlightening power of stories, the Arabian Nights is the perfect point of departure for our own journey of one thousand and one tales. Story Euphoria will release a new article on the power and art of story every week with an accompanying podcast reading. You can download this week’s excerpt from the Arabian Nights Entertainments to listen at your leisure. To learn more about the “version history” of this work, see Daniel Beaumont’s article, "The Medieval Arabic Nights." If you would like to read the complete tales, you can get the text I read (or a different version) for free from Project Gutenberg, but if you’d prefer to read your own on the beach or in bed, see if your local library has a copy, or buy one:

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