Monthly Archives: June 2014

Lesson 2:3 (Q #1) – “What is happening?”

That’s what my brother said when I told him to read Harry Robinson’s short story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England,” to himself silently.

“What is happening?” he asked. He was barely into the second page.

I must admit, I had the same response as well when I read Robinson’s stories silently. We both found that his colloquialisms, nuances, and the grammatical liberties he had taken made focusing on the story itself difficult. As I read the story, I found myself progressing from reading mentally to mouthing the words silently and finally I gave in and read the rest of the story aloud. My brother also found that he couldn’t help but do the same; only then did the story make sense to us. When it was time to read to each other (we had read the stories aloud to ourselves separately), I found that I was more animated when reading aloud to my brother than when it was just for myself. I also realized that I adjusted Robinson’s words as I tried to emulate the colloquial tone he was setting. Mostly, I would modify the -ing suffix: “Lots of soldiers watchin’. And Coyote went through there. Nobody seen ’em” (Robinson 68, emphasis added). I would do this only when I noticed another modified word (in this case, “’em”) either immediately preceding or following the verb. I think I needed to add my own touch to help the story flow a little for me as I was reading it. My brother, on the other hand, read the story verbatim.

In “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” Thomas King states: “[Robinson] develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats readers’ efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read the stories out loud” (King 186). My brother and I wholeheartedly agreed that the story was much easier to understand when we heard it aloud, without the text in front of us. That being said, I disagree in part with King’s next comment:

“The common complaint that we make of oral literature that has been translated into English is that we lose the voice of the storyteller, the gestures, the music, and the interaction between storyteller and audience. But by forcing the reader to read aloud, Robinson’s prose, to a large extent, avoids this loss, re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance.” (King 186)

While Robinson’s story did have a distinct style that allowed his voice to shine through, no matter who read it, the story’s grammatical particularities made reading it aloud a clumsy (for lack of a better word) attempt at recreating a story that Robinson no doubt knew off the top off his head. While parts of Robinson’s oral telling may be preserved in the translation to text, I would argue that it does not re-create “at once the storyteller and the performance”. While Robinson may pause where appropriate, when telling this story, my brother and I would stop abruptly mid-sentence to figure out how to tell the next bit aloud, mangling the story’s narrative at certain points. That being said, understanding the story was a bit of a magical moment for the both of us and by the end of this exercise, instead of asking “what is happening?” we both said, “I get it now.”

The magic of hearing someone else’s voice in your mind.

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Lesson 2:2 – First Stories

Question: “First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?”

In a Classical Studies course that I took in second year on Greek mythology, my professor said something along the lines of: “…then Christianity came to Greece. It soon became the dominating religion in Greece because in the face of a new and perfect God, who could believe in the ancient deities with all their many humanistic flaws?” Creation stories, or origin stories, seem to impart the message that there was one beginning, and perhaps that is why we feel the need to choose only one as sacred, dismissing all others as stories. It is in the nature of all stories to set the stage, but by setting a stage, you eliminate (for the most part) the possibility of other settings. Genesis begins: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” King points out that the Bible’s narrative possesses a more authoritative voice than “The Earth Diver,” but both have firm, distinct beginnings. Note that Genesis has “In the beginning” – there is no ambiguity about whether or not there are several other beginnings out there. What follows, God’s creations, is a very specific stage set-up. Likewise, “The Earth Diver” also starts with a description of the setting: “Back at the beginning of imagination, the world we know as earth was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was a larger, more ancient world” (King 10). Again, we have the specific “at the beginning”; both stories claim to talk about a singular beginning, but both beginnings are seemingly distinct. The perception of needing to choose between stories in order to establish an origin of existence stems may stem from these differing settings. Why the need to choose? Why not have several settings? Perhaps it is our desire to have certainty in our lives, free from the ambiguities that follow when attempting to reconcile differing origin stories.

Yet are they that different? Both stories are about creations: the world was empty, but then someone came and put things where they are. What we view as a series of choices (what King refers to as dichotomies) are actually different perspectives of the same stage. Perhaps one storyteller had a balcony seat, front-and-center, and the other had a floor seat off to the side. Stories are perspectives – if we choose one side of the dichotomy, we ignore the other half that is also part of our world.

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Lesson 2:1 – And I’m Home

Closing my eyes for a moment, I took a deep breath, then strode through the front door and entered the familiar foyer. Everything was where I left them, the usual knick-knacks in their various places. As I made my way further into the house, I passed by the small library room, filled with books (not all of them good, mind you). Next to the library was the small theatre room where I usually relax and enjoy my favourite shows and movies. Further into the house is, to my chagrin, a rather dusty exercise room. Walking through the hallways, my hand traces the familiar scars in the walls, each with a story of its own. At the next turn would be a picture with a faded image of that day, years ago, at the beach with my family. You can’t really make out what we’re doing, but the big smiles on our faces says it all: we’re having fun. Making my way further into the house, I dread the next turn, the next room I would find. It looks like the other rooms of the house, but this is the only one with a locked door. I know where the key to this door is; I even enter this locked room every once in a while, but not today. I heard barking a little ways down the hall and I smiled – there she is! Flubby is a looking a little mangy, but she bounds up to me, standing on her hind legs, little paws just barely reach up past my knees. We continue walking through the halls together, her chewing up the occasional slipper and I enjoying the various photos of myself and my friends and family up on the walls. I noticed Flubby making a beeline for a picture book on the ground. Recognizing the picture book, I raced over and rescued the book before it became a chew toy. It was a book my mother used to read to me. Well, it doesn’t actually have words in it so I suppose I shouldn’t say “read”. The story goes a little like this:

There was a mother duck with her three ducklings. One day, on the way to school, one of the ducklings sees a pond in a fenced up house. Noticing that the gate is slightly ajar, the little duckling sneaks in to play in the pond while its siblings continue their walk to school, unaware that their adventurous sibling had gone off to play. Later, the little duckling, having had enough fun, decides to leave the pond and join its siblings at school, but finds the gate locked shut. Meanwhile, the other two ducklings return home to tell their mother that they lost the third duckling. The mother makes her way down the same path that her children travel everyday and hears her little duckling crying, stuck behind the locked gate. Tying rope to a bucket, she throws the bucket over the gate, her little duckling crawls in, and she hauls him out.

My mother managed to add something extra to the story every time she told it to make the story new and interesting. Looking up from the story, I realized that Flubby had left and the room around me seemed hazy somehow, shimmering like a mirage. I found what I was looking for though, and I made my way back to the front of the house and shut the door behind me. I’ll be back soon.

Author’s Note:

I didn’t really know what to write for this week’s assignment, which was this: “write a short story that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home” (Paterson, “Lesson 2:1”). If this were an assignment to simply describe what home meant to me, then I would have had a more straightforward answer. To make a story, though, about what home was to me was, for some reason, difficult for me to wrap my mind around. What inspired the story above is BBC’s Sherlock and the idea of the mind/memory palace. I have a really bad memory – I tend to remember things in broad strokes or not at all. When I do remember details, they tend to be odd, useless details. I do have a decent short term memory, which is why the foyer of my story is so cluttered, but beyond that, it’s hallway after hallway, with rooms that are generalized by what they seem to contain. Even the most terrible memory holds onto some of the precious moments of the past though, and for me, two of those memories is my dog and my mom reading me bedtime stories. For me, home is a place where the memories that were made still have a hold, shaping my identity and the foundations of my perception.

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Lesson 1:3 – Stories & Shadows

Humans were once silent and shadowless. Those who walked in the light and produced darkness with their body were shunned for they had broken the sacred silence that kept the dark at bay; once a shadow is released, it can never be rescinded. There was one who had spoken, brave or stupid enough to want to see what would happen if he did so; he was driven mad by his dark passenger on the ground, following his every step and eventually, following him off a cliff. However, silence did not guarantee people a shadowless existence – there were those who said too much with their body, and though they noticed their mistake, there are traces of darkness that follow them everywhere.

Into this world, a child was birthed and abandoned, for her parents were poor and could not afford to feed her. Left in a forest, the child screamed and screamed until a passing bear found her. Though humans were silent, this was a time when animals could speak, for they did not fear the shadows and knew what the dark passenger represented. The bear raised the child as her own, and the child, growing up amongst the animals of the forest, learned to speak. As she grew older, she began to explore beyond the forest and one day came upon a village. Despite the animals’ warnings, she grew curious and decided to enter the village. The villagers, upon seeing her full-bodied shadow, captured what they thought was a madwoman and locked her up.

For three days she was held with little food or water; the girl tried to get the villagers to listen to her, to hear her explain that the dark follower was not fearsome at all. None stayed to listen so instead, she decided to tell her story. She spoke to no one in particular at first, but she was not deterred. She started with the story of her birth and abandonment, then she spoke of her Mother Bear and her Father Deer. She recounted the hilarious ventures of her Cousin Squirrel and his quest for a nut, and her Brother Rabbit, who constantly, but lovingly, complained about the sixteen mouths he had to feed. As she told these stories, more and more of the villagers gathered around her. They were wary of her shadow, but soon realized that it did them no harm, and they were far too fascinated by her stories to leave.

Suddenly a child stood up and though he did not speak – silence had muted spoken language for too long in the village – he mimed. He shared the story of his first time swimming that day, the anxiety he felt as he stared into the water’s bottomless depths, the fear as he jumped squeezing his eyes shut, and the relief as he broke through the surface of the water for air. Despite seeing the child’s shadow grow, the villagers all listened intently. Soon a pair of newly-weds stepped forward and together they danced, each step a show of their joy in their new life together – a story of love. More and more villagers stepped forward to tell their stories, and more and more shadows appeared. Some, seeing the many shadows, fell back into their usual misgivings and tried to take it all back, but the shadows could not be retracted. Others realized that their dark silhouettes were not evil nor were they to be feared. Shadows are the embodiment of stories – everyone has a story. Some tales are taller than others, and some tales, like the shadow of the wind, can never be told. Sometimes they blend with the stories around them, just as shadows blend with the surrounding darkness, but they are always there. We are all followed by the stories we tell, “for once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in world.”

Source: http://www.tlc-systems.com/dsc01698_lzn.jpg

Author’s note:

I had written another story before this, a story about a tyrant who kept his slaves isolated from the world so that they would not know freedom existed elsewhere, but then a wandering traveler sneaks into the tyrant’s land and shares the stories of other places where people are free. These stories of liberty spread amongst the slaves who then revolt against their oppressive ruler and gain their freedom. That was the story I was going to post. A friend of mine changed my mind when he spoke of shadows and how, like stories, everyone has one. What immediately came to mind was Plato’s Cave, another story of realizing that one cannot go back after experiencing something (the allegory has little to do with my story though). I knew I wanted to include anthropomorphism in this new story (one of my favourite literary devices), but beyond that I didn’t really have a plan when I began writing. I was a little apprehensive as I wrote this – I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out, or if it would make sense at all.

Telling this story was a different matter – I’m a horrible storyteller. My terrible memory makes it difficult for me to keep the sequence of events in order. I found myself constantly trying to give clarification for previous points or backtracking to fill in a plot hole. I told the story twice – once without the story in front of me and once with. Some people enjoyed the story and others thought the moral didn’t fit.

I don’t think this is my best story, but it was one I felt compelled to tell.

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