“I’m going to tell you a story.”
“Tell me a story.”
“It’s about how evil came into the world.”
“Is this a story you made up, or one that you read on Reddit or something?”
“It’s one that I have adapted from another creation story.”
“Okay. Tell me a story.”
“It’s short. But all great things start with just a seed.”
“Just tell me the story.”
“That’s an important part of the story.”
“Okay, sorry, I’ll be quiet. Really, go.”
———-
Once upon a time, a long time ago, before the Earth was called Earth, and before animals had shapes and made the sounds that you know them for today, there was just a tumbling world of spirits. Each spirit was free to change shape and form in any way it pleased, and had no constraints on its movements. These spirits lived in bliss, for they saw no difference in one another. They were the same, but different, adaptable, and free. They had no skin colour, gender, or distinct unchangeable features that set them apart from one another, yet they were all unique.
Every year these spirits got together to hold a friendly contest, and every year the theme of the contest changed. The year previous the theme was “Who can make the silliest joke?” and a few years before that the theme was “What is the biggest shape you can make?” That year one spirit grew and grew and grew until he became the Sun. It liked being the Sun so much that it decided to stay as the Sun, even though it had the option to change into anything else at any time. In fact, it holds that choice to this day, and should the Sun decide, it could change back into a shapeless spirit at any time.
One year the theme of the contest was “Who can create the scariest thing?” The spirits all worked hard on this, as they do every year. Some spirits worked together to create a spectacularly frightening dance, while other spirits worked alone to produce charms or spells, or morph into a particularly terrifying creature. When nearly all of the spirits had performed, and there was only one spirit left, everyone crowded around eagerly to see what it had to offer. Because, even though they were all thinking about their own performance, and hoping greatly that they should win the contest, they still supported each other and wanted each spirit to do their best.
The last spirit grew larger, and everyone in the crowd became quiet. The spirit then did something very unusual. It told a story. It told a story of horrible things: blood, murder, fear, anger, rape, genocide, starvation, greed, and more. When the story was done, a silence held the crowd still.
“Take it back now. We agree that you have created the scariest thing. But take it back now.
“I don’t know how. I cannot.”
And what the spirit spoke was true. For once a story is released, it becomes a spirit of its own, and cannot be contained. The spirits soon dispersed, but the story stayed on their minds. They retold the story to each other, trying to remember the details. But, as it is with any creature, the story changed shape and morphed with every retelling.
A strange thing happened to the spirits as well. As they retold their story, remember the pieces that were important to them, they started to lose their ability to change. One spirit retold the parts of greed and poor health, and found himself in the shape of a tree, fearful of being cut down. Another spirit retold of hunger and homelessness, and found himself in the shape of a squirrel, fearful of losing the forest and not being able to find enough food for the winter. And so and so it went, each spirit turning into the creatures we have come to know today, each one fearful of a different thing, but all fears stemming from the same story.
We are no different. Some of those spirits changed into people, fearful of their own version of the story.
———
I’ll admit that I only told this story to my girlfriend, but I retold it a twice. The first time I told her over Skype, making up bits and pieces as I went along. The story was rough around the edges, and I wasn’t very happy with it. I rewrote the story, this time having a script of what I wanted to say. I read it out to her, and she stopped me a few times, asking questions such as “What’s the relevance of the Sun?” I told her that I thought it was cute, added to the creationist part of the story, and I thought that it was fun to explain a non-scientific end to the Sun. “Oh, I thought it was because you wanted to have a contrast between light and dark, good and evil. And the fear of the Sun dying sort of clouds that, making something dark out of something that is supposed to be pure light.” …Umm…Yep, that too. She is more clever than I.
But, with her comments, I found it amazing how a reader (or listener) can take so much more out of a story than the author put in. I had added the tale of the Sun for my own reasons, and she took meaning from that in her own way. This highlighted the entire point of the project in a way that I could not phrase into words eloquently enough. A story changes shape, it affects everyone in a different way, and like a picture posted on the internet, once it’s out, there is no getting it back.
Hi Charlotte, it was a pleasure reading your blog, and I love your style and tone, really easy to read and follow on a Monday afternoon 😉
I really appreciated the mini story you told and documented before your Evil story, giving us a sense of the oral nature of your story telling. There’s a sense that stories can be very attractive or repelling, and I got the sense your girlfriend was anxious to hear it. I had very much the same experience telling my story, the audience eager to hear. It goes to show a sense of “hear (here) and now” that telling oral stories brings to the table in comparison to scribal and written stories. We are eager to hear in the here. It’s much harder to block yourself away from hearing a story, than it is to put down a book, knowing it will be where it was inscribed forever, and not lost in the sound waves. That being said, I think we’ve learned in this blog assignment and reading King’s story that this doesn’t diminish the power of oral stories, but only enhances it. There seems to be something about hearing a story in the “here and now” that makes it exist in one’s present, forever. Hopefully that made some sense…?
“I don’t know how. I cannot.” I loved this part in your blog, simply put and tremendously accurate. With memory being such a big part of oral story telling, it seems impossible to erase a story from one’s memory like that of ink on a page. This I think is one of orality’s strongest powers: it’s ability to transcend time and human memory limitations. Stories become a part of you, rather than an extension of you.
“I found it amazing how a reader (or listener) can take so much more out of a story than the author put in”. This quote of your blog stood out to me in relation to both our course and today’s technological age. In present day, story-telling has become a journey for one to take in the construction of another story. Hyperlinks are one example of this. Being taken from one place in one story, to another place of a whole different story with the click of a mouse. Stories are now able to grow, mutate and change like never before. This being said, our individual stories that we tell, do you think these lose individuality? Does a story’s ability to mutate also garner a loss of message and meaning?
Questions to consider. Thanks for the blog post, and rock on!
– Jeffrey Liu
Hi Jeff, thank you for your comments.
Because I had told this story orally, but decided to write it out rather than record myself, I wanted to add an element of the oral into it. Thus, recreating the conversation between my girlfriend and myself to try to bring the audience in, as if they were in the room, listening to the conversation as well. I’m glad you connected to that.
To answer your question, I’m not sure that I would argue that a story loses its meaning through the retelling of it. On the contrary, because a person has to connect on a personal level of a story, adapting it to create our own meaning allows a story to maintain its message and meaning. Look at the story all of us just retold. Each one different and unique, and yet all able to hold onto the same basic meaning of the story.
You example of hyperlinks helping to expand a story does ring true. It opens up a door to so many other stories to be told. While this does help to expand the story, I would also argue that it helps to bring it back to the creator. A hyperlink can help an outsider understand a little bit of the background of the creator, giving them a better understanding of how they came to an interpretation of a story. The hyperlinks are connections we bring to our posts to allow others a glimpse at our mode of thinking. So, while a hyperlink allows a story to expand in all directions, it also connects us deeper into the mind of the author. What are your thoughts?
Charlotte
Hi Charlotte,
Thanks for sharing your story! I loved your opening which sets the story up as primarily oral, even if this version is written. It reminds me of native writing, like Thomas King’s and Harry Robinson’s. Your girlfriend’s impatience reminds me of Coyote’s impatience in King’s writing!
I really liked your ending! I love your description of stories as constantly changing, as oral tales do, then slowly becoming frozen. I loved the way you depicted the spirits becoming frozen as they allowed the stories to constrain them. Sadly, too many of us do this. This ties in nicely with your comments last week about religious creation stories not being open to change and locking people into a narrow mindset. You did a good job of making the point subtly in this story!
I loved your comment about how your girlfriend found meaning in the story you hadn’t put there. I had a high school English teacher who told us that nothing was in the novels we were studying by accident; that the authors carefully planned everything out. That used to drive me insane as even as a teenager my friends and teachers had found meaning in my writing I’d been completely unaware of! We each bring our own background to the stories we read and hear. As the cliché goes, “What we see is behind our eyes” (and what we hear behind our ears?). It’s really cool when someone adds some neat meaning to something you’ve written (or in this case, told), eh? Although, telling a story also opens up the possibility of having negative interpretations attached to it. As you said, “once a story is released, it becomes a spirit of its own, and cannot be contained.” Do you think we should be more wary of the stories we tell?
Heather
Hi Heather, thank you for your comments.
Like I had told Jeff above, the point of the dialogue at the start was to try to bring the audience into the room, as if they were there, listening to the conversation before the story was told. I had hopped that this made it easier to imagine the story told orally. I’m glad you were able to connect to this.
The ending changed more times than the rest of the story. I had a little trouble ending it, to be honest. Should I make a list of possible fears humans may have? Should they be mundane such as “fear of heights, fear of the dark” or should they be deeper fears, such as “fear of death, fear of being wrong”? In the end I decided to leave it up to the reader to decide what fears they brought with them.
The connection to spirits getting stuck in their stories, and the way we get stuck in our stories did not occur to me when I first came up with the concept, but by the time the story was written, I definitely did notice it. Thank you for pointing it out! Isn’t it funny how even authors can find more meaning in their work than the had originally intended? Writing is a great reflection of our own ideas/conceptions/misconceptions/prejudices/desires/etc, even if we don’t realize it at the time.
I had teachers to taught that as well, and I couldn’t believe it! Granted, some authors are very intelligent, and fully intended to add hidden meaning into their stories, but a story is so much deeper than what is written on the page. Every anecdote, conversation, name, or object can have an effect on the way a person reacts to the story. I will bet that most authors would be impressed by the meaning scholars have taken out of their works, not realizing at the time the connections they were making (the connections people saw in the words).
We do need to be careful of the stories we tell, I have no doubt of that. A story can change a person’s entire outlook on life. We need to remember that our stories make up our truths. This is not just true for the typical “story” with a beginning, middle, and end, but for all stories we tell: “He hit me first” / “I have no idea who ate your cookie” / “I swear I didn’t tell anyone!” This is something we are told as small children. A lie is a story that we don’t believe ourselves, yet we pass it off as something we believe. These are types of stories we need to be careful of. I think it all comes down to being careful of what you say. Our mothers’ warning holds: “Think twice before you speak. You can never take back something you have said.”
Charlotte
Hey Charlotte,
Thanks for the great response and sorry about my delay in getting back to you! There are certainly authors who intentionally add a lot of levels to their stories; however, I will never believe that everything understood is intended. As you said, we each have our own background and bring our own luggage to what we read/see/hear. I know I’ve been amazed by the connections people have found in my writing!
Everything we say is a story of some sort. Our whole perception of the world is built upon our stories, so even things that seem to be hard truth are really built on nothing more than story (which takes us back to Chamberlin’s discussion of science).
I’ve enjoyed discussing this with you and hope we’ll have more discussions in the future!
Heather
Hi Charlotte!
Nice to meet you over the blog setting, it is a little unusual to say I’ve “met” you but nonetheless your story was a pleasure to read! I loved the addition of the dialogue at the beginning of your story. I felt it really settled me into a place where I could fully comprehend your story and really enjoy it. It made me feel like a kid, waiting to hear about a surprise or something I was anticipating. Like Jeff mentioned above, it sounds like your girl friend was anxious and full on ready to hear your story, as was I when I was reading the dialogue between the two of you.
I like how you mentioned you only told this one person, yet when I read your dialogue I pictured a group a people behind/in front/beside you waiting to hear the story as well. Something about “I have a story to tell you” reminds me of a group of people sitting in front of a speaker waiting eagerly for a show to start. It’s almost like we as story tellers are famous and we have an audience.
I am stuck in wonder lust with your quote “It’s short but all great things start with a seed”. This made my mind wonder for a few minutes. I was hardly able to continue reading the story until my thoughts processed because I love the idea of something small starting everything, just like something as small as our assignment starters: “I have a story to tell you”. That little line of dialogue has started 32 brains to create new stories and thoughts about something as small as “evil” and turned it into a bunch of unique stories.
Do you think it is important to orally tell a story for it to be effective? Or do you think we can simply read a story in a book or on a computer screen and get the same effect?
Talk to you soon!
Jessica Ramsey
Hi Jessica,
It’s a pleasure to meet you as well! 🙂 I’m so happy to hear that the dialogue at the start was received well by those who read it. It was fully intended to mimic a story told orally. I looked the way authors such as Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Andersen wrote their stories as if speaking to a group of people. It blends the written story with the oral story in such a unique, engaging way.
I’m also pleased to hear you liked my seed metaphor. My girlfriend laughed a little at me for this, but I thought it was deeply intellectual. A story can start from just a small seed. As you said, “I have a story to tell you” launched 32 minds into a whirlwind of original thought.
I don’t think that it is completely necessary for a story to be told orally or be effective. The presence of books, and the continued increase of literacy in the world goes to show that it is not necessary. However, it is an important part of story telling. We tell each other stories every day. They not all follow the same format, but even the simple “Hey, man, how was your weekend?” is a common way to learn the stories of another. It all boils down to preference, I suppose. Some people love finding a small corner and letting their inner narrator bring them into another world, while others would prefer to listen to podcasts, while others still prefer the theater. What do you prefer?
Charlotte
Thank you for your story Charlotte 😉 some good dialogue too. I am wondering what will happen to the story if you memorize and tell it by heart …. )