1.3: Taking a spin with words

I decided to take a big spin on Leslie Silko’s myth of how evil came into the world, and by big, I mean that I changed the whole thing and only kept the ending. Hope you enjoy it! I certainly learned a few things from the feedback that has allowed me to reflect more sincerely on the impact of words and stories. Here it is…

This is a story about the crowding of the world. But perhaps it’s not what you think. It was words, you see. In the beginning, there was only one who could speak words. Her name was Grace. She would sing and laugh and talk to the trees, but the trees could not speak her language. So, she got lonely. She needed another with whom she could share her words. So she created one. His name was Passion, and he loved to shout and bellow his words deeply. He was different than her, but Grace admired it. They had many children who loved to speak as well, but each were unique in their speech. And the family grew and grew and some moved away, over the sea and across the world. Their language started to change and take new forms, new words and accents. As the words grew, so did the people. More and more until the world was stuffed with them. And the more words we learned the more we had to share, and the peoples continued to grow because of it.

One day, someone said, “There are too many of us, mother earth can’t possibly support us much longer. We must call back the words that have been the cause of this unending growth.”

One man replied, “But the words cannot stop. They run the world. But we might be careful about the words we use. Surely that will count for something, or words will be the end of us.”

So, be careful about the stories you tell AND the stories you listen to because once a story is told it can never be taken back.

This story resonated well with the people I told it to and I got many insightful responses. Here were my favorites…

• Be careful what you say
• We are all interconnected in some way, through words, regardless of ethnicity or beliefs.
• People determine that words have power and that the power of words have created problems
• Words/stories are permanent.
• Words can mean different things to different people based on time and culture. As they spread they grow and change like a game of telephone.

I was curious to see what response I would get from Silko’s original tale, and if those responses would correlate with my version, so I told her story to a separate group of people. What I discovered was that people did not really understand the premise of Silko’s myth. They were more worried about the witched and the contest and when it finally got down to the theme of “be careful about the stories you tell” it came across a though it were a riddle. Like, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it the evil words that caused evil actions, or evil actions that inspired the words? I myself felt like I was caught in a circle with her story. How can somebody speak about evil unless evil has been seen? But then, where would someone think to do an evil action unless they had heard about it and the rewards of the wrongdoing? I believe a good story forces the reader to ask questions. In a way, it is how we discover meaning for ourselves that may not have been intended in the text.

This article puts Leslie Silko’s story into a little bit of a better perspective. It provides some background on her myth if anyone is interested!

Work Cited:

Austgen, Suzanne M.. “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and the Effects of White Contact on Pueblo Myth and Ritual.” N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2015. http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_2.html

“Chicken or the Egg.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print