advent ix: into incandescence

Thanks to Neil Gaiman's 'blog (as usual: he always points out interesting things), I have discovered 'The Moth', an organisation dedicated to... well, story-telling. According to their website,

The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch. After moving to New York, George missed the sense of connection he had felt sharing stories with his friends back home, and he decided to invite a few friends over to his New York apartment to tell and hear stories.

I'm a writer. While I love a good story, I work in a written medium because I'm a language fanatic and a reader. But oral story-telling traditions have a fascination of their own, not least because it was how stories worked from the formation of self-consciousness until mass-literacy. The Grimms' collections of fairy tales were taken from oral versions. Folklore and myth come from tales spread by word-of-mouth. Commonality between oral traditions underline the basic similarity of humanity across culture, while still speaking to the uniqueness of each individual person and civilisation.

Today most things are written down. We read stories to children but usually only until they're old enough to read for themselves. Poetry and short-story readings are often held but usually only attended to hear an artist read their own work. We have book clubs and so read together more often than we sit down to tell stories to one another. Modern folklore - in the form of urban legends - are spread though story-telling but more often through written mediums, via e-mail or websites, for example. (In fact, when I was considering topics for my third year Writing Theory thesis, there was discussion of viewing certain forms of literature as the modern replacement for the oral story-telling tradition of what are relatively distant cultures now. The final opinion was that the topic was too large for a small thesis and was duly abandoned.)

In some ways, it's curious that this kind of tradition continues at all. Most people in the modern world are literate: they may not be reading high art but they can - and, considering the reactions to Harry Potter, do - read stories. In another way, its both reassuring and utterly unnecessay. It's nice to know that story-telling can by considered important and emphasised in this way. But at the same time, it smacksof elitism, making oral story-telling something only achievable by 'story-tellers' (in this case, writers). Every one of us tells someone a story every day, about what we've done or what we think. Story-telling is innate to humanity. As Jeanette Winterson wrote,

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

~ 'Art Objects' ~ Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery ~

Mankind creates and, more than anything else, we tell stories. I don't know that any particular sort of story should be privileged over any other. I don't think that a formal story, performed with the appropriate rituals (whether they be told around a fire while wearing a mask or on stage with a microphone in one hand and glass of wine in the other), should be considered of more innate value than an idle tale told between friends. They may express different things, the depth of their meaning may differ but they still have significance for the people telling and hearing them.

On the other hand, if you're interested, there's a podcast to which one can subscribe which provides you with one 'Moth' story a week. Judge for yourself.