STORY IS A SHARP KNIFE
A story is a spirit-being, not repertoire, allegory, or a form of psychology. If a story decides to be told by you, then here is a couple of suggestions for establishing a significant level of respect. One, feed it. Literally feed it. Leave it a glass of something lovely – maybe a shot of Ardbeg whisky and an oat biscuit and good honey. Leave it in the same place every time so the stories know where to go to receive the gifts. Building a small wooden story hut with delicate engravings could be a start. Two, study it. Look at as many versions of the story throughout culture as you can find. If it talks about a whale road or a sword fight then go to the ocean or take up fencing – follow its leads. This pursuit is a sign of respect, that you take the story seriously. Just don’t mistake that research or lines on paper as where the story really lives. It’s more a gesture of decency and readyness.

If it really wants you to tell it, you should find that you can inhabit the rough characters of everyone in it, including animals. If you can’t, it may be a clue to wait a while. Stories are not about a lightning quick performative rendering: I cooked in one story for fifteen years before I considered uttering a word of it.

Get to know your own inner weather – if you are a generally placid, loving sort, then leaving a mug of red beer out for the spirit of Beowulf may be a tricky fit, although at the same time it could bring out depths unimagined. But any audience will sense in a spilt-second any disconnect between you and the textures of the narrative. It’s rather like a lump like me trying to wade through the Bhagavad Gita. Stories are not at ‘our disposal’ in this way, that’s a reckless idea.

Recently the storyteller Robin Williamson – Chief Bard of the order of Bards, Ovates and Druid, sat in my house with a harp and talked for six hours straight on the four branches of the Mabinogion. What became clear was how unfitting the word ‘voice’ was for what came out of his mouth. After almost seventy years on the planet, it is at turns raspy, angelic, guttural, cackly and melodic. It makes jumpy turns at very unusual moments. It is a gravel creek bed that the salmon of insight lays its eggs in. The old ones say that the more time you spend in the Otherworld then the stronger your voice is. So for mythtellers, that is the place to go.

So check your cadence out, your accent, your vocal dance. If young, don’t beat yourself up about it being lively and high, life will rub that off, there is no need to hurry. Mythtelling points towards the vitality of the elders – keen as us younger ones may be, something unfurls with age that we can’t ignore.

So we could be like Finnegas waiting for the salmon by the Boyne, with patience and good humour, abiding in the music of ‘what is’.

Our voice is part of our own personal eco system. Contained within it are differing tribal groups. The cadence of our family and region, inflections brutally introduced by television (even children in Devon now use the syntax of Australian soaps, every sentence ending up high, as if you are asking a question), or words influenced by workmates, travel or university. Within just one storyteller’s voice is a convergence of ancestral, regional and enforced influence.

It sees nothing where it has been seen
by all eyes in the climax forests
that pass in slow succession after fires.
Even the white bear may have known it
glazed by the last touch of the glacier
that, miles away, broke it off the mountain.
The story of its roll down here
to this surprising presence,
its ride with the field of stones
that made Maine hard to farm, and again hard,
is soon told.
I take this boulder as a landmark
and pass by
in the deep woods on my road to friends.
to this surprising presence

Can you elaborate on the relationship you make with peripéteia and epistrophé?

The implication is intriguing. I have some sense of the Hindu notion of a revolving cosmos, Blakes “The Second Coming,” and the mythic departure from the linear that is implied by epistrophé.

I am also deeply interested in the peripéteia (reversals?) that occur as the image driven mythic-gesture is played out in life (I would also like to see more of what you mean by peripéteia in this context).

In this article, I am fascinated with how these two notions are connected. It suggests that the cosmos, once one departs from our culture’s more linear sensibility, rightly encompasses an anti-structured and possibly helical reality that a myopic and reductionist worldview is simply ill prepared to entertain. More importantly, one quickly realizes that an evidentiary and purely logical understanding is soon so limited that it can be characterized as much by what it leaves out as what it apprehends. “Softening of the boundaries” opens fissures in the psyche through which all manner of “images” may enter to disrupt a neatly packaged reality. I suspect that this is, in part, what you are after.

Again, kudo’s for a profound piece.