The Indelible Prints on my Mind
My friend Ramya is a storyteller. I wondered what it meant.
I know that she goes to different places and meets different groups of people to tell stories. I know that she tells stories to children, adults and the inbetweeners. That’s all I know. Having never quite LISTENED to her tell a story, except peripherally, when I lurk around the story circles where Leela and her friends listen to her stories, I never quite understood what listening to a story meant. I was often HEARING, and more often than that I was READING and UNDERSTANDING a story, and that’s what I’ve trained myself to do. Maria Popova ( her project Brain Picking is one of the best resources for the 21st century reader) talks about storytelling being the link between knowledge and wisdom, I took it in the most pedantic sense- I learn knowledge and I discover wisdom. I regarded knowledge as what I have learnt, and wisdom as, well, I guess, my ability to figure when the milk is going to boil over. I have an ingenious way of figuring this out by listening to the sound of the water for the chai boiling, and picking up the whiff of cooking milk, that floats down the hall to the balcony, where I would be waiting to wave goodbye to Leela before she takes her school bus. Everything has to be just right- the quantity of water I put on the stove which is a bit more than the amount of milk in the vessel, the heat, the direction of the morning wind and timing of Leela’s bus. There is a formula and I have perfected it over time. It is foolproof unless the conditions change.
For the last few days, I’ve been reading Kant, Iris Murdoch and Lacan to see if I can formulate a relationship between Storytelling and Cognition. Murdoch says that the objective of literature is mystification- playing roles, donning masks, pretending, imagining, storytelling, to make a form out of something, defeating the formlessness of the world. Philosophy intends to find answers to the questions pertaining to the world, living and being through classifying and clarifying. Both look at experience as a valid category, to give pleasure and entertain or to learn and understand. I’ve been struggling to find a short answer, because I was still teaching myself how to know, in this case the concepts that Kant, or Lacan or Murdoch present and therefore I fell short of making a well constructed argument for my class.
And then Ramya arrived, the storyteller.
Ramya brought her Uruli, and Kalimba, and some flowers picked from the garden. She didn’t buy any flowers. She got the one’s that had fallen on the ground. She put her colourful Sungudi dupatta next to the Uruli, and lit an aromatic candle. She added some cowrie shells to the set up. None of these objects were culturally related- it didn’t matter. She was not asking us to make meaning here. There was beauty. Beauty is sublime.
With hesitation, everyone sat in a circle. I can imagine how this can be uncomfortable. Back in time when I was part of an educational research team which was also simultaneously teaching young children, we had to do copious amounts of circle time, and I always found it hard to focus because I had to run into class as soon as this got over and start teaching. Ramya has a beautiful way of initiating her sessions. She’s gentle and she has incredible respect for everyone. She speaks in the most melodious voice I’ve ever heard. We sang with her. We began to move our rigid and reluctant body to meet her voice halfway, and then fully, smiling at our own awkwardness.
… the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer…
Ramya told us a nordic folktale, of Ashboy and the Giant. The youngest and the most insignificant son of the king goes out to find the heart of a giant. Oh, joy! I followed Ramya’s hands when she moved them. I imagined the sounds in the forest. Sometimes it came from the left, or sometimes right. I pictured the giant with his heart inside a stone, I could smell the wind across the seas, the softness of the wolf’s mane and the smell of its breath. I had a lump in my throat when Ashboy squeezed the giant’s heart. I was transfixed.
Could it be that it is just Ramya’s voice that has lured us into this forest that the giant inhabits? If that is the case, should I not be able to feel the same when I listen to an audio book? I love audio books. But I’m always distracted when I listen to them. This storytelling experience was like the opening of the third eye, an absolute awareness of your mind and body. My body was responding as it received the story. Like a blind bat, emotions flew seeking the the source of the story. We were made aware of our feelings. Then there was silence. In that silence we drew.
Ramya helped us share what we felt. Some of us thought. Some figured. Some saw. Some sang.
We then became smaller groups and shared our own stories.
Did we find the red thread. Or the multicoloured fabric of world view?
Ramya showed us how there is not one story, but that all stories become one and one story becomes all.
Memory manifested itself in quite a different way through storytelling. In the stories we shared, we reminisced, we picked up the most relevant parts of our own lives which became the seed of our story, and in that we found the essence of our lives.
The duality of inwardness and outside world can here be overcome for the subject ‘only’ when he sees the … unity of his entire life … out of the past life-stream which is compressed in memory. . . . The insight which grasps this unity . . . becomes the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.”
Ramya was profound. She said, “ in this loneliness, we realize that our stories make us not feel alone anymore”. Sharing stories is a wonderful thing. From Solidaire television and Doordarshan, to grandmother’s who upheld thrift as the value of their generation, to daughter’s becoming sons, to mothers and heels and taking wickets, our paths cross in myriad ways. We embody history in our memory. We talk of the times that are gone, without the disabling nostalgia because we haven’t realized that 30–40 years in the world is good enough to tell a story about its history, through our lives. We think our lives are separate and our own, but it took a storyteller to make us aware that we aren’t, that we have more things in common between, we are made of the same specks of dirt. I wonder if would have been possible for any of us to exchange our experiences without a story.
Ramya guided us on a moral path through the story. For the longest time I have ignored good and bad because I believed that there can’t be a good/bad. But when Ashboy returned the giant’s heart, I understood the value of good, in a manner that I have never before experienced. Of course I had perceived the good before, but here I was being persuaded into making a decision about whether I want to be what goodness embodies or the opposite. And now that I am grown up, I have the courage to stick to it, not simply bend the rules because it suits me. I do not want to be a bad person. I want to be good for my family, for the society, for gender, class, caste, for the big wide earth. I need to relearn what it means to have the values to be good to all. There is good and bad, and a neglect of good has really brought us to where we are, we are at the fag end of humanity. I have figured this. I suppose that is what Maria Popova means when she urges us to figure:
Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry — intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
The storyteller, my friend, Ramya.
The quotations used in this piece are from Walter Benjamin’s essay titled ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ [1936] which was an illuminating part of this journey for me. He talks about the loss of storyteller in the Age of Information.
