Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  The dimple is strong on our son’s lip. To survive such a rough beginning, perhaps an extra bit of angelic forgetfulness was necessary ahead of time. We left the ward after three weeks, the baby still a mystery to the doctors.

  Jacob somehow landed. He is eleven now, as I write this in 2003. When he was younger, after breakfast and before school he liked to lie on the couch, wave a massive toy sword in the air, and tell himself long stories about a superhero named Jacob. I listened at the door and thought of the immense distances heroes travel, and the great risks they take on their journeys. I remember how a Star Boy followed the signal of a human voice and chose to come all the way in.

  I once heard someone ask Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill—a.k.a. Brother Blue—why he tells stories. He answered, “I tell stories to keep people from committing suicide.” When normal talk breaks down, only the language of Story can express the extreme truths, both bitter and joyful, of human experience. “The story,” claims an elder in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, “is our escort. Without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns and directs us.” Scheherazade’s thousand and one stories redeemed the king’s sick soul because they made a tapestry large enough to reflect and challenge even Shahriyar’s violent despair. Edward the farmer heard something in the absurd folk tale that sparked a long-lost laugh. The doomed child soldier from Sierra Leone caught an echo of his own possible future in the story Laura Simms told. And what did the three-week-old infant hear through his haze of pain and ubiquitous soundscape of beeps? I like to imagine the stories carried enough love and warmth and beauty that the baby’s soul, hearing such earth-music, chose not to leave. Perhaps all storytelling is emergency storytelling.

  DREAMING A NEW MYTH

  With myths, one should not be in a hurry.

  ITALO CALVINO, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

  A STORYTELLING FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME a story about an anthropologist who happened to be in an African village when the first television was introduced. For about two weeks, the people were captivated by its images, sounds and shows. The old man who was the tribe’s greatest storyteller stayed by his fire. After a while, people began to drift away from the TV and gather again by the fire. The anthropologist, observing this, asked one of the villagers why they no longer watched TV. “Don’t you think the television knows more stories than the old man? He’s never left the district and the TV brings in shows from around the world.” “Oh yes,” replied the villager. “The television knows more stories, but the storyteller knows me.”

  A Gaelic proverb says that Every force evolves a form. The forms of the storytelling renaissance have sprung from a deeply felt hunger for intimacy, for community, for continuity with the past, for a language of Story through which to speak wisdom. We live at a time of great changes, some positive, some so troubling they are almost beyond human capacity to comprehend. With all of our new technologies of instant data transmission, human beings have never felt more disconnected from our neighbours, families, communities, and nature.

  I believe that without forgetting our old and longstanding stories and religious beliefs, we must find a new cycle of stories to help us navigate this unknown terrain. At various periods of history, humans have turned to myth to provide a frame of moral and spiritual understanding. Such a moment has come again. It is time to dream a fresh myth.

  In The Lord of The Rings, Tolkien has a wise old treecreature recall the way the ancient earth-people gained their extraordinary power: “They always wanted to talk to everything, the old Elves did.” Our greatest hope for survival today is to take a lesson from these elven conversational skills. If we only ever hear and repeat our own story, if we fail to open our ears to new and different voices, the consequences will be both dangerous and extreme. We need a myth to teach us how to listen in a new way to the earth, to each other, to our children, to our dreams. The hero of our new myth could be called, simply, Listener.

  Listener, of course, isn’t new at all. In fact, Listener is one of the oldest spirits in the world, and is an essential part of our everyday lives. Listener was present when I sat by our son’s crib in the neonatal intensive care unit and recited Chaucer for dear life. Listener was there as the Bolton Camp boys sat around the campfire hearing ghostly tales. Listener is part of every storytelling jam in the world, giving the host the courage to welcome others to the fire. Listener blesses the rare councils where the poor and the powerful hear each other’s stories, or when enemies hear a note of truth in each other’s voices. Listener’s spirit sustains the storyteller’s art, from the concert stages of our great festivals to the loving words of every mother or father who puts a child to bed with an improvised yarn. Listener also lives in scientific labs and field studies. My friend Keith Hopper, a scientist who studies insect populations around the world, recalled what his professor George Salt used to tell his students: “Like St. Francis, zoologists must speak with animals. The trick is to speak clearly enough that the animals hear, and to listen carefully enough to make sense of their response—and never to speak so loudly that the only response is fright.” All of these things take place within the circle of Listener’s powerful blessing. Listener is the mysterious force that allows stories to spark from a storyteller’s tongue—human and beyond-human—directly into the soul of the “behearer.”

  We can find traces of our myth-to-be in the old wonder tales. In these stories, the act of listening is often as heroic as any battle with a dragon. Say you’re walking down the road and you hear a voice down by your shoes. “Friend, I’m hungry. Share your bread and I’ll share a secret.” On the ground, looking up at you, is a skinny mouse. The mouse is talking to you. What do you do next? The onceupon-a-time stories counsel you to stop and listen, no matter how urgent your journey. Rest a while. Share your bread, even if you’ve little enough as it is. Above all, don’t show your surprise that the mouse is talking, or your shock that you understand its words. Those who ride haughtily by, too proud to listen to a dusty mouse, condemn themselves to dreary inconsequence; sometimes they get turned to stone, but mostly their terminal mediocrity is its own punishment. The true hero, so the stories teach, is the one who is open to hearing new voices, no matter how strange their provenance. In wonder tales, wisdom speaks in unexpected voices. The trick is learning to listen. Your open-hearted listening shows that you have the quality to one day contend with dragons and discover firebirds.

  It isn’t easy to listen like this. We like our talk to come in familiar voices and from familiar places. Socrates, in his dialogue with Phaedrus, tells an ancient myth and Phaedrus scoffs, “It is easy for you, Socrates, to make up tales from Egypt or anywhere else you fancy.” Socrates responds, “Oh, but the authorities of the temple of Zeus at Dodona, my friend, said that the first prophetic utterances came from an oak tree. In fact the people of those days… were content in their simplicity to listen to trees or rocks, provided these told the truth.” We don’t go through daily life listening to mice, dreams, oak trees or, as in Harold Courlander’s West African story “Talk,” yams: “Well, at last you’re here. You never weeded me, but now you come around with your digging stick. Go away and leave me alone!” (The farmer runs away screaming when he hears this indignant yam.)

  In Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, an account of California’s Pit River people, a shaman gives this advice: if you want to find power, you must be willing to hear about it from strange sources; go walking alone in the mountains; keep your ears open; sing your best medicine song: “The dragonfly came to me / with news from my home. / I lie in the afternoon / looking toward the hills.”

  Our world today can seem far removed from myth and mythtellers. “Because a people coevolve with their habitat,” writes Sean Kane in Wisdom of the Mythtellers, “because they walk the paths their ancestors walked, mythtelling assumes that the stories already exist in nature, waiting to be overheard by humans who will listen for them.” He is writing about hunt
ing/gathering societies quite remote from where and when I live, in Toronto, Canada, in the early years of the twenty-first century. As I write this book I can hear streetcars clatter by, jets fly overhead, a telephone ringing, a microwave beeping, and a cartoon character bellowing from a television in the living room. It’s not easy to hear the voice of myth in a world that has so thoroughly forgotten its ancestors and their paths.

  Yet myth does echo in our lives, even when we don’t realize it. I was giving a storytelling workshop to camp counsellors at a camp on Lake Couchiching. When I asked them if the camp had a resident ghost, they told me they didn’t go in much for scary stories. I asked if there wasn’t some kind of spirit haunting the woods, and the young counsellors smiled and said yes, come to think of it, there was a traditional camp spirit. Finnigan the Elf was said to live out there in the forest around the camp. Finnigan wasn’t a scary monster, but more like a leprechaun. He helped lost children and befriended lonely ones. They liked to tell the story of Finnigan to first-year campers to help them feel at home there.

  Camp Couchiching is in Anishnabe territory, land that has been continuously inhabited for many thousands of years. When I heard about Finnigan the Elf, I remembered Basil Johnston’s story “The Little Boy in the Tree” (you can find it in Next Teller: A Book of Canadian Storytelling, which I edited in 1994). Johnston, a great Anishnabe storyteller and scholar, describes the maemaegawaehnse, “a little being akin to an elf, who dwells in the forest. This being bears a special kinship to children, coming to them to uplift their spirits should they be despondent, or conducting them back home should they wander away into the forest on their own.” The maemaegawaehnse had never stopped haunting—or more accurately, blessing—the forest on the shore of Lake Couchiching. It had simply taken on a different name. The counsellors were astonished to realize they had re-created a myth that had been told on that land, in those woods, by that lake, since the beginning of time.

  I believe that humans have never lost our instinct for myth. As a child, for example, I fell in love with Athena. I also admired one-eyed Odin, gentle Baldur, fiery Thor, mischievous Hermes; but I felt quite passionate about the beautiful, grey-eyed goddess of wisdom. I was fascinated by the idea that these gods and goddesses once walked among us, shifting or imposing our fate, partaking of human emotion on a divine scale. “To those who think the myths,” writes Robert Bringhurst, describing the Haida mythtellers of the nineteenth century, “the creatures who inhabit them are real and not fictitious.” I thought the myths, and wanted them to be real; but I also knew to my sorrow that Athena wouldn’t ever visit my middle-class Jewish neighbourhood in northwest Detroit. Even so, I enjoyed the idea that she’d once been a real part of things; had once, for example, guided Odysseus, my hero and hers too, home to Ithaka. Faraway as these things were from my 1950s American childhood, I loved the idea that world-shaking thunder, mind-shaking wisdom, surpassing desire, great craft and divine skill had once been so closely woven into the warp of human affairs.

  Alongside my awe and affection for the old gods, there was also, of course, God, the protective, though sometimes wrathful, force I knew from my own ancestry. To this One I made my evening prayers, asking for blessings for my parents, my grandparents and my dog (a black mutt named Cerberus, after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades), and protection from the hydrogen bombs we were sure were about to fall on Detroit. I was around eleven when I switched allegiance from Mount Olympus to a more modern but equally immortal hero whose chariot was an Aston Martin, whose nectar was a martini (shaken not stirred), and who had a Zeus-like predilection for mortal women. Yet even in the world of 007 I never forgot my first love for grey-eyed Athena and one-eyed Odin.

  Now I’d like to dream a new myth for an ancient spirit. For this myth to become a real part of our lives, many others must join in the dreaming. Myths, I’m convinced, are born from shared dreams. The Australian aboriginals call Creation the Dreamtime, and their myths the Dreaming. It may be the world is ready for a great new dreaming. If we put all of our stories of listening together, Listener’s story will emerge.

  One of my favourite Hasidic stories is about a time the Baal Shem Tov and his faithful scribe went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The ship was becalmed, and the sailors blamed their Jewish passengers, assuming they had brought bad luck, and threatened to kill them. The worst part of it was that the Baal Shem Tov had forgotten all of his mighty prayers, and couldn’t call for divine help. His student implored him to try, but he remembered nothing. Finally, the great teacher and storyteller asked his scribe what he could recall. Slowly, painfully, he remembered something: the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He began, tentatively, to murmur them aloud: Aleph, bet. The Baal Shem Tov repeated the letters, and even these, the simplest elements of language, had such power that they were saved from catastrophe.

  The observations, stories and ideas in this book are my “Aleph, bet.” They are still only fragments of a myth, the barely audible echoes of Listener’s footsteps coming over the horizon of our twenty-first-century lives. “Not we but those who come after,” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien, “will make the legends of our time.” If that great mythteller is right, then it is our grandchildren who may one day tell the story of Listener’s beneficent spirit, and of a time when men and women learned again to listen to each other, to nature, and to the wee mouse on the road.

  A PRAISE FOR LISTENER

  Listener,

  you abide wherever

  stories are told

  guiding the words home

  to the hearts of the behearers—

  You are there when a parent tells at a child’s bedside,

  when a bard performs before the queen,

  when a camp counsellor spins ghost-talk by a bright fire,

  when the elder gives the tribe its history—

  You are there when one prisoner whispers deliverance to another,

  when the scientist records the language of molecules and rivers,

  deployments of galaxies and quick chemical reactions,

  when animals listen to the wind or to each other—

  You are there when we try to hear Worldmaker’s First Story

  in the myriad voices of creation—

  You are there for the longest stories,

  and always stay to the very end,

  all-nighters, epics and sagas,

  weeklong creation myths,

  following the winding thread of the tale

  til it ends by dawn-light and ember-glow—

  You are there for quick stories told en route and every day,

  anecdotes, fables, proverbs, miniature wisdoms,

  the briefest mind-movie,

  the flash of a dream—

  All stories belong to you, Listener,

  and all storytellers find shelter

  in the circle of your ancient blessing—

  You teach us to kindle the hearthfire,

  to fetch the wine, hand out the cookies,

  give granny an extra blanket to coax an extra tale,

  for you understand that grannies need extra blankets

  and storytellers need generous listeners—

  You are in the old-time stories,

  the ones where heroes fare forth to find their fortunes

  and there on the road

  they meet a misshapen beggar,

  a hungry mouse,

  an ancient crone,

  who says, “Share your bread and I will share my wisdom”—

  the arrogant older princes,

  the haughty, impatient princesses

  they can’t be bothered to listen

  and they ride past to their own dreary destinies—

  the true heroes stop,

  they share their hearing as generously

  as they share their bread—

  for this is Listener’s way:

  when things begin to talk, do not ride past or run away—

  break your journey, rider,


  share your meal—

  stay and listen,

  even if the story comes from unlikely sources,

  a weird mouse or unkempt vagabond,

  the earth itself or even a dream—

  maybe you’ll hear an interesting story—

  maybe the story is about you—

  maybe the story will change everything—

  O Listener,

  let us dream a new myth for you,

  let us imagine that your great and generous spirit

  will dwell among us,

  teaching us to hear each other,

  to hear nature,

  to hear even the smallest voices—

  I became a storyteller to honour you,

  Many have become storytellers in your name—

  O Listener,

  May we learn your passion for staying until the very end,

  your kindness when the storyteller begins,

  and your love for every story

  the world has to tell.

  STORIES

  This is a collection of seven stories from my repertoire. They are all based on traditional patterns that I’ve rewoven with new yarn. The longest of them, “The Storyteller At Fault,” is a linked series of stories told within a frame story about a king and a storyteller. It is a loving homage to the Thousand and One Nights, and echoes its theme of life-and-death storytelling. The shortest story is a new creation myth about how human tongues came to be red. The others, to varying degrees, I’ve discussed in a previous chapter. I invite you to retell any you like. A Tuscan proverb has it that “A story is no good unless you add your own spice to it.” Please feel free to add spice. I offer these ideas, suggestions and stories in the memory of my own good teachers, and knowing that you—as I continue to do—must find your own voice, repertoire and artistic purpose.