Animystic » story telling

All of it… and dinosaur pee

Adam — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 10:03:11 +0000

When my daughter was very young, I used to take that malicious paternal delight in suggesting to her that what she was drinking contained what was very likely once dinosaur pee. Bless the resilience of young children, I haven’t disturbed her for life ;-p but it did lead on to the discussions about the hydrologic cycle.

I brought it up again yesterday… “Do you remember when you were little, and I would tell you that what you were drinking very probably contained dinosaur pee”. Quizzical look. “No”, she said, so I explained adding “You’ve covered the water cycle at school?”.

“Over and over again,” she groaned, with a roll of the eyes.

“But with a something new added each time?”

“Yes.”

“And you know the water molecules are not destroyed or newly created except in unusual circumstances… they likely stck around for a long time?”

“Yes.”

“So your probably drinking dinosaur pee!”

“OK, but it is clean isn’t it?”

“Of course it is… you only get the molecule of water, not actually the pee… and donkey sweat, and…”

“OK Dad, I get it… I get it.”

Where the sky ends and space begins

Adam — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:42:32 +0000

Grammatically very rough, this was written in about 20 minutes as a stream of consciousness metaphor… but when I came to work on it, every change destroyed something. So you are left with the poor grammar, paragraphs starting with conjunctions etc.

I once knew a story about a boy called Hugh, who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Hugh knew what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Hugh knew how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one. But Hugh did not know where the sky ended and space began.

Hugh grew up, as we all do. He learned how a girl’s smile could melt his insides all the way from his throat down to his groin and how confusing that could be. He learned how songs that he heard when he broke up could make him feel as bad as he did when he broke up. He discovered communication in the widening of the eyes. And, with each passing year, his yearning to discover where the sky ends and space begins grew stronger and stronger.

Hugh became a man. He observed how he and his wife became we, rather than you and I. And that we became I and I became we and distinction blurred. He observed the emergence of consciousness as his daughter grew. He observed his daughter emerge into a beautiful being who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Who knew what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Who knew how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one.

But Hugh did not know where the sky ends and space begins.

Hugh grew older.

Hugh discovered meaning and communication in every sound, in every sight, in every sensation. He discovered how every year his awareness of his experience of being expanded, and he discovered how good that felt and how little it mattered, that his awareness of his experience of being was what it was, is what it is and will be what it will be. Hugh grew older with his children, with his grandchildren. He lived to see his great grandchildren emerge into consciousness, to see his great grandchildren emerge into beautiful beings who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange.

And still he did not know where the sky ends and space begins.

Then he died.

In bed, surrounded by his children, his grandchildren and his great grandchildren… all of whom he had taught how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Who he had taught what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Who he had taught how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one.

And as the tears receded, he noticed how sight, sound and sensation receded too. And there came a point, as he breathed out once, that with his last breath he smiled and said silently to himself, “Ahh, so that is where the sky ends and space begins”.

The Enemy Within

Adam — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:21:11 +0000

The Mullah Nasrudin

Nasrudin saw a man sitting at the side of a road looking utterly desolated.

“What’s bothering you?” he asked.

“My brother, there is nothing interesting in my life. I have enough money not to need to work, and I was traveling to see if there was anything curious in the world. But everyone I have met has nothing new to say to me, all they do is make me more bored.

“In a word, I can tell you without any fear of doubt that despite all that I have done, I haven’t managed to find the peace I sought. I have turned into my own worst enemy.”

At that very moment, Nasrudin grabbed the man’s bag and ran off down the road. Since he knew the region well, he quickly managed to set a considerable distance from the man by taking shortcuts through the fields and over the hills.

When he was far enough away, he put the bag down in the middle of the road where the traveler was bound to pass, and hid behind a rock. The man appeared half an hour later, feeling more miserable than ever because of the thief he had come across.

As soon as he caught sight of the bag, he ran to open it, breathless. Upon seeing that everything was intact, he looked up to the sky full of joy and thanked the Lord for life.

“Certain people only realize the taste of happiness when they manage to lose it,” thought Nasrudin, looking at the scene before his eyes.

On the nature of soul.

Adam — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:29:29 +0000

A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:

THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.

Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature.

What is it to know another person’s soul? To know their true nature? To look into the heart of their being? It is to be able to enter the infinite universe of their stories and to recognise the utter interconnectedness of their stories with yours.

As Bateson points out, our language does not describe the world as it is… it describes the world as it is useful to describe it. Our language is primarily a language of things. Or as Pratchett put it

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Again, as Bateson points out, the language of “reality” (whatever that may be) is the language of relationships, of connectedness; the language we use to describe the world simply does not describe the world. It only describes what is useful for us. Stories, though… stories are all about the relationships. All about the connectedness.

On a blog I read regularly, the author wrote about Lucretius’s “great didactic epic poem, which aims to teach us that the soul is mortal, death is not to be feared, religion is mere superstition, and the whole of creation is nothing but the random coming-together and shearing-apart of an infinity of atoms sleeting through the void.” He posed the question why would Lucretius do all this in the form of a massive complex poem? because the poem itself is a metaphor for order and structure, right down to the arrangement of letters in structured, grammatical and poetical order being a direct metaphor for reality and experience created from natural phenomena, atoms arranged and structured in patterns and relationship to each other…

The Sanctity of Language

Adam — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:08:40 +0000

Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it is not so much that matter is conscious but that consciousness resides in the experience of relationship (it turns out that Strawson defines consciousness in terms of the ability to experience, so that is quite handy).

Greg refers to the experience of Jung where he “reported an experience he had as a child: ‘Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’”. To me, it is not so much that I experience the rock and the rock experiences me, but that there is an experience of relationship between me and the rock. Consciousness manifests experience, which in turn requires distinction to acquire form. From the creation of distinction (what G Spencer-Brown would have defined as perfect continence) comes identity and the experience of an experiencer and that which is experienced; subject and object.

So I fall to wandering. If the process of manifesting consciousness as experience gives rise to duality (in order for experience to have form), then this process appears to be mirrored in language and music. Unformed sound becomes language, words, sound with form that creates distinction. Every word cleaves our perception of the world in two. The word sand divides the world of experience into sand and not sand. Music defines a structure of sound against the chaos. Language shapes our experience of the world and gives it form in ways that mirror that primary manifestation of universal consciousness as experience.

There is potentially a tie in with Professor Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis that includes the premise that consciousness is a learned process based on metaphorical language and gives rise to the ability (amongst other things) to introspect, to self-examine. While this is a different definition of consciousness, it does stress the importance of developed language in understanding the experience of experiencing. And if language mirrors the process of the emergence of form-as-experience from consciousness, while giving rise to the ability to understand how that process shapes our sense of self… then it seems fair to understand language itself, and every word, sentence, song, poem, story as sacred. As truly and fully participating in that process of emergence and co-creation.

Words of Power, Part I

Adam — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:22:32 +0000

Words dissemble
words be quick
words resemble
walking sticks

plant them
they will grow
watch them waver so

Jim Morrison, American Prayer

It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m just very cautious of coming down to such a binary conclusion.

Words are strange things. I recall a Reith Lecture in which the neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran demonstrated a synaesthetic relationship between word sounds and visual and kinesthetic senses. By showing people two pictures, one of a soft rounded amoeba-like shape, and the other of a spiky, sharp spiny shape, and telling them that one was called a booba and the other a kikki before asking them to identify which they thought was which, he demonstrated that in excess of 90% of people would associate the word booba with the soft rounded shape and the word kikki with the spikey shape. While I’m guessing we could account for this through a learned cultural phenomenon, Ramachandran’s studies into the phenomenon of synesthesia have lead him to conclude that low level synesthesic experiences are common, even normal, and that the root of language development in our species may in part be attributed to this experience which appears to be genetically determined.

So it seems plausible, even likely, that the experience of hearing a word works on at least two levels.

First is the level of sound. But even the experience of hearing that sound goes beyond the sense of hearing itself, and includes visual and kinesthetic experiences at least internally and some of these experiences are common to most of us, independently of culture and learning.

Secondly is the learned meaning of the word, which will overlay the first experience with further visual and kinesthetic representations and associations. But this second experience will have two components… firstly the learned meaning, the received understanding of the word passed down through learning… the definition. Secondly, our own associations of meaning associated with the word. We all know what the word “Father” means, on the first level…. and we all use the word according to a set of rules that allow us to apply it consistently and make sense of that meaning. But do I truly know what the word “Father” means to you? Do I know what the experience of being parented entailed and what associations that word may have, what emotion you may put behind the word?

From the point of view of words having a “magical” inherent power, power over us and power over (maybe) the external world, independent of the power that we give them, I’m most interested in the first point… words working on the level of sound. The second point, about the learned meaning and experience associated with words, is more associated with the power that we give words… but even that is a power not to be dismissed lightly, a power that derives not just from a life filled with association meaning and story, but from the life of the community, the evolution of our language itself; to suggest that we give words that sort of power is only to suggest that it is human derived, it is not to suggest that it is something we can “give” and “take back” lightly. It isn’t.

Tantric sources distinguish between lettered and unlettered sound, and sanskit is interesting because of its direct association with a concept of the subtle body through the chakra system (where by letters/sounds from the Sanskrit system are associated with “petals” of the chakra) and with a complex understanding of the process of coming into being of all existence, of manifestation from the primal source

A very profound doctrine is connected with these Letters which . . . . . . . has been set out in greater detail in the Serpent Power (Kundalini) which projects Consciousness, in Its true nature blissful and beyond all dualism, into the World of good and evil. The movements of Her projection are indicated by the Letters subtle and gross which exist on the Petals of the inner bodily centers or Lotuses.
Sir John Woodroffe, Shakta and Shakti

What is interesting is the way in which Sanskrit letter sounds or phonemes can be arranged according to the part of the mouth used to form the sound. There is a clear correlation between the location of the mouth used and the location of the chakra, so phenomes formed at the rear of the mouth are associated with higher level chakra in the body.

This interests me because psychologists understand that we perceive vowel sounds differently that we perceive sounds formed at the back of the mouth, round, ooo or oh sounds as larger than sounds formed at the front such as ee sounds. Recent research for example seems to show that this effect can be expoited to create a false perception of the size of a price discount… Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22) with the former perceived, on average, as a discount of 28.1% on $3 and the latter as a discount of 24.13% discount on $3! Clearly the discount on the former is significantly less than the latter, but the effect of the sound on our perception of the size of the cost has a direct impact on our judgement. This effect appears to be cross cultural. In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value. While this research is not yet released formally and is reported in a newspaper (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/business/18drill.html) it is none the less indicative of a psychological power that resides in words beyond the simply learned.

Moving even further in to the realms of speculation, we can wonder where such responses to sound-in-language came from. I strongly suspect that they are evolved responses and they they are pre-linguistic. As a species evolves, it’s neurology develops to respond to sensory stimuli in particular ways to adapt it to its environment. So somewhere along the line we have evolved to associate certain sound “shapes” (in this example “oooo” and “eee”) with an internal perception of size (and probably more).

It can be an interesting experience to stand in an empty room and close your eyes, before starting to intone vowel sounds, resonating different parts of the body and paying attention to the internal sensory experience.

So, so far we have considered a range of effects that words and lettered sound may have upon us as human animals at a psychological level. It isn’t clear how these effects relate to language and its development, but it would make sense to assume that we have a somewhat chicken and egg scenario… where (from Ramachandran and others) internal experiences of sounds correspond to external world experiences beyond the onomatopoeic and into the realm of true synesthesia as a mode of engaging with experience.

Words

Have a learned effect

as language, learned meaning
according to the way that they are layered with personal and individual meaning from life experience

and an unlearned effect, yet still psychological

as sound creates consistent internal experiences that engage the full sensory spectrum, an internal landscape

I haven’t even made a start on considering the direct physical effects that the vibrations of words are capable of having on the human and other animal. On the whole, I strongly suspect that this can be discounted in any real empirical sense… the world bathes us in the experience of sound vibration all the time, and words make up a minute proportion of that experience, and I suspect that there is no correlation between any physical effect and the development of language (though I wouldn’t immediately discount the possibility in some contexts). However, in specific ritualistic contexts, when experiential variables are highly controlled, and those present are functioning in highly altered states of consciousness, I don’t think we can entirely rule out the possibility that direct physical experience of vibration of words could have a very specific and manipulable effect.

I don’t plan to leave this here… I would like to cover other related areas… the use of a person’s “true name” in folklore or the use of specific words of power, for one. And a consideration of the animated nature of words, words with spirit, for another. But in the mean time I would like to leave you with a video. I don’t know if you have ever come across the phenomena of Chladni plates before. A Chladni plate is a metal plate undergoing forced vibration and creating 2D standing wave patterns… granules of a fine material are placed on the plate and gather at the points where the plate undergoes least vibration. The artist in this video used this phenomena to engage artistically with her voice and the geometrical patterns created.

Bateson on Story

Adam — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:23:45 +0000

This is a very serious matter… that the way that human beings think, certainly the way that I think, is in terms of stories… Now what is a story? A story, if it so please you, is a metaphor… If you look at these two plants, you will see that they are essentially metaphors, one of the other, that metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive…

These are stories, a story being an aggragate of formal relations scattered in time… It has a certain sort of minuet or formal dance to it. It gets more complicated, because this is where we live. And the funny thing about living there is that we care about it intensely. And when the metaphors get jangled by unfortunate events… we get very upset. You see, the idea that there is any mental process going on that isn’t metaphoric is a very late, school-marmish idea. What they were killing each other over in the 14th Century was metaphor. Is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics said yes. The Protestants said no; it stands for body and blood. And they felt that this was worth burning for. No one would ever think that now.

The set of mental processes – aesthetics, feeling, poetry perhaps – is precisely where dream is made… And the Protestant view of the sacrament was a policy decision to exclude from the church that part of the mind which is concerned with poetry, feeling, fantasy, metaphor, stories

Gregory Bateson, quoted on http://www.trismegistos.com/ as being from an audio tape

taboo, contract and the making of the world

Adam — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:00:41 +0000

A blogger who’s posts I admire wrote what he called “sketch for a short story” a while back. In this story, a credible construction from an indo-european perspective of the sort of things that may have been practiced and believed by the original druids, although in and of itself wholely a work of fiction, the two central characters (a Roman and Druid) talk through a rite that lasts for a period of weeks, when it becomes the task of the druids to take over from the Gods in the making and recreating of the world. The sense conveyed in this short sketch was very powerful, describing an unstable world eternally teetering on the edge of chaos, and fearful rituals needed when the Gods withdrew once every nineteen years in order to maintain existence and prevent its plunge into the abyss of howling monsters.

On one level, it got me thinking that we do indeed continually maintain our reality, if only in sustaining and maintaining that sense of stability and continuity that defines our sanity. And if we do this on a personal level, through the development and unfolding of a continuous personal and mythic narrative, how more so do we do it on a community or social level… what rituals we enact, what proscribed and prescribed patterns of behaviour and what stories we tell and develop to create and maintain our consensus sanity?

One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.

“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”

“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”

“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)

More recently the issue of taboo came up on a forum that I participate in. Actually, this is an issue that has come up over the years on several forums I have been involved with, and again it gets me to thinking about this relationship between proscribed behaviour, narrative and the maintenance of the experience reality.

To me, a taboo is not an inherently religious issue, but it does seem to be an inherently deep psycho-spiritual one. As a culture, we tend to use the term to describe things that it are good to break in some sort of iconoclastic sense… “the last taboo” is always a media favourite… or we use to to describe comparatively trivial transgressions. But the real taboos… the actions that place the transgressor “beyond the pale”… are actions that unmake the world. The phrase, beyond the pale, would have meant beyond the stake, or outside of the fence… cast out of society, outlawed.

In engaging with our community there are rules, expectations. Some of these are so deeply enculturated that it is almost impossible to articulate them, as hard to perceive as the air that we breathe or the light that we see by. We have contracts, agreements that are unconsciously extended and accepted, between us, that require us to refrain from certain behaviours that would threaten that fabric of consensus stability. Those who break those contracts we have need to weave into our narratives as monsters, to place them outside, howling with the other demons threatening to destroy the world. In doing so though, I wonder what it is that we become in our attempts to deny the truth of our own monsterhood?

I promised you a story.

Adam — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:09:42 +0000

I promised you a story. Are you sitting comfortably?

A little background colour first. I grew up in social housing in a small market town called Olney during the 70′s. Back then it had a population of about 2 and a half thousand, and was situated in the heart of rural North Bucks, some 11 miles south of Northampton. I have vivid memories of fields of rapeseed, of playing all day on a disused overgrown railway line back in the day when kids could carry sheath knifes without risk of censure.

Olney is famous for a number of things… a pancake race that claimed a tradition going back to the 15th century CE, run by the women of the town every Shrove Tuesday. The “Olney Hymns”, written by John Newton (an ex-slave trader who converted to Christianity), that include the well known “Amazing Grace. The 18th century poet William Cowper. The town got its name from the Anglo-Saxon Ollanege, thought to mean Olla’s Island.

On the road out to Wellingborough, past the Castle pub, was a fetid algae covered pond which we children referred to as the “whirleypool”. Legend (at least amongst us kids) had it that the whirleypool was bottomless, and that it was connected by an underground stream that flowed beneath the High Street to the River Ouse, emerging behind the Church of St Peter and St Paul. Legend further had it that on certain nights the devil would ride out of the whirleypool in a carriage driven by headless horses. The Church was suppoosed to have been built on a different location, a field next to where it currently stands, but when the builders returned to their work in the morning everything was found to have been moved to its current location. After several abortive attempts to build the church in its intended spot, the conclusion was that it was somehow important to the “old religion” and that the devil himself was moving the stones, and work continued at the location that the church currently stands on.

Now, back then, I was a choirboy at the Church (which accounts for my enduring love of bells and smells, and a nicely crafted Nunc Dimitis). The graveyard was a truly evocative place. I recall giant angels with sad, lichen covered faces, and one head stone, old and faded, that seemed to have no writing on at all, only pictures with skeletons and other imagery of death and mortality.

John Newton was buried in the graveyard, in a fairly secluded corner. Among the tales we would tell each other as children there was one in particular, of Newton’s grave. The tales had it that if one was to approach the grave after sunset and stand on a certain spot, walk three times anticlockwise around the grave, close your eyes and turn three times anticlockwise on the spot to face out from the grave, the devil himself would appear!!

Just imagine the appeal such a story had to a pubescent boy with a fascination with mythology. So, after dark, I headed to the graveyard and approached Newton’s grave. I stood in the spot, and proceeded to walk around the grave three times, anticlockwise. After all, we knew that these we just stories, right? So why did my heart beat a little faster with each circuit of the grave?

I completed the three circuits, closed my eyes (heart really starting to pump now) and slowly turned on the spot, three times, anticlockwise.

I looked up… opened my eyes…

and inches away from my face was a bloody great gargoyle!

These are my stories. This is my land.

The Tale of the Sands

Adam — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:58:35 +0000

This is a slightly experimental post using WordPress’s podcasting plug-in for the first time.

The Tale of the Sands is a Sufi teaching tale which I retold some years ago for submission to an online competition. The voice tone has a trance-voice quality (intended) and the story explores age old themes of identity and impermanence from, I believe, an animistic perspective, although clearly anthropomorphising the protagonists for the purposes of the story.