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Last week I went to Port Townsend, Washington, for some “executive training,” since I’ve taken on full management responsibilities at the paper where I work — the revenue side as well as the content side. During our session, each of the participants was invited to make a one sentence statement about what makes us tick. I did not miss a beat: I am a Storyteller. I live and breath Story. I love to read them, I love to hear them, I love to tell them, especially in writing. I am enough of a romantic to feel myself, in some special, magical moments, to be in one.
Gwyllyn the Bard.
*
The Olympic Peninsula is spectacular, classic Pacific Northwest landscape and I reveled in driving through the mist shrouded forest in the rain. I drove in silence, except for the whap-whapping of the windshield wipers and the hum of tires on wet pavement. And I pondered the matter of Myth. Myth has a couple of different meanings. One is something that is false, not true, a pernicious kind of cultural lie. The other, grander meaning — which demands a capital “M” — recognizes Myth as the stories a people tell to explain and culturally understand nature, history and the way humans behave. Sometimes there’s a fine and blurry line between mere myth and Myth. You recognize the Right Stuff when you see it.
I believe that when we distill out the essence of the project we are engaged in at The Running Iron Report, we get down to the creation or, perhaps better, the discovery of a Mythology that can help us find our way through the disorienting cultural and social maelstrom, the oscillations of the late-stage Empire. This is not an effort to “live in the past” but rather to find ways to apply timeless verities in a world that seems to have become unmoored from connections to culture and place. For as our own Craig Rullman observed in his post on Peter and the Farm:
…notions of code, responsibility, and honor in both the Iliad and the Odyssey remain practical and urgent in their value — thousands of years and thousands of miles from their origin.
How can this be? How could tales wrought in the age of bronze or of iron still resonate in the age of the silicon chip? Such questions have been asked before. The 20th Century English war poet, novelist and memoirist Robert Graves recalled in Goodbye To All That how a professor of Anglo-Saxon expressed disdain for his own subject, stating that it had no value in the modern era, in the wake of the industrial slaughter of the First World War, which bade fair to destroy the soul of Western Civilization. Graves, a veteran of the trenches of the Western Front, vehemently disagreed. The ringing of Mythology of Beowulf held more resonance for him and his warrior peers than the “modern” novel.
“Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for promenade to Holoferne’s tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting — all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the 18th Century.”
Beowulf remains practical and urgent, thousands of years and thousands of miles from its origin.*
Beowulf by Daniel Bel.
https://avcgi360.deviantart.com/art/Making-Of-Beowulf-with-Zbrush-by-Daniel-Bel-511883751
*
The cultures that resonate most powerfully with me — from the Norse and the Celts, of Europe to the First Peoples of North America, and frontiersmen from North America to Africa to Australia and New Zealand — were all storytelling cultures. The oral tradition persisted deep into the modern era and survives today, even in the era of cable TV and smartphones. Even the writing produced by the modern storytelling cultures is infused with the oral tradition, from the bush balladeers of the Australian Outback to today’s Cowboy Poets.
Blackfeet Storyteller by Howard Terpning.
Art by Andy Thomas.
They were also self-consciously heroic cultures. The aspiration to a heroic life is not much in vogue these days, in an anti-culture of hip irony that also valorizes victimhood and perceives the vigorous assertion of right and liberty as “threatening.” But I do not much fear that notions of code, responsibility, and honor will disappear. We crave them too deeply. When we nourish them with Story, they grow.
* The Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf is a magnificent thing. Read it aloud, preferably around a fire with your thanes, loud enough for the neighbors to wonder what the hell is going on.
Matthew says
Great post. Myths seem to come in many forms from the oral storytellers to big fat fantasy novels.
Thanks Matthew.
Many points to ponder for the creative mind.
You (probably) know, of course, that Port Townsend throws an annual multi-day acoustic blues festival complete with workshops and everything else. On my bucket list.
But I digress… ? (though, that would fall under storytelling, in its way)
What makes me tick in a single sentence?
Wow. I had to ponder that one.
A sense of discovery, learning, and adventure? I love learning things (so long as the subject interests me, of course.) The adventure is admittedly largely vicarious (can you say “pulps?” ? )
I do love reading and writing so I guess I am a storyteller but not sure that entirely makes me tick. My father could tell a tale. I think his oral storytelling translated through the genes as my penchant for writing stories, instead.
I do not much fear that notions of code, responsibility, and honor will disappear. We crave them too deeply. When we nourish them with Story, they grow.
Chris Golden insists that even when you are just winging it and writing a story, there is a theme. Sometimes the theme is known and cultivated from the start. But other times it forms as the work grows. I suspect a lot of my favorite reads have thematic elements of honor code – even when the ‘bad guys’ work within a code.
Hmm…what makes me tick in a single sentence?
Off the top of my head…I strive to learn, to grow, to explore, to adventure, to write, in short to interact with the world around me in its present form and with what came before, and by doing so, to create.
(Don’t ask me to diagram that sentence.)
As I was reading this post, I couldn’t help but think of the works of the late science fiction writer Poul Anderson. Many of his future societies are ones in which the values of honor and storytelling have survived and are still practiced. (As for the last days of empire, well, the Dominic Flandry sequence of Anderson’s Terran Empire future history comes to mind.)
I’ve only read Poul Anderson’s Norse stuff and his Conan pastiche, but I know he’s our kinda people.
Wade McKnight says
Great Post Jim. The clip from “The 13th Warrior” made my day.
I concur about reading aloud around the campfire. As a high schooler, I went on a boy scout canoe trip to the Boundary Waters with some troop mates. Around the campfire one night, a good friend pulled out a dog-eared copy of the Ace paperback version of Conan the Warrior and began reading aloud. Pretty cool being in the middle of the wilderness, under what seemed like a million stars, hearing an REH story being read aloud.
That is perfection. Especially “Beyond the Black River” in that setting. Crom!
Breaker Morant says
What makes me tick in one sentence? Obviously, there is history, books etc-but first comes the land.
1) I love the ragged edges of the land.
“The Ragged Edges of the Land” is a glorious book title.
Love it.
Breaker Morant says
RE: “The Ragged Edges of the Land” as a title.
Thank you.
A few years ago; when I was casting about for things to (maybe) write about‑I started a blog called “An Eye on the Land.” I did a few posts, but then when I looked at the Okavango Delta and I saw that it is in danger ‑I thought when we live in a world where the Okavango Delta is in danger and we can’t even say to ourselves, as humans, “Whatever else happens, the Okavango Delta stays!!!”
There would simply be no point and would lead to endless heartbreak in working on “An Eye on the Land.”
I still love the idea, as Geography and conservation related stuff is my true love. It is where my heart is and I may go back there at some point.
I got the term “Ragged Edges” from my love for the odd-shaped fields on our farm as compared to most farmers who think they have to grub out every small patch of trees and so forth. I have mentioned before about the large plums that my daughter and I found on a “Ragged Edge” woodland on a farm of ours.
My plan for “An Eye on the Land” ranged from the special wild plum tree to hedgerows in southern England to the Amazon and the Okavango to grubbing out the shelterbelts in the Great Plains.
One thing that always bugs me is that if Egypt is a gift of the Nile (really a gift of the silt from the Nile floods) why did the Aswan Dam get built and mess up a system that had worked for thousands of years?
As to your last paragraph, I give you:
https://runningironreport.com/resistance-resilience/outlaws-indians-life-downstream/
Breaker Morant says
This post drew me to re-read “Education of a Wandering Man” a memoir by Louis L’amour. I highly recommend this short little book, regardless of what one thinks of his westerns.
Just based on this book-he is our people.
Teaser»“Somewhere back down the years I decided, or my nature decided, that I would be a teller of stories.”
I forget about this book-but then every few years I reread it and remember how much I love it.
Yeah, that’s a good ’un. Thanks for the reminder.
Lane Batot says
I read “Education Of A Wandering Man” many years ago, and I’ve read some few of his novels, which I always liked–“Last Of The Breed” and “Hondo” are my favorites of his. Little surprise many of his stories have been translated to film, although I’m STILL WAITING for a kick-arse version of “Last Of The Breed” to FINALLY get done! It would go very appropo with the “renewed” Cold War with Russia, I’m thinking.….