Dear Readers:
This post from the end of August was never sent out...somehow I lost its thread and let it languish in the Draft file. Since then, there have been so many things to write about that I don't know where to start...travel, birthday celebrations, visits with friends from college years, more travel, mnd receding. Then there's fall, its dry beginnings...
Well, I will eventually chip away/tap away at them. Maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, I offer this old one.
Aug 28th. Outside, the fire engines are sirening their way up toward campus...not too far away, it seems, since they've already stopped. Somewhere, there's a story going on...it's hot enough today to start a flame just from the heat on the pavements and make trouble for the rescue team. Not me, though. I'm staying inside in the cool, avoiding shopping errands and garden chores, not only because of the heat.
For one thing, my right ankle has been feeling harsh when I walk for any length of time. There's a name for it (I looked it up), something about a tendon inflamed. The Scottish National Health Service site offered a few simple exercises to do a few times a day and promised it would be better in three to six months. I'm doing two of the exercises, but obviously I can't wait that long to walk painless. So, gingerly, I keep walking.
To keep busy indoors, I've been taking stabs at different kinds of art and I've been reading. The library, only a short drive around the corner, has been a frequent collaborator. There I've discovered books of short stories and two novels built around old legends. They've reminded me, one way or another, of how stories become legends, and how, culture to culture, generation to generation, storyteller to storyteller, they often go back to being stories again. A story changes with the tides, it seems...that basic human need for tales that reflect what and who we are.
Some are successful translations, some not, I'm finding. Of course, my standard for mythical stories is Miss Eudora Welty; her collection (almost a novel), The Gold Apples, follows Zeus and his compatriates through their devilry by moving them to Morgana, Mississippi. Golden men disappear from and reappear to their small-town homes, their wives meanwhile creating heroic status on their own. Girls drop their talented futures to chase a dream, then come home to their mothers, who sit in amazement at a girl who has finally learned to mind. Girls who stay home all those years, teaching piano out of yellow Schirmer books, watch all this happen...they are as rooted as their mythological heroine, Hestia, who tends the home fires, but can see the wanderings of others with equinimity.
I don't have to read Miss Welty again...I've practically memorized all her works over the years from way before my dissertation days. So the stories that modern authors embroider from old myths have to be up to her kind of speed for me.
On the library shelf, two novels over two weeks drew me in...one I finished every word of; the other left me annoyed by the way its author took the thread of a good tale and wove it into something blasphemous, something Athena would have no trouble judging dishonorable and turn its writer into a spider, or worse.
It was the title of this last one which drew me to pull it off the shelf...Babayaga, by an author whose name shares the same typeface and pointsize on the cover as the title (I think now that that should have been a clue). It had been years since I'd even thought of that witch, who lived and rode in a house that whirled around on chicken legs. This book ought to be fun, I thought...especially since, reading the inside flap of the jacket, I discovered that the witches had been transported herein from their Slavic origins to Paris. A long and hard journey, imaginably so, through centuries of wars, betrayals, death, and the terrible cold of winters that enwrapped them across desolate countries, took them to the city of light. Paris could, I predicted, be quite an appropriate backdrop for their updated sorcery. I love Paris.
Alas, though the witches were women with potions and passions for everything, and bore their terrible adventures in the manner of their centuries-old ancestresses, their lives were made miserably second-rate by the author who cluttered the story with such inane others...a fat, rather dim-brained lover whose head eventually hangs from a scrolled-iron post; a self-absorbed detective turned into a flea, nonetheless able in his flea-dom to detect; and a mild-mannered innocent ad man whose troubles stuck to him like fly paper, thanks to that era of the not-so-secret CIA machinations in Europe. Surely witches like these deserved better. They were, after all, the point of the legend and...most important...women in Paris. But here, they take second and third place after their writhing victims' already pathetic lives. I threw the book down last night only half-way in, and this morning read the last few pages to see if by chance it had redeemed itself. It hadn't.
On the other hand, the hefty pages of Every Rising Sun, by Jamila Ahmed, a Pakistani writer, brought a new perspective to the ever-retold story, the Thousand and One Nights...the ultimate story of stories. Ahmed's version begins with smitten young girl and her earliest affections for the once-gentle but now betrayed and angry Malik, and records her brave attempt to save both other young women and the Malik himself by marrying him and telling her stories. Hers, besides, is an empire in trouble, though at the beginning the trouble is as far away as her innocence. Stories litter (yes, that is the right word) these pages...not only the ones she conjures as the latest wife of the destroyer of wives, but those she tells others along the way...for entertainment, for comfort, for distraction, for rescue, for edification. The point of the story is always on point.
Anyway, these two novels and another book of short fiction got me to thinking about the power of the story in human life. We tell stories to save ourselves, like Scheherazade, and invent a sane perspective of the world which otherwise seems to be powered by chaos.
For instance, what do the Slavs mean by inventing the terrible Baba Yaga and her witches...is it just a mean legend filtered down to us, like Grimm's dour fairy tales, teaching that evil lurks in the dark beds of every turn in life, no matter the illusion of happiness? Why have studios recreated a cartoon of wicked stepmothers and made them pay in the end? Why do Greek and Roman and Norse and Amur gods and heroes show up in graphic novels and young adult films, while online games, filled with horror and wretchedness...killing being their only cacaphonous solution...seek to justify themselves by borrowing their names?
I once taught part of The Arabian Nights to a survey class in World Literature (part I). The anthology from which we read had only selected stories from the longer tale, but in one semester, with so many hundreds of years to cover, all we could do was flip from culture to culture as centuries flew by. One student, though, whose origins were from those Eastern countries, their traditions perpetually in conflict, argued furiously against our reading. "That's not what Arabian literature is about at all!" he just about shouted at me. I knew what he meant. The text before us was a rather brazen Englishman's translation, romanticized for his 19th English readers. We had come to accept it as genuine, despite so many versions derived from the old culture itself.
I wished too late that I had avoided our anthology and given them Mahfouz' Arabian Days and Nights instead. There, its Egyptian author, those tales part of his heritage, has moved them into the present tense and illuminated the parts of the story that still resonate in modern life. It's a slim book, but it's whole, and the point of its story makes us go back to the Nights and re-assess what storytelling is really good at...changing lives in whatever century or eon they live.
We tell stories to give ourselves a framework in which we can own a history, live through today, see to tomorrow. We tell stories...family stories, personal stories, native and national stories...so that we and the world can make (a kind of) sense. I wonder what stories those children...of any age...are living on, as they play on their screens those games with borrowed names?
