The tales we tell

Humans are storytelling creatures, and our favourite subject is ourselves. We tell stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we aspire to be going. For many, the process of growing up is the process of changing those aspirational stories from wanting world peace, to wanting a nice kitchen. Thus far I have singularly failed to grow up, and am doing my best to keep it that way.

We know each other to a large degree through our stories. It’s one thing when you live amongst the people you grew up with, all holding the same myths in common, identities interlocking, but quite another meeting strangers. We go off to university and other places to reinvent ourselves. When I changed town, I changed name. As a child, I had a name I hated, when I moved to a place no one knew me, I was free to offer any name I liked, and I did. Having come back to the place I grew up, that old, unwanted me hangs around like a ghost. Sometimes it is simpler to answer to the old name and not tell the tales of change.

Much reinvention is harmless, some of it is actually productive. A clean slate to experiment with ideas of self can be a good place to find out who you are, free from all the assumptions that chained you as you grew. Live your life out in the same place, and those stories of youthful error can become your defining features, whether you want them or not. Then there’s that other kind of reinvention. The sort that doesn’t mention time spent in prison, much less the reason for it. The sort that invents prestige and experience in order to impress. Offering the fantasy of who we wanted to be, and not the reality.

I’ve been through a few of these, and the mind bending process of having to unpick the threads of my own life from the vast tangles of other people’s fantasy webs. The trouble is that one little lie is seldom enough, they need extra details to make the story plausible. Characters are added in. Friends, lovers, events, and once those stories tangle into other people’s lives, it gets complicated.

I think about the man who told his family he had an agricultural accident, leaving him scarred for life, but who told his friends he was injured whilst fighting as a mercenary. Maybe neither version is true. That one didn’t turn out to be terribly important, because no one was counting on his soldiering expertise. It could have been a very different story if we were.

Now here we all are living our lives in public, where the guff that a teenage girl says can come back and cost her a lucrative job. These days you can’t just move town, you’ll have to start a whole new online identity if you want to step away from the past. The past, I have noticed, has a knack of coming back, and if it doesn’t fit with the story you tell, that can get messy. The ex girlfriend who isn’t ex at all, the child you didn’t admit to having, the friends and enemies historical who it turns out have no desire to be written out of the story.

We invent ourselves all the time, in every expression of self from conversations with friends and colleagues to the snippets of life we put up in public places. I think the internet may have made some of us more self-conscious in our story making. It also makes it easier to spin incredible webs of lies and deceit. Invent whole identities. I’ve seen friends burned by attractions to works of fiction in online dating. I’ve met people who were so convinced by their own stories that they had no awareness of how they might be perceived from the outside.

It’s no good flashing the words around if there’s nothing to back them up. Of course we can invent and reinvent ourselves, that can be a good part of the learning and growing process. Everyone should have the scope to change, but if we don’t live out that ‘once upon a time’ narrative, there are always going to be consequences. The bigger the story, the harder it is to tell what it might be going to do to us.

That’s my story, anyway.

The Unreal Estate

I’ve been talking on and off lately about changes in how we work and what we do and why. During my meltdown at the beginning of the year I admitted to myself that a number of things were really bugging me. First is the nature of the publishing industry, which is very slow. By the time a book comes out I no longer feel involved in it, I have usually moved on to something else and I struggle with this. Putting content into the world more often is a sanity saver – this blog being a significant part of that. There are also issues around the fact that I can write enough words in a day to keep Tom busy for months, and that makes for a disconnection. I have to wait a long time for things to make progress, and the frustration I feel around that is really unhelpful. It was getting to me.

A lot of this cannot be changed, but we sat down and talked about what we both want and need out of our creative work, and we hatched an idea. We want to work together, really together, so we’ll start of a morning with the same piece of paper, get the words and images planned, and then over the day Tom can make a page. The rest of our work commitments mean that we might have one or two days in a month when we can work this way. It is enough.

A week or so ago we took a day, and made a comics page from scratch, for a new title – The Unreal Estate. We’re both very fond of Under Milk Wood, this is nothing like that, except that there is a debt owed… it’s modern, urban, and very strange. It allows both of us to push the edges of our ideas and creativity, which is great, and whether it turns into anything doesn’t matter, because the method of working is nourishing and gives us something we need. I realise that just a small amount of the really soulful work is enough, I can spend most of my time on dull necessities if needs be, so long as I have a little bit of time to follow my heart. It’s liberating.

I’m still exploring how I want to work and what I need to do, working out what is both desirable to others and meaningful to me. I think there are balances that can be struck. I think there are things I am driven to create that other people enjoy. Hopeless Maine has been a success on that score. It was made with love and a lot of people are responding to it. Tea Dragons (see some of them at http://www.copperage.deviantart.com) seem to be getting people excited too, so, more things like that (you’d like some insane Steampunk cats, wouldn’t you?). I’m hopeful that I can find ways to follow my own awen and make things other people benefit from. I don’t see much use in creating just for my own indulgence, nor do I see any point in making things that are saleable but soulless. Whatever I do has to tick both boxes, or I’d rather not do it at all. Having that clarity has been a great help to me.

So, here’s the thing we’re playing with, just one page so far, floating it out across the interweb to see if anyone enjoys it…

http://www.hopelessmaine.com/?p=994

(Do leave a comment on the comic if you stop by)

Rebellious Roots

I spent last night listening to the BBC radio 2 Folk awards. On the whole radio2 tends towards the shiny end of folk, and I tend towards the raw and dirty end, but they had Billy Bragg on and Treacherous Orchestra, so that was fine. Folk is where I come from, it’s home, ancestry, community, more so than Druidry because folk has been there my whole life. I’ve seen a fight, in my lifetime to keep the folk traditions alive. Back in the 80s, the prospect wasn’t good, with aging and dwindling clubs, but, there’s a tremendous resurgence going on and a lot of brilliant young people coming through.

At the Druid Network convention back in November, Paul Mitchell pointed out that our folk traditions are as much a part of our heritage as Stonehenge. More so, because folk has the potential to belong to everyone, and apparently Stonehenge doesn’t, and we can’t all get there and it would be bloody crowded if we did. Folk is where you are, there’s plenty around. It’s your traditions, your heritage, be that farming or industry, or protest or something else.

I have some sense of who my people were, what they did and the land they come from. Not everyone has that. One of the things the folk tradition does is gives you a huge pool of possible ancestry to pick from. Of course you had your share of poachers, soldiers, peasants, and poets – we all do. Not everyone engages with folk, too much beard, woolly jumper and finger in ear… except most of it isn’t like that, and never was. Folk can be sexy, angry, militant, ironic, dangerous… and also loud, or more like classical, or all kinds of things. Still, I’m not going to lure everyone in.

I was listening to Billy Bragg talking about how much now is like life under Margaret Thatcher, and about how it keeps coming round and we keep having to fight the same fights. The protest songs serve in part to connect you to all the people who had to do it before, to make it less lonely, help see the point, keep your courage up. We all have these fights, and in sharing them, they become easier. Workers protest songs from a hundred years ago and more are very relevant. We’ve rioted before over impossible rents, and lack of food, and shitty systems and we’ll do so again.

It helps to know this. How many people don’t know? How many people live in the small awareness of a few generations, overwhelmed by what the system is doing to them and unable to imagine that you could fight back, much less that it would work. How many people don’t know about Ned Ludd and the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo massacre, the peasants revolt, chartism, levellers, diggers, and all the other brave attempts to put things right. Each round of fighting takes us a little bit further forward. Without that knowledge, without the history of dissent, revolt, non-cooperation, and uprising, it’s easy to believe that you can’t do anything.

What does that give you? A whole new kind of feudalism, in which the peasants are held in place not by laws, but by our own lack of knowledge and disbelief. That’s the developed world for you, all too often. Bread, circuses and being dictated to by our lords and masters.

Show of Hands, in their song ‘Roots’ have this line – “Without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we came from?” We don’t. We have no idea, and that makes it very hard to figure out where we might be going or how to even own that process a bit.

Learning by heart

I’ll start by saying that I detest rote learning, the kind of learning where you are just forcing facts into your brain, usually with a view to regurgitating them in an exam and then forgetting the lot. That kind of learning does not generate wisdom or feed inspiration very often.

However, dedicating a lot of material to memory was very much the work of the ancient Druids and Bards, as far as we know. They didn’t write anything down, it was all oral transmission and memory. Most of us don’t go in for that kind of learning at all, but it’s very different from being able to recite a multiplication table. Being a bard is about making the carefully learned words come alive, in the moment.

Yesterday I watched a group of children put on a show. There was about an hour and a quarter’s worth of material there – songs and dialogue The oldest children were 11, the youngest, I think 7. That’s a lot of material to have got to grips with, in a matter of a few months. A great deal of work, dedication and repetition went in to getting them there, and the result was stunning. It’s amazing what can be done when there’s a will to make it happen. But if you suggested that kids ought to have an hour’s worth of learned material in their heads, complete with actions, I don’t think many people would see that as a good use of the child’s time.

I recall being at a druid event some years ago, with no formal entertainment, and people, less than perfectly sober people, trying to amuse themselves with songs – frequently half remembered ones at that. I have enough performance level material in my head to run for a good four hours flat out – tunes, songs, poems and stories. In practice, my voice is not up to more than 2 hours of uninterrupted performance. Probably less these days as I haven’t done the epic busking stints in a while. It’s long been natural to me to have a reservoir of learned material I could draw on, and this event made it apparent to me that for many people, that pool of bardic lore isn’t there. Which is a shame.

There’s something magical about dedicating yourself to a piece of art – be that a dance, a tune, a song, poem or story. Giving yourself to it so that you can learn it, means that it in turn becomes a part of you. There’s time taken to understand the relationships between each note, each nuance of the words, how an arrangement might shift it and make something new of it. Learning the song, or the story is all about understanding it and having a real relationship with it. It tangles into your soul. The stories we tell, the songs we sing become a part of who we are. They enrich. And when the power goes off, we have some way of passing the time.

Community music, dancing with people, and all these kinds of sharing are really bonding activities. You can’t forge those kinds of bonds by sitting around and watching a television program together. You can’t do it on facebook, either. The immediacy of something shared is powerful. The offering of song or words is one of the best things I think anyone can bring to a ritual.

It does take discipline and effort, but that’s no bad thing. What it gives us in return, is far more than the cost. A gem inside your head is with you for life. Sharing it enables you to give something beautiful to others over and over again.

And the more you learn, the easier it gets to learn.

Storytelling magic

Humans are storytellers. It’s easy to assume that story making is the exclusive preserve of authors, and that telling is something only skilled bards do, but this is not quite it. We all tell stories. We tell them about who we are and how we got here, what we did today and why it is that certain things happen to us. We all have shared stories, belonging to the tribe, or our traditions. We tell jokes and anecdotes, and ask each other ‘do you remember when we…?’ History is also story.

All kinds of things happen when we transmute life into story. There is a process of making sense that accompanies story creation. You have to kick reality into story shape, and that tends to mean finding a coherent conclusion, a way of tying up the loose ends. Story making is a method of creating meaning out of chaos. In this process, we can get a sense of control. A person who can tell it as a story is far less of a victim than a person who has no voice.

Sharing is critical to storytelling. It’s not enough to make a narrative, you have to be heard. Here too, complicated things happen. Often in life, there is no fairness and no justice, however, having your story heard, taken seriously and empathised with can bring relief over the most bitter issues. Having a witness to failures and triumphs, wonders and setbacks, we feel less isolated. Sometimes someone else turns out to know all about it. Then they offer back another story in which we might see our own experience mirrored. We are no longer alone and out of kilter with everyone. We are part of something, even if it is only a tradition of two. Once one person finds the words, it’s not usually long before other people dare to use them as well.

When we share stories, we open doors to the possibility of change. That which is held in silence, kept in the dark, or too personal to offer up, remains unchallengeable. If I share a story and someone says ‘Nimue, you are being silly, that wasn’t what it meant at all,’ I might have a chance at changing the story, my relationship with reality, and everything I do. If someone says ‘that happened to me too. We should do something about it,’ then in our story making we have just crafted the beginnings of a revolution. It may be small, but then again, it may be epic. There are many people who would do differently if only they knew of the consequences. When we tell them the stories they listen up, and make changes.

We also tell stories about the future, and where we want to be going. For a fledgling tradition like druidry, this is important, shared work. Every time we pause to imagine what druidry could be, we build towards possible futures. Every story we tell about where we have been contributes to the ones we shape about here we might be going. This is a part of how we construct all of the stories of our future, as individuals, family members, as countries, as a planet. Knowing that we are making stories and that we can direct them in very conscious ways changes everything.

Do I believe in magic? Absolutely. Do I believe in Harry-Potter-style, pyrotechnic laden magic? Not so much. I believe in the magic of change and transformation, and the awen, the flow of inspiration that makes all things possible.

What stories will you tell today? What stories will you tell about today? Make them good. You can reimagine the world as it should be. Where story goes, reality will sometimes follow.

Flash Fiction

The other sort of dog
Dogs know how to make the best of everything. Even in the depths of winter, they still want to play. Take them out in a howling gale and they can still wag, go mad for a scent and revel in being their own, furry self.
I envy them that, but I just don’t have the knack of seeing the world so simply and with such bounding, hairy joy.
My dog crawls up my body, big heavy feet placed without care on my squidgy places. He licks my face, offering a hearty dose of dog breath for good measure. Tail wags. Come and play with me. Get up. Do something! He’s relentlessly cheerful.
I haven’t moved in a long time. I don’t know how long. There are mornings when it all seems like too much and leaving the duvet represents monumental effort. It’s no help, having a happy, happy dog begging to go out and play. Run around with me. Amuse me. Feed me. An uncomfortable reminder of all the things I should be doing and ought to find the energy for. The dog makes it clear that there’s no excuse for my sloth. He expects me to get my pitiful backside moving and to make something of the day.
Big paws press into my stomach, and the full weight of the dog settles on my chest. He’s too heavy to shift at the best of times, and in this state I’ve got no chance. I make a few feeble sounds of protest, but with the dog on me it’s challenging enough just to keep breathing. From this position, he can look right into my face, and I can look back. It gives me no comfort at all.
You should get up and do something useful with today. The dog does not care how I feel. Not really.
I study the incomprehensible depths of his dark face. He knows what he’s doing. The more he sits on my chest, the less able I’ll be to do all the things he’s demanding. Of course it’s deliberate, but that’s black dogs for you.