A KIND OF SECRET MELODY…

I was re-reading a talk given by the Canadian/American storyteller, Dan Yashinsky (The Joan Bodger Memorial Lecture, 2006.) It can be found on the internet, and raises some great questions about listening in our current day and age.

This section about the nature of listening to a story, particularly sticks in my mind:

When the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism and a renowned storyteller, arrives in a village marketplace and begins telling stories, Martin Buber tells us what happens. A man begins to listen; then: “a second man came up, soon after a third, then ever more and more, mostly servants and poor people who begin the day early. They all remained standing, listened eagerly and called over still others from the houses. As the hour advanced, the maids came with their water-jugs on the way to the fountain and stopped, the children came running out of the rooms, and the family heads themselves left their businesses and their pursuits to hear the strange man.” (The Legend of the Baal-Shem.) The marvelous thing is that, wherever you entered the tale, you found its “red thread” (a wonderful German phrase for the inner life of a story): “His narration…was so delightfully intertwined that whenever someone came up it seemed to that person to be at the beginning, and those who earlier had not been curious were now entirely concentrated on what would happen next and awaited it as if it were the fulfillment of their most precious hopes. Thus they all had one great story, and within it each had his own small and all-important story.”

And what do these spellbound villagers hear in the storyteller’s intricately woven narrative? Buber answers somewhat mystically: “It was no report of distant times and places that the story told; under the touch of its words, the secret melody of each person was awakened …”

This way of describing an already-mysterious phenomenon only deepens the questions; yet there is something wonderfully accurate in Buber’s phrase. With oral stories, it seems to me, we are always listening for a kind of “secret melody” — that is, a distillation and expression of our own experience — our lives reflected back to us with new understanding.

 

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