Obsolescence

In Beyond the Writer's Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction Carol Bly presents a challenging project: 100 stories.

She suggests we ask children to endeavor to learn, verbatim, 100 stories by the age of 18. She does not, as emphatically or clearly, state that this attempt, this devotion, requires they have access to 100 stories, and a person to listen to their recitations. I ask that you keep this in mind as you read along and determine how this project can work for you (regardless of your age).

Bly argues for the merits of this project, offering the following observations:
1. Storytellers use Language.
2. If children are asked to memorize great stories—they will use classic language.
3. They will hear themselves speaking great words.
4. They will hear themselves narrating the lives of creatures very unlike themselves.
5. They will directly experience something other.

This lays the groundwork for many things.

I ask you to add to the notion of classic languages, the project of learning and using ancestral languages (often considered endangered, impracticable, extinct, or obsolete) for your own 100 Stories project.

Bly further argues that memorizing and telling 100 stories (to listeners) lays the foundation for empathy. Children will fill their mind with classical feelings and humor. She also writes, for the purpose of this project, "do not translate the language of each story into something familiar, current or provincial." She says you will lose the wonder and the tone—I agree and add you will lose much more.

Bly writes: "Children love strangeness if they're not afraid of it, and they are not afraid of it when they get to say the strange words in their own voice. When they tell stories of unlike creatures and unlike places they free-heartedly exercise curiosity about otherness—about things that will never be like what they know."

Further details about the project, as defined by Bly are on pages 163-170.

Some insights I had while reading Bly's project and her understanding of story. Her 100 stories project provides a concrete way (for people who do know how) to relate to the unknown, without killing it. She asks the young storyteller, and the related listener, to allow the mystery of the unknown and to memorize its language. She asks them (us) to relate to others without changing them, or reducing them to the known, the understandable or the same. She asks the young storyteller not to kill others, but to take the details of them into our mind and memorize them. Perhaps so we can recognize them when we encounter them? Perhaps to know they exist, even if we never have the honor of meeting them.

Many might ask who does this?

I do.
We do.
The Urban Nizhóní do.

Many ask who has the time to do this? (Meaning memorizing stories is impossible, or not worthwhile.)

I've heard and been persecuted by the notion that the oral tradition is always one generation from extinction. Stories need someone to tell them. They need someone to listen to them. Given the state of books and libraries I have an easier time now when I make my argument that books and archives are equally vulnerable to loss (by decidedly different means and methods). They need someone to care for them and read them too.

Devoting our lives to the stories that walk among us is more then a contemporary possibility, or a creative nonfiction workshop idea, it is an essential part of the project of life.

This project has merit, especially when you make a devotion to the stories themselves and the ethics of storytelling. Please remember, this project is not founded on theft. Do not go stealing stories. Make an honest and true devotion to story and start there. Start with your own stories, respect them. If you do not have access to them, start asking around, start reading.

Language: Íishsjání ádoolnííł: Make Things Clear

Íishsjání ádoolnííł: Make Things Clear

Paul Chaat Smith's essay, Lost In Translation, begins with a discussion of 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt. Hewitt had several rules for successful television. One being: No Indians. "Indians talk too much, too slowly, and what they say is always complicated."

Smith continues: "[Hewitt] realized the Indian experience is an ocean of terrifying complexity. We are reputed to be stoic, but in reality it's hard to get us to shut up."

A long time ago I heard the Honourable Justice Robert Yazzie say, "the most important piece of paper in the Navajo Peacemaking Court was—the Kleenex®."

Peacemaking on the Navajo Nation involves several principles. The two most important being: talking things out and making things clear.

"Navajos know from experience that people cannot engage in respectful, meaningful, and relevant discussions and move toward a consensual resolution of a problem unless they understand each other's positions." (from Raymond D. Austin's Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law: A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance)

I know, from my own experience, not everyone is working toward a consensual resolution, but I offer this as a way to speak about language and a glimpse into my understanding of our need to talk things out and make things clear.

"Maybe this is where I got the notion that if I could tell the story clearly enough then all that was taken, including the land, might be returned." (from Leslie Marmon Silko's The Turquoise Ledge)

Clarity is a challenge not everyone is willing to pursue. Clarity requires a willingness to listen and the skill of honest appraisal (of self and other). I find myself circling the same issues in several languages in an attempt to be clear. When someone does not understand me I am angry. That's why Justice Austin reminds us to use and practice Íishsjání ádoolnííł. If you don't things get funky fast. "The 'make things clear' rule requires individuals to express points clearly while 'talking things out' to prevent perturbation and confusion among the peacemaking participants."

Expressing points clearly is required of life. Our expressions, clear or not, shape each of our relations. Done well expression makes the peacemaking process something we may find ourselves rarely in need of.

Often we talk about difficult things. Often we don't even know who are we? Often the stated we does not include me. I may not share the same idea of talking or the same relationship to listening. My time frame is often so different that some believe I do not even have one.

Language: we live inside it. We are using it at this moment. At this moment many require brief, quick, and comprehendable messages in swaths of three to five minutes, or 140 characters. How can I maintain clarity in those terms?

In my desire to connect I am trying to articulate this, my world, with clarity. Everyone is not searching for such brevity.

No one lives in isolation. No word is spoken in isolation either. These are my beliefs, they shape what I write, when I speak, and the words I use.

How It Works

"I think all writers live off of obsessions. Some of these come from history, others are purely individual, and still others belong to the realm of the purely obsessive, which is the most universal thing a writer has in his soul."
the Paris Review: Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68

When I was five my mother lived next door to Jesus. I lived at home with my grandparents. On certain days my Grandma would let my mother take me for a sleep over. As the year wore on I stayed with her for a few days at a time. I spent these days waiting for Jesus. He'd leave early and come home late. I'd sit by the window and watch for his head. We were on the ground floor on Naples. He lived in the unit around the corner. To get to his door he had to walk down the hill a few feet, so his head would pass by the window and he'd grow miraculously smaller.

Jesus was famous, and he lived next door to me. I wanted to ask him a question. I don't remember what my question was, I only remember that I waited for hours to talk to him. I never did. My mother moved from Naples and on her last day I stayed up till two in the morning waiting for nothing. I went back home where all we read was St. Joseph's Missal and True Crime Magazines.

the Axe: Language, Translation, Novels and Obsolescence

We didn't have books. We had music. Every room had at least one stereo (my Uncle specialized in hot ones). My mother had a hi-fi console and when she moved in with me she brought her records: Neil Diamond, Johnny Mathis, Janis Joplin and Barbara Streisand. I was nine. My world was Fosse and Dolly Parton. My Grandmother and I watched Lawrence Welk every weekend and my Uncle kept me up with him to watch Creature Features. I was used to spending my days with my Grandfather walking through Dogpatch. He was in for wine from the corner store. I was in for toys at the junkyard. Chances are things were gonna be different.

I didn't understand that Indians could write until I went to college and found Custer Died For Your Sins on the shelf at Cody's.

"If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books to affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, Franz Kafka

(Chapter 5) How it works:
1. the Axe will post five days a week.
2. Monday through Thursday I will post once a day. Each statement will be titled: Language, Translation, Novels or Obsolescence.
3. On Fridays I will answer three Letters to the Editor. To send me a question simply send me an email (the address is in my blogger profile). I will select three questions a week and answer them in a post titled: Letters to the Editor.

"Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world."
Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino