Robert Bringhurst reads a translation of a Myth told by Ghandl of the Quyahl Llaanas, a Haida Mythteller, as excerpted from Bringhurst’s book “Nine Visits to the Mythworld“.

I’ve gotten hooked on Robert Bringhurst’s book, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World. He attained some measure of fluency in Haida in order to study their spoken artistic traditions; in the book he translates extensive sections of 10 hour oral narrative epic poems, to prove the point that a handful of recorded Haida mythtellers (the Haida poets Ghandl and Skaay among them) number among the great poets of North America, of this or any other age.

In fact, he makes the case that myths never enter this world as a communal expression, but rather as an expression of an individual voice. An excerpt:

Swanton’s hope, as he has told us, was to transcribe every story, or every mythic episode, told in Haida Gwaii. but you can no more record all the stories in a mythology than you can write down all the sentences in a language. A mythology is not a fixed body of stories; it is an open set. It is a narrative ecology: a watershed, a forest, a community of stories that are born and die and breed with one another and with stories from outside.

What a brilliant little summation; if you think of your dreaming life, writing down all the myths of a culture essentially means writing down all the dreams ever dreamed by a people. A neverending task! Your dreams speak your personal native tongue in the same sense that your culture’s myths provide a communal mythic tongue. Your dream language creates stories, much like your myth language does. And both feed into and aliven each other. The term “animism” seeks to make such “aliveness” and relevance to the present moment more clear; dogma means the death of aliveness. In our culture, we define religions as possessing dogma. Mythologies (as natively stewarded) have no dogma, only a language that they provide to tell stories in, refreshed by the community of dreamers. Anthropologists tend to turn mythologies into dogmas, and thus you have books that purport to tell all the stories of Norse, Hindu, or Greek “mythologies”. But only a dogma could offer such a finite set of story; a true mythology never stops speaking. More good stuff:

The mythteller’s calling differs little from the scientist’s. It is to elucidate the structure and the workings of the world. Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world (whereas novels, for example, more often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone). A genuine mythology is a systematically elaborated, extended, interconnected and adaptable set of myths. It is a kind of science in narrative from.

Science too is an ecology of ideas. Science, in fact, is a kind of mythology in computational form. Where science is in fashion and mythology is not, it is widely claimed that science is “true” and mythology is “false.” This claim proves, on close inspection, less a theorem in science’s defense than a partisan slogan. Both science and mythology aspire to be true, and both for that reason are perpetually under revision for as long as they are alive. Both lapse into dogma when these revisions stop. Where they are healthy, both mythology and science are as faithful to the real as their practitioners can make them, though it seems to be an axiom that neither ever perfectly succeeds.

Any persistent reader of the College of Mythic Cartography will know how close this lands to my heart; this resonant understanding of both science and myth by the author really surprises me. I would only clarify that whether or not Science aspires to “truth”, I would say more accurately that Mythology aspires to talk about the world in a useful way, to reflect it so that we can interact with it in a more effective way. It inextricably weaves both waking and dreaming reason together into a seamless tapestry of useful story, that affirms and increases life.

The word ‘Time’ doesn’t describe a dimension of reality, it describes an experience of reality. The Time of waiting in line at the movie theater, differs from the Time of watching fireworks, or sparring in martial-arts, or experiencing a perfect night sky. By acknowledging, rather than discarding, the profound impact of our subjective experience of the daily world, we can empower ourselves to experience it more fully, more attentively, more satisfyingly. A dance, a deep conversation, an intimate relationship, and a profound adventure – all these belong to the space of the Dreamtime, the Heroic Present. Play with moving in rhythm with the pulse of eternity, and see what happens – you yourself must choose what to make of it.

The Terrible Truth About Truth, Dr. Terry Halwes (a wonderful article that further explores the futility of looking for “truth” or “facts” of the natural world)

the Heroic Present, Jan Yoors
Language, Thought, and Reality, Benjamin Lee Whorf

Tom Brown Jr.’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking (contains the Wisdom of the Marks tracking excercise)

Relevant Articles:

Animism, Native Language, and Quantum Linguistics

A World of Shape and Movement

The Silent Realm

The Mouth Speaks, The Mind Boggles

“The Ones Who Are Dream And Land Together.”

Glimpses of the Animist Language-World

The Ceaselessly Latering Day - COMC Podcast, Episode 20 [ 32:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

According to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Hopi speak and think in terms of a world of events (or more precisely, “eventing”), as opposed to our world of “objects” and formless commodified substances (what form does “meat” have? “Wool”? “Sugar”?). How does my Indo-European linguistic and intellectual heritage obscure my perception of a dynamic, occurring world? How can we use new realizations in this area to free us and enable more fully lived lives? Listen to me as I struggle with barely-understood concepts of Hopi and animist relationships with “time” and “space”, and see if I can’t answer for myself why this all feels like a matter of Life and Death.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

No Word for Time, Evan T Pritchard (for discussion on Micmac culture and language)

The Balance Point, Julie Cramer (“Where the Profound and the Practical Meet”, a whole-life organizing and balance resource)

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Confusion - COMC Podcast, Episode 19 [ 33:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One could describe the idea of the Tao, as referring to an ancient Chinese animism, that counsels conversing and dancing in accord with the natural forces prevailing in the world. “Yes, and…” comes from the Theatrical Improv tradition (in particular, I think of Viola Spolin), and yet counsels the exact same action: how do you embrace oncoming energy, and ride it to where you need to go? Discover the amazing wisdom in a western tradition that verges on a kind of home-grown “shamanism” (for lack of a better word), as encapsulated in “yes, and…”.

“PLAY UNSAFE”, by Graham Walmsley

Related articles:

Open Space Technology as Culture, Tradition, Identity

The Power of “Yes, and…!” (blogpost)

The Power of "Yes, and..." - COMC Podcast Episode 18 [ 40:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Which reminds me of…this…

Why do dreams give us rest and renewal? Why do we watch television, read fiction, go to movies, tell stories to each other? At what time did the age when Humans and Animals Spoke the Same Language occur? Can Storyjamming answer these questions?

“Language, Thought, and Reality” by Benjamin Lee Whorf

Related articles:

The Dreamtime, MythicSpace, and ‘the Time Before History’

Storyjamming: the Podcast

The Elements of Storyjamming

Storyjamming with Free Indie Story-games

Holding Space, Standing Like A Tree

Standing at SHIFT

Healing and Renewal Through Storyjamming - COMC Podcast Episode 17 [ 38:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve decided to re-podcast an old episode, not included in the new run. Let’s call it Episode 16!

Listen to me interview Lisa Wells, instructor of theater, creative writing, and wilderness skills, author of Cedar Rapids: the Coming Derrick Dean, and poet-about-town.

In the interview she talks about the fascinating connection between prayer, theater, intuition, nature awareness, storytelling, and that ineffable creative energy that we sometimes call “shamanistic” or “mystical”.

I apologize in advance for a bit near the beginning where the microphone seems to go on a walkabout – I hope you can still catch what we say, as it addresses a worthwhile issue. Also, I mention the word “Duende” as meaning “wind” in Spanish. It doesn’t.

Get out of your head, and into your body, courtesy of Lisa Wells.

(see the original post here, with comments)

Lisa Wells - COMC Podcast Episode 16 [ 24:11 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download