Storytelling and Wonder
by David Abram

In the prosperous land where I live, at this dangerous and delicious moment on the cusp of a new millennium, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. In a strange and curious initiative, parents and politicians and educators of all forms are raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom from kindergarten on up through college. With the new technology, it is hoped, children will learn to read much more efficiently, and will exercise their intelligence in rich new ways. Interacting with the wealth of information available on-line, children's minds will be able to develop and explore much more vigorously than was possible in earlier eras — and so, we hope, they will be well prepared for the technological wonders of the coming century.

How can any child resist such a glad initiative? Indeed, few adults can resist the dazzle of the digital screen, with its instantaneous access to everywhere, its treasure-trove of virtual amusements, and its swift capacity to locate any piece of knowledge we desire. And why should we resist? Digital technology is transforming every field of human endeavor, and it promises to broaden the capabilities of the human intellect far beyond its current reach. Small wonder that we wish to open and extend this powerful dream to all our children!

It is possible, however, that we are making a grave mistake in our rush to wire every classroom, and to bring our children online as soon as possible. Our excitement about the internet should not blind us to the fact that the astonishing linguistic and intellectual capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer! Nor, of course, did it evolve in relation to the written word. Rather it evolved in relation to orally told stories. Indeed, we humans were telling each other stories for many, many millenia before we ever began writing our words down — whether on the page or on the screen.

Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if a hunt was successful, as well as information regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and — more generally — how to live well in this land without destroying the land's wild vitality.

So much earthly savvy was carried in the old tales! And since there was no written medium in which to record and preserve the stories — since there were no written books — the surrounding landscape, itself, functioned as the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for preserving the oral tales. To this end, diverse animals common to the local earth figured as prominent characters within the oral stories — whether as teachers or tricksters, as buffoons or as bearers of wisdom. A chance encounter with a particular creature as you went about your daily business (an encounter with a coyote, perhaps, or a magpie) would likely stir the memory of one or another story in which that animal played a decisive role. Moreover, crucial events in the stories were commonly associated with particular places in the local terrain where those events were assumed to have happened, and whenever you noticed that place in the course of your wanderings — when you came upon that particular cluster of boulders, or that sharp bend in the river — the encounter would spark the memory of the storied events that had unfolded there.

Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Traveling through the terrain, one felt teachings and secrets sprouting from every nook and knoll, lurking under the rocks and waiting to swoop down from the trees. The wooden planks of one's old house would laugh and whine, now and then, when the wind leaned hard against them, and whispered wishes would pour from the windswept grasses. To the members of a traditionally oral culture, all things had the power of speech...

Indeed, when we consult indigenous, oral peoples from around the world, we commonly discover that for them there is no phenomenon — no stone, no mountain, no human artifact — that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own pulse, its own interior animation, its own life! Rivers feel the presence of the fish that swim within them. A large boulder, its surface spreading with crinkly red and gray lichens, is able to influence the events around it, and even to influence the thoughts of those persons who lean against it — lending their thoughts a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom. Particular fish, as well, are bearers of wisdom, gifting their insights to those who catch them. Everything is alive — even the stories themselves are animate beings! Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation...

There is something about this storied way of speaking — this acknowledgement of a world all alive, awake, and aware — that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, that grab our focus or capture our gaze. Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory perception is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein every phenomenon has its own active agency and power.

When we speak of the earthly things around us as quantifiable objects or passive "natural resources," we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a set of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we begin to tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again. Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us, and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous. We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit, along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden, and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter. Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos — the round dance of the seasons, the sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening, the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world. However much we may obscure this ancestral affinity, we cannot erase it, and the persistence of the old stories is the continuance of a way of speaking that blesses the sentience of things, binding our thoughts back into the depths of an imagination much vaster than our own. To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.

*

How basic and instinctive is the imaginative craft of telling a tale! And yet how little we exercise these skills in the modern era. Of course, we'll read a story to a child before sleep, but we won't take the time to really learn to tell the story ourselves (without reading it), or to improvise a fresh version of an old tale for our neighbors and friends. We have too little time for such frivolities: a world of factual information beckons, a universe of spreadsheets and stock comparisons. If we crave entertainment, we have only to click on the tv or the computer, and straightaway we can synapse ourselves to any one of the rapidly multiplying video games and virtual worlds now accessible through the glowing screen. Surely this rich and rapidly shifting realm of technological pleasures is the niftiest magic of all!

Perhaps. Yet for all their dash and dazzle, the inventions of humankind can never match the complexity and nuance of the sensuous earth, this breathing cosmos that invented us. The many-voiced earth remains the secret source and inspiration for all the fabricated realms that now beckon to us through the screen. Let us indeed celebrate the powers of technology, and introduce our children to the digital delights of our era. But not before we have acquainted them with the gifts of the living land, and enabled its palpable mysteries to ignite their imaginations and their thoughts. Not before we have stepped outside with our children, late at night, to gaze up at those countless lights scattered haphazard through the fathomless dark, and sharing a story about how the stars came to be there. Not before they've glimpsed the tracks of Coyote in the mud by the supermarket, or have sat alongside us on the banks of a local stream, dangling a line in the water and pondering an old tale about the salmon of wisdom...

Spoken stories, when we listen to them, or when we make them our own and tell them ourselves, wake us up to our immersion in a dreaming universe — to the vast and enigmatic story deliciously unfolding all around us. They induce us to taste the icicles dangling from the roof, and to smell the breeze, and to wonder: what's going to happen next?

* published in the Encyclopedia of Nature and Religion, edited by Taylor and Kaplan, Thoemmes Continuum, 2005.

(David Abram is an cultural ecologist and philosopher whose work has had a deepening influence on the environmental movement in North America and abroad. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage) — a book which helped catalyze the new field of eco-psychology. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. His essays have appeared in such journals as Orion, Tikkun, Parabola, Environmental Ethics, Adbusters, Resurgence, and The Ecologist, as well as in numerous anthologies. David has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Watson and Rockefeller foundations and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction; he was also was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. His current work engages the ecological depths of the imagination — exploring the ways in which perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth.

Recently the New England Aquarium sponsored a large public debate between David Abram and biologist Edward O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and the nature of ethics. David founded the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) in his home terrain of northern New Mexico; he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture. He is a guest speaker at Mythic Journeys '06)

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