Storytelling nature: the art of connection

Given the amount of material I have accumulated to read, and the amount of time I spend in any given day writing, or thinking about writing, I'm all too aware of the dominance of visual input to my system. Not necessarily always visual awareness or sensitivity, in the sense so well articulated by John Berger, but more particularly the use of sight and language rather than language and the sound of it. For that matter, in spite of the importance of music to my life, how little deep listening I do either to music, or to the world around me.

This was all brought home to me most powerfully last weekend. I had decided many weeks ago to attend the last three days of a festival of new music in Kitchener (Ontario), and of course bought tickets to absolutely everything happening on each day, also attended all the free events, wore myself to a frazzle, came home in a complete daze and could barely function for at least 24 hours. Drunk and then hungover from an excess of sound. On the Greyhound bus zooming back into Toronto, I administered an audio antidote, a musical "hair of the dog (wolf?)" by listening on my portable CD to the exquisite new recording of Mozart Sonatas for Piano & Violin performed by Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg. It was Bud Parr at chekhovsmistress who alerted his readers to the CD; my experience of several of Uchida's Schubert recordings (among my most frequently played CDs) led me to track down a copy of the Mozart, and in the past week I have listened to it at least once a day, often a couple of times. Not only are the performance and audio quality luminous, it has proven to be, in the context of the new music festival, especially informative in a way I hadn't anticipated.

The presence at the festival of Hildegard Westerkamp and Anne Bourne had first caught my interest in the week-long program and affected my decision to attend. A dear friend on the West Coast had introduced me some time ago to Hildegard's soundscapes and the deep listening recordings of Pauline Oliveros, with whom Anne Bourne studied. I've bought recordings whenever I've found them, read what I've been able to find. Although the concerts and events I managed to take in provided an intense array of musical experience (some of it admittedly painfully so), what affected me in a potentially more enduring way was the work of these two women as presented in a soundwalk, an octaphonic electro-acoustical performance, and a deep listening workshop.

It can take time for any profound new experience to sink in, to make connections with what one already knows, but this time -- thanks both to the variety of musical sensation and the timing of this event with other new experiences -- the importance of listening has now taken on a more far-reaching significance for me.

Listening to the new Mozart CD was at first a balm to my exhausted mind at the end of the first two days of trying to absorb music that was new in more than one sense. By the end of the weekend, however, I realized that I seemed to be listening to the CD itself in a different way. It can happen quite easily with a piece of music one listens to regularly that it takes on a familiarity, becomes a pleasant background to other activities, as Adorno observed and as Sandy Throburn has recounted in At Last, a Bird's-eye View of the Elephant: a Reassessment of the Work of Theodor Adorno:

This repertoire of great works comprises the canon of music played in restaurants, elevators, telephone hold buttons, and dentist's offices; the resulting familiarity of the works then has the detrimental effect of squeezing every last fibre of originality out of the repertoire by sheer familiarity. This, in effect, creates a whole new class of cliché: the masterwork for the background. As it happens, Adorno has dealt with this phenomenon too. He wrote "Music in the Background" in 1934, declaring: "in our immediate life there is no longer a place for music.

The process of deep listening, as practiced by Pauline Oliveros and Anne Bourne, and the practice of an ecology of listening, as illustrated by Hildegard Westerkamp in her work, makes me want to go back to Adorno to discover where there might be an opening in his critique to the influence of deep listening encounters, a place of opposition to a statement as sweeping as "in our immediate life there is no longer a place for music." (A statement as dogmatic as his "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" which was contradicted by Celan's work: philosophers however insightful are vulnerable to grandiose generalizations.)

Even the limited exposure to three days of markedly different music, and even less to deep listening, affected my hearing of the Mozart CD. I began to hear it "differently", became more aware of the texture, the complexity, the contrasts, and to its emotional colour. But there's more to the act of listening than this mundane personal recognition of the difference it can make to my pleasure of music.

Another new part of my life is the world of storytelling, the art of oral transmission of all manner of stories: myths, fairy tales and wonder tales, legends, sagas, anecdotes, and more. The act of telling is something I had taken for granted, growing up with a father who would sit down with his coffee, roll a cigarette, gaze into space, and begin telling a story about his past with lines from Gray, Byron, Macauley, Hunt, Service, or a host of others. It became a familiar part of my landscape, the repetitions dulling my listening. Only now, too late, do I honour the tradition that seems nonetheless to have seeped into some layer of my consciousness, resurfacing finally to connect the parts of my life that have seemed to pull me in such various directions: poetry, fiction, music, ecology, plant medicine. It all has do to with the thread of deep listening.

Tonight, late as it was, I finally opened a book I've had out of the library for about three weeks, recommended to me by a storyteller I met at the recent Toronto Storytelling Festival: The Healing Heart -- Communities: Storytelling to Build Strong and Healthy Communities. I was looking for something related to a project I'm involved in to save Heritage Trees, wanting to discover whether telling stories about trees might be one of the ways to raise awareness -- the kind that leads to everyday actions that bear fruit -- about our disappearing forests. Perhaps because I don't identify myself as a therapist or a health professional, I hadn't yet gotten to the point of exploring the book. Then I found there an essay by Susan Strauss, "Storytelling nature: Story speaking and listening in the information age" in which she states unequivocally, "I have observed the degeneration of a skill that I believe is essential to healing the rift between human society and the natural world -- namely, the art of listening. Listening is at the core of the storytelling art and is essential to all perception. Deep listening can help us avoid the extensive pain and suffering that are often byproducts of limited perception." The examples from her storytelling experience are rivetting. It's no longer however a question of needing convincing: now that my ears are open, there are suddenly more connections to be made.

Comments

[jason]

my friend asked me if I knew you, and didn't say why she might think that. then you mention maureen harris, and I wonder. just thought I'd share.

[Norma]

Thank you Jason for directing me via your blog to the article by your colleague on students and web logs, and though I haven't met you, I believe we do have a friend in common, who happens to be a fine poet.

[Bud Parr]

You comments about listening remind me of John Cage's 4'33" (which, you may know is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of "silence"). In listening to this piece, you suddenly become aware of the world around you, those minute sounds taken for granted. It's silly in a way, but also brilliant in its simplicity (actually ruined when I "heard" it because the orchestra pretended to play their instruments, which diluted the purpose, and they occasionally hit a string).

Oddly, I haven't heard Mitsuko and Mark's CD yet, because I'm supposed to get a complimentary copy, which Mark has not even received yet. I hear it's selling well, (and I think there was a good review in the Guardian). Glad to hear you are enjoying it!