Be a Teller of Tales (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

POETICS In the Service of Sophia Poetic storytelling is humanity’s oldest, most effective teaching tool. Imagine words as boxes, each one stuffed with multi–dimensional worlds of meaning. The words act as a kind of shorthand to relay bits of condensed information – facts. Poetry pries open these word boxes and frees sensual associations which encourage the human brain to accept and integrate information. Storytelling takes facts, makes them anthropomorphic and infuses them with spirit. A good raconteur roots her metaphor in the syntax of her listener’s language and the context of their culture to establish empathy. Empathy is the bridge upon which Sophia – “the personification of wisdom; an amalgam of personal experience, acquired knowledge and Spirit…” travels across time and space from one person to another. Sophia doesn’t always need words to span isolation. She prefers, in fact, to transport herself along the more subtle paths of body language, instinct, intuition and eye contact. Nevertheless, as long as humankind persists in its delusion of separateness, narrative continues to be indispensable. Poets are among Sophia’s greatest devotees. Poets long to be wise and to share their wisdom. Whatever their motivation – pain, surcease from sorrow, love, lust, injustice or joy – they seek to acknowledge that which drives them, to understand it and to transcend it. Having achieved this, however temporarily, they yearn to share their insight. The poem is both crucible and distillation. It is a tightrope spun of words, flung across an abyss of ignorance by the good will of the poet. The poet, by definition, has experienced within herself the fusion which brings forth Sophia. Having experienced even a moment of wholeness, the poet knows herself blessed. From that moment her particular experience is set firmly in a matrix of commonality and her poems become an antidote to the illusion of separateness. And though the poet knows the void to be illusory, she also knows that this illusion is reality for those experiencing it and throws her lifeline anyway. Gossip, that much maligned form of communication, is a prevalent form of storytelling. Unlike other ways of folk telling, it adapted to the Twentieth Century without missing a beat; moving easily from back fence to water cooler and humming along telephone wires almost as quickly as they could be strung. Even Sappho stooped to gossip and modern poetry often uses the language of the coffee klatch to reveal a painful truth. People love gossip because it gives them a chance to star in their own stories and to praise, coddle, scold and pass judgment on their sister heroines. No matter how dark the deed or bitter the anguish some part of it can be presented to be laughed over, cried over and compared to other stories and adventures. Nothing is ever so bad or shameful that someone hasn’t a similar story to tell. The sharing of it weaves the teller’s pain into the larger frame of history and humanity and draws her back into the warmth of belonging, to the place where we remember that all the tales are our own. Her stories and his stories are often traced through journals and epistles. Some diaries are bare accounts of comings and goings but the most eloquent often presuppose an imaginary correspondent. Novelists sometimes assume the same device and directly address their reader. At other times they create an imaginary exchange of letters between characters as a vehicle for presenting their stories. The charm of such contrivance is two–fold. On the one hand it indulges the human propensity for eavesdropping. On the other it allows the storyteller to cram even more nuance, connotation and significance into her communications than usual.