Once there was a Dorian…

A Story about a Story-teller in 2010 plus words

Tell me what created timelessness for you as a child for therein lies your myth to live by (Joseph Campbell)

Falling into Stories

I was born in a flat above a cinema and a bank across the road from the market place. 1944. Leo. “Looks like a drowned rat” mused my father, thirty years older than my mother. Perhaps this is where the story begins? Reading backwards (for we make sense living forwards but understanding backwards) as a boy I pedalled my bicycle (it steered itself) to the Victorian library near the Kimberly Club where Rhodes had plotted and dreamt. I’d climb the patterned spiral staircase in search of adventure.

Back home, I played imaginary games, sometimes alone in the backyard marked by the citrus and fig trees and a grapevine. Constructing narratives in which I was the hero. Only later did I encounter the myth of the archetypal hero’s journey.

And soon as I could escape, I was swapping comics in a Saturday morning ‘bioscope’ queue. Stamping my feet as the stage-coach with the runaway horses raced towards the precipice, following the fortunes of Francis, the Talking Mule and anguishing over the doctor who had taken his suffering wife’s life (mercy killing) then disguised himself as a circus clown to escape detection. And in a train crash in order to save a life, blew his cover. (The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B Demille, with James Stewart as Buttons.) 1952. An impressionable 8 yr old.

These engagements birthed a sense of story . Then at age 11, I began to write - writing my first poem to hold the grief surrounding my father’s heart attack and death. Since then writing and healing have become twins.

A mediocre school performer [was I, yet an optimist. Coming 9th in a class of 32, I’d offer solace, “Don’t worry, mom, there are 23 others behind me.” One activity from those school days that still served me - learning poetry by heart. Quotes cling like the burs in my socks walking though the Kimberley veld. As a teenager when dealing with self-doubt, fear and the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Hamlet) I recited quotations written in my left hand scrawl, recited until a sense of euphoria, courage and possibility rang through my cells . Sayings such as “Diamonds are made under pressure (appropriate for a Kimberly boy) and “oaks grow strong in contrary winds.” (Oaks abound in Somerset West in the winelands where I now live).

Later stories took me beyond a conventional religious upbringing. The stories I thought were unique to my faith and believed had literally happened, virgin birth et al, I found in other faiths. These stories were archetypal. A great shift from literal interpretation into metaphor. For literal turns a process into a thing and an image turns thing into a process.

These stories were a make up on the outside and the truth on the inside. Blessing upon the head of mythologist Joseph Campbell for his wisdom. “Every religion is true… when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.” All spiritual leaders and mystics in every faith have told stories for when they do this, they place authority in the heart of the hearer.

As a teenager I thought I would be a priest but turned out teacher instead. I was too rebellious –plus a number or other words beginning with letter r. So I majored in the Humanities at Rhodes University - English and History. Somehow this student emerged with a distinction in History.

I taught in the east Cape and Cape Town for 13 years then a chance job offer from a friend took me to Windhoek for 20 years (1979-97) – training teachers then as an academic.

[Looking backwards I read my years as apprenticeship, a preparation for my current vocation.

Nothing is lost, sweet self,
Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!
(Laurence Durrell)

So teaching, reading, counselling and training for Life-Line, then asked to resign over a crime of passion, divorce, loss, amateur acting - all these experiences nuance and give texture to the workshops I facilitate. As the classical traveler Ulysses verifies, “I am a part of all that I have met.”

Studying literature to a D. Phil level , teaching it at schools, a training college, a University. Teaching history, learning about irony, paradox and ambiguity, the three sisters of story. The teacher archetype strong in me. A year in York, England reading for the D Phil, taught in a Canadian creative writing faculty in the early 90s, enjoyed a Fulbright at Stanford drafting The Writer’s Voice. Published poetry, plays and children stories. Participated in a poetry festival in Colombia South America. Invited to several Conferences on World Affairs in Boulder Colorado as a story-teller.

When I resigned the Professorship (1997), I took 3 vows –not the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but rather I would not teach conscripts anymore. When people are willingly present they take responsibility for their learning. I would not teach towards an examination for that so often corrupts the learning. The third vow? To stop asking questions that I thought I knew the answer to, so that I could be surprised by the unexpected. Stories are about surprises.

These vows led me to my calling. Working in creativity and imagination, twin sisters that bring healing, belonging. Showing people how to re-story their lives and work and acting as a mentor. The image for mentorship? A client dons one shoe and I the other. We set out walking through the chosen terrain - be it creative writing, work, development (UNICEF) , academia or personal growth. I have swum in the great ocean of stories with rural caregivers who mind children who are dying. We created a Storywell team -with its multi-layered meaning (we all own a well of stories can learn to tell them well and they make us well.) Worked alongside narrative therapists, business leaders, embassy personnel, scholars (given the glorious title ‘Writer in Residence’) and academics - how to privilege stories in research. Shared Oom Schalk Lourens stories (H C Bosman) by heart with audiences in Brisbane, Boulder and Wakkerstroom. The richness of my work? The stories people tell about their lives and how they tell them for this is ever a choice. As Oom Schalk Lourens advises, “It is not the story that counts. It is the way you tell it.”

Guiding quotations?

Here are eight stars in a countless galaxy:

The first task is re-storying the adult… in order to restore the imagination to its primary place in consciousness (James Hillman)

Give me back the soul I had as a boy matured in fairy tales (Garcia Lorca)

Why stories? Because stories are origins and origins are places that we walk out from. Because stories have many feet and travel several roads at once... because the story conjures the invisible. (Deena Metzger)

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. (Albert Einstein)

Enthusiasm is the first principle of knowledge and the last (William Blake)

I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' …I took it upon myself to get to know 'my' myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks…I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me.” (Carl Jung)

We are wound with mercy round and round as if with air (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. (Barry Lopez)

The gifts of story in my life?

A never ending story. Gifts abound. Here are eight of multitudes.

- accepting that we humans own a fictional identity. We love stories for we are stories. “We spend our years as a tale that is told.”(Psalm 90 : 9)

- developing the witness - the one who watches from another vantage point. Much like a movie where part of me sits in the stalls and watches the antics, the rise and fall of Dorian on the screen. Paradoxically (and stories are rich in paradox) the more I watch, the more passionately I am involved in whatever I’m doing at that moment.

- learning to live lightly and with humour. Stories are a great antidote to taking myself too seriously. The trickster archetype is strong in me.

- suspending judgement for stories invite curiosity and movement. “What will happen next?” is the great page turner in our lives. The show is not over till the anorexic man sings.

- as in a dream we are many selves, many possibilities. These can be awakened in our day time reality. By day we are white light , by night a dream prism separates us into rainbow shades in the drama of story.

- cultivating memory as an antidote to ageing. Learning poetry and stories by heart and offering then as participation not performance.

- we are born into somebody else’s story for us. In an authoritarian culture the political/ religious/educational authorities tell us who we are. When we become conscious of and selective about our formative story, we are born into our own authentic story. This is the second birth.

My logo

The tortoise/turtle swimming in the cosmic ocean of stories. Designed by my fine friend, poet-priest Bob Commin. There is no culture without tortoise/turtle myths.

In the beginning

there was a great tortoise

who supported the world.

Upon him

all ultimately rests….

He is all wise

and can outrun the hare.

in the night his eyes carry him

to unknown places.

(William Carlos Williams)

[This creature has many symbols inscribed in its shell.

The waters; the moon; the Earth Mother;

the beginning of creation; time;

immortality; fecundity; regeneration….

In China it is possessed with oracular powers.

The Cosmic Tree grows out of the back of the tortoise.

(J. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols)

[

I too travel with my house on my back. And since I enjoy word play, there is the Alice in Wonderland remark “We called him tortoise because he taught us”

Wives and Children

I have been married five times less than screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. My heartner of the past seven years, Elma (partner is too cold a word) is a passionate eco-journalist who runs an online news paper The Green Times) Like poet Stanley Kunitz “I have made a tribe of my affections and my tribe is scattered.” I have exported my two oldest children across the waters - Damian (Houston) and Martine (Brisbane) (I wonder when we have no choice, what happens when we pretend we do? What story emerges?) Child no 3 Dominic, is the kind of man who might end up meditating on a mountaintop in Tibet in a wet sheet and drying it through raising his body temperature. Child no 4, Adam, is en route to being an astro-phyicist. I have acquired children-in-law en route and a tribe of grandchildren. I am blessed in enduring friendships. I am “a rich man entering heaven on the ear of a raindrop.” (Seamus Heaney)

The great sea of unknowing (Mare incognotum)

There have been moments when the angel of death has nudged me and whispered how life hangs on a spider tread - whooping cough, a car overturning onto its roof twice with me the 21 yr old passenger …

I am drawn ever towards the close-by ocean… walking, swimming in summer. In winter I take to the heated pool in the local gym and swim 1000 metres most days, meditating, concocting stories as l move through the water. I tell my children I am the unrivalled swimmer in the category: folically-challenged, left-handed male poets in age group 66 and a bit.

…and I still love big screen movies and bank with the bank that stood below that flat where mid-wife, great aunt Gerty, brought this story-teller into the world.

2049 words