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Through the Story's Terror
By Laura Simms
(Parabola Magazine, Fall, 1998)

Tsvetaeva tells us, a fairytale that doesn't frighten us is not a fairytale. It is terror that transports us to the place where Dostoyevsky was transported when he was condemned to death, this most precious place, the most alive, where you tell yourself you are gong to receive the ace's blow, and where you discover, by the axe's light, what Kafka made Moses say: "How beautiful the world is even in its ugliness." It's at this very moment, as Blanchot would say, that "we see the light."
    --Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

Fear is the uncompromising compassion of the hero and heroine in story-as well as in life. She shakes loose the walls of our fixed ideas and conceptions, waking us up trembling and alert, in order to experience the reality of our inner world and the invisible realm of spirit and ancestors which lay locked behind thick chains of conventional logic. Fear is not to be avoided, repressed, or conquered. For from the very depths of fear itself arises fearlessness, awareness, and wisdom. The acknowledgement and experience of fear is the door that opens us to heightened presence and perception through which we learn to live in the world as it is.

The experience of fear is physical. It is neither imaginary nor conceptual, but is known directly through the body. Thus, one of the ways in which traditional peoples have prepared their children to live in the world, "to learn and survive," has been through the live telling of myth, legend, fairytale, and true story. The experience of events is known through an actual psychic enactment: the fear is confronted and endured in the imagined story as a kind of practice process or ritual. When Frances Harwood, anthropologist, asked a Sioux elder why people tell stories, he answered, "In order to become human beings." She asked, "Aren't we all human beings already?" He smiled. "Not everyone makes it."

The most powerful stories (those that are told with knowledge and experience informing the storyteller) are capable of engendering a visceral, imaginative, psychological, and intuitive response during the telling. Of all the stories that pierce to the heart of hear, the fairytales, succeed best, second only to the retelling of long-unspoken personal narratives born of crisis or bliss. The direct involvement in becoming the story makes it an experience, one that occurs at the moment of the telling. A story is not an explanation. It is lived between teller and listener; it resonates far beyond the content. The text alone, separated from the enlivening experience, can be analyzed, but the result is different. It is not a transformative event. In other words, genuine story manifests when it is heard in the moment, when the listener is drawn out of self-consciousness-the thinking mind held entranced by the ongoing logic of the narrative-and becomes everything in the story. The meaning and the power of the story do not reside in the content alone; rather, they unfold in the dynamic processes of listening/creating.

The storytelling is potent because it is physical experience. The whole person is engaged in the making of meaning and story. Mind, body, and heart are synchronized and activated. The embodied listener is alert, with senses heightened, and naturally creates image and meaning from association, feeling, memory, dream, and a ceaseless source of archetypal symbol within. It is the holistic activity of listening, not the conceptual content of the text or plot alone, where true learning takes place. During the event, the inherent and natural wisdom of ear, eye, and heart are given voice.

In the Turkish fairytale of "The Three Golden Apples," the youngest prince, the most fearful of the three sons, is the one who kills the monster that has caused massive hunger in the world. When the monster is dead, the audience cheers, relieved, breathing heavily, having overcome the monster and their own fear that they could not slay it. Then, just as the prince is about to return home, he is betrayed by his brothers and has to confront and even more challenging situation.

An old man advised him, "I know the only way back home. You must walk onto this meadow and close your eyes. You will hear three three-legged horses running. Jump on one, keeping your eyes closed. If it is the white one, you will return. If it is the red, you will remain here. If it is the black one, you will descend to another world beneath this one.

 The trembling prince leaps, eyes closed, onto the black horse. He descends to a desolate world ruled by a flesh-eating dragon that is ultimately responsible for the drought that produced the original monster.

This kind of storytelling, story, and listening, is akin to traditional rites of passage which create the ground for something to happen; for the practitioner to pas through a threshold of fear, in order to know the self and to face the awesome sacredness of life. The feeling of communion, relaxation, enchantment, and refreshment that is felt during and after a storytelling is proof that this has occurred. Something has opened, widened inside the listener, that makes visible the invisible world of image. "I didn't see you when you told the story," remarks a fourth-grade girl. I asked, "What did you see?" "My story," she answers.

It is like dreaming wide-awake. Although the narrative plot carried the logical mind along, entranced with curiosity to know what will happen next, the images and meaning of story sink downward, plunging the listener deeper and deeper-drawing upward the richest source of intuitive knowing, memory, compassion, and wisdom. It is a gossamer, yet vivid, mutlilayered shadow play, which cannot be reconstructed by the logical mind.

It is dreaming. It is awake. It is alert.

Louis Bird, an Omuskego Cree elder said about telling stories:

How do you train your young ones or your next generation so they survive? To have skills you need a lot of  education first. You need to see and acct and experience everything but you must learn before you acquire skills to survive. The lessons are hard in the beginning. The lessons as story are told  as soon as they can understand. They are geared as they grow. They change. There are different ways of telling them as the person grows older. They are flexible. They work because they also make the mind of the person flexible, able to live that kind of life. These stories help you live.

Life is dangerous without skills. The inner person has to be prepared to sustain the unpredictability of weather and mind, the intensity of experiencing sorrow and joy, acknowledging fear, change, and the truth of death. Without passing through the pulsating threshold of fear, the hero or heroine would remain ever stuck at the beginning of the story, enclosed in a fortress of systems and rigid beliefs.

In the Native American Modoc myth of Kokolimalayas (the Bone Man), an orphaned boy, Nulwee, is told that he must kill the monster that murdered his parents, destroyed his village, and caused the earth to be barren. His grandmother tells him the story. He is terrified. "How can I kill that monster?" The listener, hearing the story, asks the same thing. The boy's preparation is long and surprising. He is warned against waking the monster, but disobeys. He wakes the monster, watching him grow bone by bone back to life. He feeds the Bone Man, providing it with strength and size. Only then does he confess to his grandmother what he was inadvertently done. She then prepares him for the next stage of his initiation, more fearful than the first. He must learn to use the bow and arrow skillfully to save his life, and to think clearly on his feet while knowing absolute fear.

"Grandma," stutters the boy dressed for battle, "I am afraid."

She answers, while pushing him out the door to what might be his death, "A good warrior is always afraid."

In this way, the boy is educated to overcome his fear, not by escaping it, but by the total immersion in it while conscious. It is as if  hidden in the darkest recesses of our fear itself lies the sustaining awareness of fearlessness. We, the listener, tremble for the boy Nulwee, because we have seen the monster, and we tremble for ourselves who will now confront him again.

The secret of the power of story is the essential realization that what happens to the character in the story is not important. What is of value is what happens to us who listen. In truth, the character does not exist except in our own invention of him or her. We have manifested all the characters, even the landscape, from within, just as a disciple embodies the energy of a deity and landscape within themselves during practice and prayer; or the masked sacred dancer calls for the spirits of the gods and demons and brings them to our world to be seen, felt, feared, and loved.

Of course, the listener is tricked, just as the boy is tricked. The necessary activity is to awaken the monster in the story and in ourselves. Logically, none of us would do it. In the fairytale, the heroine is warned, "Don't open that door" or "You can use any key but the tiny silver one. Don't use that key." Or as the grandmother cautions, "Sing the old holy songs and not your childish songs." Frightened into forgetfulness, Nulwee sings those childish songs, bringing the skeleton back to life. Fear numbs the logical mind, awakening the dreaming mind to carry out what needs to be done.

The listener hears the warning and undergoes the consequences simultaneously. It is we who invest the monster with being, dress him into reality, and raise him up bone by bone. We feed him while the grandmother we have conjured waits in the distance, and the ghosts of invoked ancestors watch. We even summon the barren land and silent sky, pregnant with possibility and ready to be renourished.

Such profuse and brilliant creativity sleeps within, on the other side. It is fear that crumbles the thick walls of familiar convention and habitual patterns of ignorance. And it is fear that opens us to what treasures lie in wait within. In fairytales it is so often the youngest, least developed of the characters who is able to break through convention and acknowledge fear with humility and compassion. The trembling hero of "The Golden Apples" faces more and more fearful obstacles until he gives up hope. He destroys the final and most gruesome monster without hesitation in order to save twelve eagle babies in an uncanny place, two worlds beneath our own. In gratitude, the eagle mother attempts to save him and carry him home on her back. Midway, she loses strength and they begin to plummet toward death. The hero has no more fear of death. It has been transformed into compassion, which arises simply as a selfless act:

The prince felt pity for the eagle mother and her children. He took out a tiny knife and cut flesh from his own leg to feed her. When she tasted human flesh, she did not swallow, but she was nourished by his kindness and carried him back to this world.

Her flight, like the shaman's flight, carries us back home. With her magic she healed him and then flew back to her children.

And so the young warrior Nulwee, instructed by his grandmother, confronts the monster for the last time knowing full well that at risk are not only his own life but also those of his grandmother, the people of the future, and the earth.

The boy's heart beat swiftly. His entire body shook, but he pressed his feet to the earth and faced the monster. His arrow pierced the monster and the Bone Man's heart flew from him. Nulwee caught it in his basket and began to run. The monster stumbled after him, but without a heart, the Bone Man had no strength and fell to the ground.

In the fairytale, the hero still has to outwit his evil brothers in order to win the princess and to tell his story from beginning to end. In the myth, Nulwee throws the monster's heart into the sky and it transforms into thunder, bringing the long-needed rain.

At the threshold of the new or unknown is fear. The knowledge of fear is not abstract; instead, it is central to our awakening. In the cremation ground in India, the Hindu pilgrim invokes the wrathful aspect of Shiva: "the world considers You inauspicious, O Destroyer of Fear, who plays in the Smashan smeared with the ashes from funeral pyres, wearing a necklace of human skulls, with ghouls for comrades. But for those who remember You with devotion, O Bestower of Boons, You are supremely auspicious."

Ultimately, fear is in service of compassion. We, who have become all the characters, feel the pain and selflessness of the prince who offers his own flesh. The feeling evoked by this fearless act arises forcefully because we have been opened and prepared by the deep listening. Furthermore, because we are everyone, not hero or heroine alone, within us the consequences of actions have been enacted and felt. Such unbiased awareness is the mother of true compassion.

The terrible demons, wrathful goddesses and gods, monsters and nightmares, are hideous to the naked eye. "How frightening she is," we remark on seeing he eight-headed Mahakalis depicted in temples, or the headless blood-drinking goddesses of India and Tibet, or the unbearable monsters in our own dreams. Robert Svoboda, writing about the cremation grounds rites, expounds,

Most people, unfortunately, are so attached to their snares [the emotions which cloud the mind] that they shrink from her in hear... thinking, "She wants to kill me." She does want to kill you-the false you, the limited you, which is accrued over so many births-when she cuts off your head, your mind becomes firm, unwavering in its concentration, which enables you to succeed.

Recently, I was barred from telling ghost stories to children in a conservative school, because it would frighten them and because of the school's religious beliefs. The level of child and adult violence in this city was frightening. Later that afternoon, in another school, after an hour of stories, the children asked for more. "What shall I tell?" I asked. In unison they called out, "Something scary." And so I proceeded, slowly, deliciously, to bring ghosts and demons into view, in the visceral, vivid, yet safe world of story-knowing that if I did not, the demons would clamor for attention and rise up again and again in our world.  In this world, we do not know what to do with them except to build more prisons in which to control and hide them, or to make more wars to conquer them. The fairytale offers us a daring solution within ourselves.

When the two deceptive brothers of the prince see him, they say, "Don't believe a word he says. He is a liar and a coward." However, when the prince tells his story those who hear him know it is the truth and the two brothers are placed in a dungeon. The prince marries the youngest princess, whom he brought back to this world, but the golden apples don't grow again.

Not until the princess becomes queen and prince becomes king. Then, united, they visit the two brothers, who by now have understood the full consequences of their evil. They who feared fear and caused betrayal become the protectors of the kingdom and vow to serve the king and queen and all the people, even the animals.

And that winter the three golden apples grew on the tree. There was no hunger of heart or belly and everyone lived happily ever after. Those of you who have listened and made the golden apples grow in your minds, may you live as well.

 

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