The New Storytellers
How we live the story is as important as its content
by David Spangler
DURING THE EARLY 1950s, my parents and I lived in Morocco not far from Casablanca. An exciting weekend adventure was to drive south to the ancient walled city of Marrakech and visit its souk or native market. If you have ever seen the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, you will have seen that market as it was then, for part of that movie was filmed in Marrakech while I was living in Morocco.
I loved the excitement and bustle of the great souk at Marrakech. It seemed a place that belonged more to one of Princess Scheherazade's thousand and one tales than to the real world. I can never read the Arabian Nights without thinking of that market with its ordered riot of colors, sounds and odors as tradesmen and farmers hawked their wares and foodstuffs from open stalls and booths.
One of the attractions of the souk was to watch the storytellers. As I recall, there was a wall, and along it the storytellers lined up, each trying to attract the largest crowd, each vying to outdo his competition on either side. I could not understand Arabic, so I didn't know what they were saying (my father would occasionally translate for me), but I was fascinated by their animation. Surrounded by circles of interested customers, many of whom were children, they projected a mystique and an excitement that spoke to me across the barrier of language.
The tradition of the storyteller and bard is an ancient and honorable one. We are a storytelling, story-loving species. Let someone be spinning a good tale at a gathering and watch a crowd collect to listen. We recognize that in the power to tell a story lies the power to shape our reality, to alter our perceptions, to create new worlds of experience. It is, in fact, a god-like power, one that can affect and change consciousness (which modern physicists tell us may be the ultimate reality after all). If, as St. John says, in the Beginning was the Word, then the Story followed directly after, unfolding the universe from the imagination of God. In emulation of the divine, we have sought to duplicate that moment of creation by being storytellers, too.
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