Storytelling

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15; Luke 7:36-8:3

            Not quite ten years ago a friend of mine invited me to join about a hundred people in a Buddhist Center in Colorado.  We were going to spend a week, he said, examining the “story field,” at what was called “The Story Field Conference.” He explained that “story field” meant the rich ground from which spring all of the stories of humans:  the big stories or meta-narratives, the medium sized stories of various traditions, the tribal, national, family, and personal stories that everybody has some acquaintance with. 

            I got pretty interested in this process.  I have always been a lover of stories, and, like my father before me, I appreciate few things more than a good yarn.  A friend of mine once compared my stories to a Bruckner symphony—“they just go on and on,” he said, “never an ending in sight.”  He should have known my dad.  Compared to his, my stories are little ditties and jingles.  At the Story Field Conference I began to view stories differently.  I began to understand why it is that so many people attach themselves to stories that actually are quite destructive both for them and for the planet they live on.  I began to see more clearly why it is that our self-understanding is often tied to stories that might or might not be true (few stories are completely factual), but which anchor us to some context that gives our lives meaning. 

            On my next birthday after the Story Field Conference, my partner Joe gave me a book written by an Australian named Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories. [1]   It is hands down the best and most important book I’ve read in the last decade.  Boyd shows in a fantastically readable way that all of our stories, not just the oral and written ones, but those told through art, sports, theatre, dance, architecture, and all our other human enterprises, are the way that our species has evolved to gather and pass on survival information.  We are always telling stories and listening to them, just as I’m telling one now and you are listening to it.  And in one way or another we are always telling stories as a way of surviving.  Sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes that survival is the passing on of critical information, and sometimes it is simply shared to give us a chance to cut loose and laugh as a necessary experience to help us get through and carry on. 

            Now all that I have said so far is backdrop to what I have to say about two stories in particular.  One is the story the prophet Nathan tells King David which climaxes in the line, “You are the man!”  The other is the story in which Jesus tells a riddle to his host, Simon the Pharisee, and then asks the question, “Do you see this woman?”  Both of theses stories, sliding together on this June Sunday, have to do with self-recognition.  One a parable, one a riddle:  both function like traps for the purpose of exposing inescapable truth.  One person, David, gets it, hearing the message that the story has for him.  The other person, Simon, might or might not have gotten the message—we don’t know.  But there is another layer on each of these stories, as there always is.  Why are they told?  Why were they preserved?  Each contains some survival information for the one who hears them.  And that would be you and I.  The story is never complete, indeed not even alive, until there is a hearer.  Art hanging in a museum may be ever so powerful, but not until there is at least one viewer.  The relationship between story and hearer is essential to the story itself.

            So let’s take a brief look at each of these stories.  I’ve already said that they are about self-recognition.  Nathan’s skillful fabrication of a parable about a little pet lamb of a poor man that the rich man stole and slaughtered for his own use aptly captures the dynamics of David’s recent sexual history.  Wandering up to his roof deck overlooking Jerusalem one spring afternoon, he had spied a woman bathing.  Aroused by the sight, he had sent for her, brought her to his palace, had his way with her, and gotten her pregnant.  He then had had his general summon her soldier-husband from the front to come home as a way of setting up a scene to cover up his own unfortunate development.  The plot had failed because of Uriah the husband’s unwillingness to cooperate with the trap being laid for him, so David had had him killed.  So far, so good, until the storyteller appears on the scene in the person of Nathan, the court prophet.  Knowing what had gone on and seeing the enormity of the king’s behavior, Nathan picks the parable—the story—as a way of making his point.  David falls for it.  Hearing about a fictional crime, he pronounces judgment:  “the man who did this deserves to die!”  And with that, Nathan has him.  “You are the man!” he says.  And then he begins to unpack the message.  When he hears it, David responds, “I have sinned.”  He sees himself.  He recognizes what he has done.  He owns it.

            The other story is considerably more complex.  Simon, a Pharisee, invites Jesus to a dinner, which obviously is a festive meal because guests will be arranged on couches where they will recline during dinner, in contrast to the everyday style of eating.  A woman, quite possibly one of the many neighborhood people who would be hanging around the edges of a banquet hoping maybe for some leftovers or maybe just out of curiosity, wanders into the house—apparently a common occurrence—and heads directly for Jesus.  She carries an alabaster jar, quite expensive, full of ointment.  She stands at the foot of the couch on which Jesus is reclining, weeping.  Her hair down—a telltale sign that she is a prostitute—she engages in the very intimate act of drying his feet with her hair.  Simon is appalled that this scene goes on and Jesus acts as if it is all perfectly natural.  Why doesn’t he put a stop to this?  Simon thinks.  He certainly can’t be a spiritual man, or else he wouldn’t allow such a thing to go on.  Then Jesus tells his riddle about two debtors, one with a big debt, one with a little one.  Both debts are forgiven by the same creditor.  Who will love the creditor more?  Simon gives the obvious answer:  he one whose debt was greater.  Bingo.  Jesus has him.  He is just about to make the point that what differentiates Simon from the woman is how much each of them loves.  And how much each of them loves has to do with the degree of forgiveness that each of them has experienced.  The riddle serves as a mirror to Simon, who might choose to look and see himself in this little story.  He might see that he is the debtor with a very small debt indeed, whose perfectionism in keeping the law precludes his need for any forgiveness to amount to much.  Hence he might see that his heart really is not very capacious when it comes to loving.  He might see that he could learn a thing or two from this woman, who, by the way, is apparently still a harlot at the end of the story as before it began.  Nothing suggests otherwise.  Simon might see that someone like her, outside the Law, a social outcast, is actually practicing a kind of divine love in her extravagant devotion.  But don’t bet on it.  Sometimes stories suggest things that are just too much at odds with other stories, like Simon’s Pharisaic one, that we are wed to for us to hear their message. 

            Not all but many stories silently ask their hearers to pull aside the curtain and see themselves. Sometimes stories affirm us.  Sometimes they convict us. Sometimes they jar us loose from our presuppositions.  Sometimes they simply speak their message and leave us to ponder it perhaps at some later date.  And sometimes stories, since they are human creations, make no sense. 

            I saw a movie Friday night, an old one called “The Fallen Idol.”  It was about a web of stories, most of which were all a jumble of truth and lies.  A child is at the center of the plot.  He only partially gets what the adults around him are doing, and he is caught up in conflicting secret-keeping that he finds bewildering.  He both lies and tells the truth, motivated essentially by his love for one of the adults with whom he has a deep bond.  At the end, no one listens to his story, although he is desperately trying to tell the truth.  The movie leaves us viewers wondering what the kid might have made of it all as he grew out of his innocence and became accustomed to a world of stories where much of the time nothing is incontrovertibly true.  But that is just my take-away from the movie.  I could have yawned, left the theatre, and forgotten about it.  Stories rarely force us to pay attention unless our souls are ready to.

            The Bible is our main storybook.  Some of its stories are good, some are lousy.  Some bear the mark of eternal truth, like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  Some of them we would just as soon forget about, so violent and horrible they are.  But the Bible is only one set of narratives among many.  Even for many Christians, other stories, like the narratives that we loosely call “racism,” trump biblical teachings.  And there are things even from the lips of Jesus such as “love your enemies” that all but the most devout will rationalize, debate, make excuses for—because they irritate us by conflicting with our more precious stories. 

            “You are the one!” continues to be the recurring message of the stories that are trustworthy.  “Do you see this woman?” is a recurring theme of stories that invite us to reexamine our attitudes towards those whom we easily dismiss as unwashed and unworthy.  If you are not listening to stories that ask you one or both of those questions fairly frequently, then perhaps it might be a good idea to ask whether the stories you believe are actually helping you to survive.  Are the stories we live by simply making us believe what is easiest and most comfortable, the stories that demand the least change? 

            You are the one.  You decide.

[1]  Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories:  Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016 

Technique

As sometimes happens when on vacation, I wind up at a museum seeing something I would probably have missed had I lived next door.  Joe and I had planned during our New York trip this week to go to the new Whitney, never having seen it.  Alas, it was closed on Tuesday, our only day left for a visit. We decided to head to the Guggenheim.  There in progress was an exhibit of the incredible work of László Moholi-Nagy, about whom I knew absolutely nothing.

Moholi-Nagy, a Hungarian Jew by birth, had an interesting career that blossomed between the two world wars.  Before immigrating to the United States where he was to make a huge name for himself in Chicago, he became a faculty member at the famed Bauhaus.  Always interested in integrating art with science and technology, he had an array of skills that enabled him to assume a leading role in artistic experimentation in photography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, industrial design, and typography. 

There was a day when I would gladly have passed on the opportunity to view a bevy of paintings largely of geometric shapes in various colors.  Over the years, however, I have gravitated more and more towards noticing artists’ techniques.  How does a single stroke depict a blood vessel in a hand?  Or how do little irregular daubs of paint create the illusion of lace?  What is the secret of creating the shine on a piece of silver or the realistic representation of a flower stem in a glass of water?  So I looked at Moholi-Nagy’s paintings paying attention to what he was doing with squares, triangles, circles, and rectangles.  He very skillfully created montages of shapes and color that exactly reproduced the effect that would happen if layers of colored glass were placed over colored objects including other glass.  I was intrigued to watch how he demonstrated what happens when various tones collide and mix. 

Step away from the painting, look at it less analytically, and it can recede into a rather pleasant but somewhat basic, no-frills illustration in a geometry lesson.   And that is where technique sometimes serves the cause of truth.  Mastery of color, expertise at applying paint to canvas, intimate knowledge of tones and values enable a genius to express realities so flawlessly that one can do with art what we frequently do with life:  miss the depth of it. 

More is happening right outside your door than you could ever believe.  Some of it is positively great.  Some of it is mundane, but strangely worth noticing.  It all makes no difference until we pause and look.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

Birthday

Everybody has a birth myth.  Some know theirs.

Mine contains several elements, all of them having to do with who I finally, after 71 years, am on my way to becoming. 

I was a big baby by 1945 standards, weighing 9 pounds, according to the telegram my mother sent my father, then somewhere in the Pacific headed towards the Battle of Okinawa.  Mama told me many years later that labor had been exceedingly difficult and painful for her. She had begged Dr. Archie Sasser to let her have a Caesarean section.  Nothing doing.  She could do it. 

Childbirth was not the only thing going on that hot summer day as World War II was winding down.  Uncle Gus Burroughs, my grandfather Leon’s youngest brother and the one he was closest to in age, lived a short distance away.  He lay dying in the house he had built.  One version of the story, which my mother’s sister Aunt Min did not confirm, was that some of his family asked Uncle Gus, “Papa, can we do anything for you?  Get you anything?”  He said yes.  He really would like a drink of water from the Fred Brown place.  At the Fred Brown place there was an artesian well the water from which was apparently special to Uncle Gus. 

In that time of gas rationing and in the heat of the May night no one was about to drive clear out to the Fred Brown place to fetch a drink of water.  Someone instead slipped downstairs to Uncle Gus’s own artesian well, filled a glass with water, brought it up to the bedroom, and announced, “Here, Papa, is your water.”  Uncle Gus was helped to sit up.  He took a sip of water.  “God damn,” he said. “That’s not from the Fred Brown place.”  And with that he rolled over and died.

All of that was happening as I was just getting used to being on earth. 

Put it all together and you have the ingredients of my birth myth:  big baby, hard labor, absent father, and a dying.  Don’t leave out the humor in the last bit.  And don't forget the theme of thirst nor the element of water. 

I could make as if each of these things somehow perfectly fits the life I am living, and that would be contrived, to say the least.  But connections are obvious.  I have always been healthy, which is sometimes what big babies turn out to be.  Birth, especially the ongoing birth of becoming, always demands my attention, energies, and best efforts. Shortcuts never work. 

Father—is a more complex theme.  I thought forty years ago that Daddy had always been absent from my life in a certain sense.  But before he died ten years ago, he and I had become quite close, a gift I cherish perhaps more than any other in my life.  Yet I continue to yearn for fatherhood, both to have it and to share it.  I’m at the stage now where I know I have something to give to younger men and I want to give what is mine to share. 

Both my father and my mother’s father were men who never stopped being natural, human, and real.  I think my grandfather, and perhaps Uncle Gus, were more at ease with themselves than many of us.  Cussing and praying didn’t rule each other out.  I’d like to think that they knew on a deep level that they had nothing to hide, nothing to fear, and nothing of which to be ashamed.  As long ago as my high school years, I wanted to be real.  I have come to replace that word with whole in recent years.  But it is all pretty much the same.  I don’t want to be a phony.  I want to be authentic.  And that means claiming a fair amount of dirt and mud, not just glitter and glory. 

And there is nothing I like more than laughing.  Well yes there is.  Making someone else laugh. 

I wrote a theme in high school once.  I can only remember the last line.  “I hope I will be thirsty forever.”  I was talking about the thirst for knowledge and understanding.  I thirst.  I always will.

And don’t try to fool me with water that purports to be from a well that it isn’t.  I want the real thing.  For that I came into the world and for that I’ll die.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, May 30, 2016

Pentecost I

When dawned the Day of Pentecost,

Some deadness in the air,

Stung by the sense that all was lost

And paralyzed by fear

A band of brothers hung around

A house that was not theirs.

And suddenly there came a sound

Of gods bestrewing stars

On earth, their breath a wind that crashed

And shattered panes and doors

And barren expectations smashed

Destroying bolts and bars

Preventing change in human hearts

That could no gospel hear.

Without the aid of maps or charts

Or fabricated cheer,

A heav’nly flame of white-hot love

Their comp’ny came among,

Alighting like a graceful dove,

Distributing a tongue

On heads of all those brothers there.

Exotic words spoke they,

Drunk on a Spirit very rare,

And prophesied a Day

When earth and heaven would join as one

To celebrate a God

Whose grace and mercy had begun

To cast that fire abroad

So that the universe might be

Converted and renewed

And stamped through all eternity

With God’s similitude.

And oh, my kindred, near and far

You dead and living dead,

That Spirit will your minds unbar

From all you hate and dread

And set you free to realize

In resurrection power

That we ourselves have won the prize

Within this very hour

Of God the Son’s transcendent love

Exceeding all desire

That never will from us remove

That purifying fire!  

May, 2016


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

Worn

“ You really have to go see your doctor about this.”

“ I just don’t understand why it hurts the way it does.  Something’s not right.”

“That’s why I’m saying talk to your doctor.”

This conversation went on for the better part of a year, maybe longer.   Every chance I had, I would put my hand—either one of them—into Joe’s and practically beg for a massage.  He never resists.  (That’s a big advantage in any mate.) 

I began to notice a perennial soreness—not really pain—when I was doing some full body weight exercises under the guidance of a trainer several years ago.  I would finish pull-ups or pushups on a bar and the palm of my hand would hurt.  Then it would go away.  But the sensation kept returning even after I no longer was doing the regular exercises that had first seemed to cause it.

“We know what the problem is,” my young doctor told me after he had quizzed me and looked at the X-rays.  “Severe arthritis.” 

“Severe?”  I asked.   “Why severe?  The pain isn’t great, if indeed it’s pain.” 

“A lot of people come in here with far less arthritis than you have,” he said, pointing to the absence of cartilage between bones in the thumb, “and they’re complaining of pain that is nearly unbearable.” 

Wow.  I’d better be thankful for a high pain threshold, I suppose, that I don’t exactly believe I have. 

So my primary care physician was correct.  Arthritis, he had said, was the probable cause.  And here I have prided myself for so long that I’ve had none of that ugly stuff.  Should I be surprised that, after years of running, my knees pop and crack like kindling?  Should I be shocked that when I do yoga my spine now speaks to me in unmistakable tones of bone rubbing on bone?  Or that my hands, incessantly typing, washing, playing piano, needlepointing, would finally say farewell to the last traces of cartilage?

Entropy.  Things tend always in the direction of disorder, decay, disarray.  Refrigerators, cars, toys, human beings:  nothing excepted.  I am lucky to have come this far with so little worn out.  It won’t go on forever.  And there are things to take to make it somewhat better, or at least endurable.  Ibuprofen.  Cortisone injections if need be.  Surgery if it really gets past bad. 

What is much less easy to take are the daily reminders that I live in a society that really cannot stand old, worn-out things—or people.  If I am praised it is because I look younger than I actually am or because I am “so active” at my age.  Passivity and dependency are not only unfashionable but unthinkable.  There are exceptions, of course.  Once in awhile someone recognizes the value of experience.  Some actually respect wisdom. 

There are things more painful than arthritis.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016