Interview

A map is primarily a message from eyes to mind, an atmosphere is something you enter: it requires all your senses.  It doesn’t reveal to you the quickest route to your destination, rather a complete encounter. Smell, vision, hearing, taste even – these are things that may be activated when a storyteller has plunged into the atmosphere a particular story offers. The pungency of a forest, the spray of the sea, the dankness of a cave. A story wishes you to tarry; how can you really get to know it if you are striding from bullet point to bullet point, night after night? You have to show fidelity to what you can see at that moment and report back. Sometimes a scene will stretch or contort, even one you’ve told a hundred times before, and you should pay attention to that, follow its lead. If you are treating the story only as a map that may frustrate you. I suppose it’s like the old adage about the journey being as important as the destination. It’s not that myths don’t provide patterns and direction – they can – but the primary surrender is to the sensory tapestry the story provides in the first place. An experienced storyteller knows that to understand a tale, first they have to get lost in it. A map can feel transactional, and hurt the feelings of the story if it feels it’s being treated so. You have to live where it lives.

Much of what we see on social media isn’t myth it’s commentary on myth, and usually psychology in disguise, or myth being flogged for some groovy new positioning within the culture wars. It’s used as exotic decoration, but the same modern mind is just an inch under the surface. I’d have to say: don’t offer commentary on what a myth is until you’ve travelled a hundred miles in its kayak. Don’t find out what you think from Youtube. Tell the story, in your mouth, over and over. Puzzle on it, dream on it, fast on it, feast on it. Take it for a stroll not a hike, don’t manipulate it to make a hip little comment and get ‘likes’. The story will soon shift from your side like an offended lover. It’s to do with that big old word phenomenology, or what I call Beholding not just Seeing. Wait to see what it tells you, don’t tell it ‘what it is’.

That doesn’t mean you don’t study, don’t do research. But all that book-knowledge is relegated to a secondary stream. The telling is a Temenos, the stage is a-place-set-apart. Those moments can be sacred. By ignoring the oral telling you are circumnavigating the holy heart of the experience and settling only for theories and opinions. Your mind is stimulated but the soul not so much. The storytelling is a kind of praying.

Without the story being actually told it’s all talk and no prayer.

I will tell a story in front of an audience quickly after learning it because I’ve done it for so long, and I know the amount of information I’ll immediately receive. I wouldn’t recommend this for about ten years, it’ll likely get unglued in your hands. Tell it to small groups and keep the stakes delightfully low for some time.

This isn’t for everyone. I do it because I’m curious about wild things and I don’t want to domesticate my imagination by turning it into a recital. But – some master tellers do just that and it can be incandescent. But for me all the action happens in the live arena, not the green room or study. To actual imagine in public requires tremendous surety. This is where hundreds or thousands of hours in public come in. 80% of storytelling is just holding your composure together as a room full of strangers look intently at you and form distinct opinions. That’s so unnerving that many want their words in a pile before they go through it. I understand that, and some can make it beautiful. But I didn’t get into this for to be the most sublime and assured teller of words that always behave and do what I say and never stumble. I did it to try and find the wildest way I could of telling the truth. Truth differs from teller to teller, so you better figure out what yours is, no matter how subtle.

The truth is not facts. They come and go. The truth is a deeper, more anarchic weave of polyphonic eruptions. I’m not just reeling off lines learnt from a page – that’s literacy not orality – but showing some faithfulness for the thing that’s actually happening right there at that moment. What’s happening in the shared eruption of imagination in the room. It’s a many sensed, many voiced encounter and I don’t want to comb its feathers through.

This is my work, as witness to the music of what happens.

It feels like everyone I know has fallen in love with etymology. It’s great and you can look awfully smart awfully quickly if you lob the root system of a word about. I get it. It helps us understand something about how we’ve got were we’ve got. But be very sparing if you try and crowbar that into a story. You just look like you’re showing off. Save it till a later chat and it may be useful. The moment you utilise it you’re addressing the wrong part of the participants’ character. You’re not courting their soul anymore, you’re likely showboating. You’re cooking with the wrong ingredients. Always go for an image over a concept, an image over an explanation when actually dealing with the primary encounter of telling. Etymology always feels like an excavation to me, a bringing up into the light. But mythtelling is often a descent, a downwards move. Keep everything in the direction of darkness, torch light, horses in the rain. Gifted storytellers can make asides, even tell a story within a story, without it losing its heft and sense of direction. Again, it’s about trust of the teller.

We are in initiatory times but we lack initiated language. We have some very smart people out there but mostly they operate within the mode of words as persuasion or argument, and usually pick-a-side. Even folk that go on and on about myth are rarely using the antique technologies that truly honour it. Myths need coaxing. We are seemingly in magpie times – black or white, right or left. But magpies have these blue feathers if you pay close attention. Myths speak blue feather language – they can be co-opted for sure, but they are meant to offer some third, artful perspective when culture is butting heads.

To be a sovereign in ancient Ireland you had to bind your chariot to two wild horses. They would want to go in two different directions and you had to dictate through charisma, will and skill a third road that both horses obeyed. The third road is not some bland middle ground, but something sparky and charming enough to intrigue both horses. That’s a blue feather move. You shouldn’t be punting for leadership without it.

And a decent leader has to have what i call the Service Code embedded within them. That involves knowing there’s something bigger than your own passions at play. Until you are defeated by a story you will get nowhere near it. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, and as Rilke says, we need to be beaten, decisively, by constantly greater beings. Storytelling involves submission. It’s a hierarchy of skills and wisdoms, not a level playing field. A great storyteller used to be honoured like a blacksmith was honoured, or a holy woman, it’s both a skill and an art, it takes the scuffs of everyday reality and renders them magnificent again. It reminds us of the prayer mat we kneel on and the smoke hole we praise through. Right now, I can barely fathom anything more important.

Weddings usually come at the end of the story and are to do with a high tide of the heart. They are to do with healing, a coming together. After the intrigues and betrayals of the story, suddenly a wholeness arrives, all the ships set out in the same direction, old friends settle their differences and everyone is in love. This isn’t corny, it’s necessary, especially if its been a rather dark ride to get to this point. There’s a contract for oral storytellers – well, I feel there is, and live by this – that the audience has to trust them. That no matter how deep and turbulent the tale gets, there will be some redemptive energy announced at the end. A green shoot will burst from the ashes, life in its way continues. The alchemical journey of a story, from lead to gold, involves a set of stages, and the wedding is one of them. They are to do with a spiritual reunion, even a glimpse of heaven.

The matter is the bones of the tale, the sense is what the teller does with it. If you see a fantastic telling of a story and dream of telling it, then go back to the simplest rendition you can find. Build from there. Don’t coast along on the hard-earned phrases the teller conjured. They likely worked a night shift in the deep forge of their own soul to get them. If you tell a story using all the observations you witnessed from the first teller that’s not the oral tradition you are utilising, more intellectual or imaginative theft. The sense of the story is where the teller reveals their particular genius, and it’s the reason you may love their telling of the same tale more than someone else’s. There are as many ways of telling as there are weather patterns or animals on the plains I always say. Find your own way. It’ll be more than enough. Seeing Billy Connelly, Gioia Timpanelli, Robin Williamson helped me understand my essential energy when I was a young storyteller, and I will always admire them and lovingly quote them. We all have influences and should acknowledge them every chance we get, but you really need to burrow down into your own sense of things.

Tradition is the matter. Innovation is the sense. Tradition is an old woman gripping a girls ankle who has found she can fly. The job of a grown up is not to let the girl go – she will be scorched by the sun – but not to bring her down to earth either, but to live in the useful tension of both. That’s the incubation that makes masterful storytelling.

Storytelling in the way I do it is rather like dreaming with my eyes open. All sorts of information usually restricted to when I’m asleep filters into my waking time. This is terribly useful. You and I have just been travelling up the west coast of Canada, when the tour ended and I returned to Dartmoor I found some dates had been added. Every night asleep i’m in some kind of casino, hospital, chapel or temple exploring the next evenings safari. This has now happened for one straight week – I’m not being especially poetic. Whether I’m asleep or awake at this point the myth telling is in full disclosure. It doesn’t seem to care. It’s a little tiring, though intriguing.

I’ve been asked recently to offer more social commentary. This surprised me as I thought everything I did was social commentary, though in a blue feather kind of way. A way that brings in our honourable and sometimes dishonourable dead, sea lions and flakes of snow. That evokes a mode of behaviour, and dare I say it, morality.

My dreaming form is basically how I think deeper. I’ve come to the conclusion that its Otherworld Thinking. This is more useful I suspect than me wheezing on about things in a strung out, daylight speech that you can no doubt get much more effectively from others.

The writer holds a revered position, but the oral storyteller is still an outlaw.

It’s a vagabond art, leaving little trace at the end of an evening save in the hearts of those that stood firm in the scrum. It’s our most ancient thing. We did it in the Dordogne caves, we do it now. You will have heard me say at the end of an evening, that our people from five, ten, fifteen, twenty generations back peering in would understand what we were doing that night, without the use of a screen or even a microphone.

Oral storytelling is a redemptive act of resistance and delight in the face of despair and franchise. In its purest form, it is completely counter-cultural. It’s a polyphonic mosh-pit that refutes any mono-meaning and flips outrageously and reverently between known and unknown worlds. It’s how we quilt our life to the Otherworld, how we occasionally glimpse heaven.

I tell ancient stories because I know they are in the future too.

More from Ted Hargrave on Substack, Into the Marvellous: The Art of Oral Storytelling + Travelogue + Interview with Martin Shaw from his Canadian Tour.