Learn two stories and tell one

By Eric Marks

As a teen, I worked in a village museum for seven summers. Going to work was like paying a visit to another country. Summer students were taught to read the stories in documents and photos, tools and personal possessions. We were exposed to the collective memory of a place, from 10,500 years ago until the present, and learned to see the shadow of that other land underlying the community in which we lived. So perhaps it's no surprise I've come to think of heritage as a way of seeing.

I have stood on the seabed at midsummer at the spot where a ship was wrecked in midwinter, more than 100 years ago, and tried to climb the cliffs the sole survivor scaled as his clothes froze on his body.

I have hiked past campsites where fires burned 3,000 years ago, following a path worn into bedrock by men and women who left few other traces of their existence. I have knelt to retrieve a stone knife that looked as though it might have been dropped that afternoon, though I am told the man who made it died 16 centuries before. Had the people who blazed that path and the man who made that knife never lived, the world today would be unimaginably different. So I am grateful to know they were here; to be able, in some small way, to appreciate the continuity between their world and our own. To honour those connections and the fact of precedence: for, as Alden Nowlan wrote a generation ago, the world belongs not only to the living, but to those millions yet unborn, and to the named and nameless dead who brought us forth.

Without a sense of heritage, we are deaf to our elders and indifferent to our grandchildren.

If a sense of heritage results in better seeing, it begins with better listening.

My first history lessons began at home, at the feet of my parents and grandparents. The greatest influence was probably my maternal grandfather, who, at 16, witnessed the Halifax Explosion and participated in its terrible cleanup. He served on a navy minesweeper during the First World War. His father had fought in the Boer War, and his older brother survived the mud and gas and shelling at Ypres. Other brothers were not so lucky. My grandfather later became one of the first peacekeepers in the 20th century, as part of the allied army policing the demilitarized Rhineland. He boarded with a guesthouse keeper and his son, both veterans of the German navy, and so added the young submariner's knowledge of what it was like to be depth charged to his own memories of what it had been like to be the target of U-boat torpedoes and mines.

As an elderly man, he tried to convey to his grandchildren something of the honour of soldiers and the treachery of politicians, which know no nationality. He was not a pacifist, but a lifetime of heeding his country's call to arms had made him a sceptic.

His was not the generic experience of war we are taught to remember, and I believe we are the richer for having heard it; because, in truth, there is no generic experience of anything. History is a tapestry woven from millions of individual threads. Too often we are encouraged to look for the larger pattern without becoming aware of the details.

The warp and woof of the past matter, but it is the individual threads - our specific ancestors and their communities - that are the reason we are who we are. Until we start listening to the differences in our personal experiences, we can't value the things that make our own lives unique, or be aware of the richness of our heritage.

Like a winding road, the past goes on without us, even when we are not aware of it. Sometimes it takes a stranger to point out where we've come from.

One year, when I was working for the census in another county, I was cornered by a dog at a farmhouse about a kilometre down a dirt road from the nearest neighbour. The man who lived there greeted me with what I had come to regard as the standard salutation: a gruffly shouted, "Who are you?"

I stated my name and business, which he quite reasonably felt were insufficient grounds to strike up a conversation. So he asked me a question I hadn't expected: "Who's your grandfather?"

I told him, not just my grandfathers' Christian names, but the nicknames they had gone by among their friends. He seemed to consider the information, then stepped back into the house, telling me over his shoulder to stay put. In a few minutes, he stuck his head out the doorway.

"You can come in. Dog won't bite."

Inside, the house was lined floor to ceiling with books, papers and all manner of electronic equipment, from simple crystal radio sets and old telegraph machines to a working navy-surplus shortwave transmitter in the kitchen. In a corner of the living room, he threw open a wooden trunk the size of a small sea chest and lifted out a large manila envelope, from which he extracted a black and white photograph.

A dozen or so men posed alongside the sawdust, logs and tools of a lumber camp. "This was taken in 1940. That teenager on the far side is me. The third man from the right is your grandfather."

He smiled at my surprise and offered his hand. "My name's Bill."

During the next hour, Bill filled me in on another aspect of Canada's war history - the thousands of men like himself and my paternal grandfather who were too young or too old to fight, or too badly injured, or who had large families to support. They worked in the woods, in the mines and smelters and on the docks and railroads, producing the raw materials that kept the war effort going.

At one point, I asked him about the radios, which were everywhere - the house resembled an electronics museum. He smiled.

"Now, that's a story."

It went something like this: as a young teen in 1939, Bill had acquired a crystal set, the simplest radio possible. Broadcast strength and frequencies weren't regulated as they are today, so a boy who was patient could tune in to broadcasts from Europe or farther afield at night after his chores were done.

Over his crystal set that night in 1939, Bill heard a frantic broadcast from Poland. The Nazis were invading. The nightmare that would become the Second World War had begun. Night after night, he listened as Europe was torn apart.

"After that, I was pretty much hooked."

After talking to Bill, so was I.

This is our heritage: not the bare bones and empty buildings cast off by the past, but their personal meaning for those who inhabited them, and the continued relevance of that experience today, albeit in transmuted form. The past lives through us and through our stories.

I wasn't there when much of Halifax was destroyed by gunpowder and fire in 1917, but I have listened to a man who was. I couldn't ride the convoys across the North Atlantic to the battlefields of the First World War, but I have shared his terror of torpedoes and floating mines, just as he later shared the terror and elation of the Germans who launched them. Had he not lived through those experiences, I would not be here.

The Second World War began on another continent 31 years before my birth, but I have spoken with a man who listened to other men, who were there, describing the chaos it ushered in. And while I did not work in New Brunswick's lumber camps, I have spoken with enough men who did to have developed a healthy respect for the dangers they faced, and the tremendous price that was paid in their communities.

My life is richer for what I have been allowed to share of these experiences. My sense of what men and women are capable of, for good and evil, is more expansive, and this has made me both more optimistic and less forgiving of how we govern the world we have inherited.

We must listen to our elders and read the evidence of the past to learn who we are and where we have come from. And we must convey a sense of this to our children, if we do not want them to lose their way.

Talk to someone in your family or community about the past. Take
the time to really listen.

Learn two stories and tell one.

Eric Marks is a newspaper editor. He lives in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

Wanted: stories to shape the world

By Eric Marks

An old stick rests high on the shore of a lake. The wind and waves long ago stripped it of its bark. Years of lying in the sun have bleached it the even, silver colour of an elder’s hair. One day, a man picks it up. He takes a pipe from his mouth and blows smoke at the stick, watching the way it flows around and away from the wood. As he turns it in his hands, he sees a story forming.

There’s a slim paperback book sitting on the corner of my writing desk. It's a collection of public lectures delivered in November by Native author and playwright Thomas King. Its title is The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. The point he begins from and returns to is as simple as it is universal: "The truth about stories is that that's all we are.”

The man turns the stick in his hands. Tiny shavings fall to the ground as he carves at it with a pocket knife. Beneath the weathered surface, the wood is a warm, reddish tan. The man draws his knife across the wood, and the broken end of the stick becomes a strong, cupped hand, offered palm upward in greeting. The stubs of twigs jut from its wrist.

Our knowledge of the world begins with stories, and from our earliest days we grow accustomed to hearing them – whether gentle (“Once upon a time”) or ominous (“If you don’t stop that . . .”). And we learn to distinguish which of the stories we hear apply to us and which do not.

The first inkling I had of the importance of storytelling came from a visit to the village library when I was a child.

I already knew the alluring power of stories. My parents read every night to my brother and me, and as soon as I could read myself, I spent most of my free time with a book in my head. But, as excited as I was about stories, I’d never given a thought to storytelling. The best stories seemed to tell themselves. They still do.

Then, one autumn, a poem I had written about Remembrance Day as a class assignment was read at the school service on Nov. 11.

That Saturday, a volunteer at the library stopped me while I was browsing for storybooks. She was a slightly stern woman, plain spoken and fiercely intelligent, and an immigrant from one of the Baltic states where the heel of Communism had impressed upon everyone the power of words.

"I heard your poem. You have a talent – a gift. I'm not saying this to make you feel happy; I don't care how you feel about it. I’m telling you; that is all. You’re good with words. But, you should know this: words have power. Words can change the world. But you have to learn to use them responsibly. Otherwise – ” She shrugged and looked away. “Terrible things can happen.”

At the time, I was pleased and confused and didn’t have a clue what she meant, although her comments planted in me the first awareness that I could be a storyteller as well as a reader.

It took me 20 years to understand the truth that she had shared with me and which Thomas King expresses so eloquently in his lectures: that the stories we are told and tell and believe in shape the outcomes of our lives. This is doubly true of the stories others tell about us.

The man turns the stick in his hands. Lines appear on it: bright bands of colour representing the six worlds. There are narrow bands of black for the world beyond the sky and the world beneath the water and the earth, which man never sees; broad bands of blue for the sky world and the water world; between them, a jagged band of yellow ochre to represent the world of earth. Across the surface of the earth, where it meets the water or the sky, the man daubs a dotted line of red for the ghost world, which exists beside our own.

Once upon a time – in an era we regard scornfully as superstitious – storytellers understood the responsibility they carried. They believed, quite correctly, that words used carelessly can kill.

Thomas King cites a story from Leslie Marmon Silko’s wonderful novel, Ceremony, explaining how evil came into the world. A group of witches hold a competition to see who can come up with the scariest thing. The winner tells a terrible, horrible, awful story, "full of fear and slaughter, disease and blood.” The witches try to call it back, but they can’t: once told, a story has its own power in the world.

Reflecting on this tale, King writes, “you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.”

If Leslie Silko’s story is too grim for you, there's a lighter one I've heard. It's a Mi’kmaw tale that was told to folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons in 1923. In a time of great hardship, seven young men journey far into the wilderness looking for a man who is almost as old as the world itself and who can grant their wishes – the hero Kluskap. When they find him, one young man asks for a long life. The obliging Kluskap turns him into a twisted cedar tree. The others ask for useful skills – for knowledge – and Kluskap sends them back to the people with all the fundamental skills of the Mi'kmaw culture.

The young men have learned two lessons: All wisdom is conveyed through stories. And, it is better to live well than to live long.

The man turns the stick in his hands. Figures appear on it: A man raises his arms to the sky. His feet are rooted to the earth. His arms sprout twigs. Below him, figures encircle the stick in a dance of life: hunting. Crafting. Canoeing. Speaking. Healing. Trading. The six gifts of culture.

Most of the stories we tell today are not so constructive. If they carry any implicit lesson, it is likely to be an unhealthy one. Our children are enchanted by the dubious entertainment of television, movies, video games and magazines – media driven by corporate greed and sustained by the promotion of unwholesome appetites such as avarice, envy and lust. Their lives are hexed by stories as constraining as the evil spells that put Sleeping Beauty in her trance.

What stories do these sources tell? The convenience of processed food and easy credit, the romance of alcohol and commitment-free sex. Better living through chemistry and self-esteem through violence. The results are visible all around us: ill health and obesity, record debt and endemic poverty, loveless families, broken homes, an epidemic of depression, frustration and violent acts. Our beliefs are killing us.

The worst stories we tell have developed a life of their own. Willing actors play them out over and over because these stories were born of the hurt inside us and the desire to escape it. They gain power with each repetition. Ask the relatives of any young suicide or of the victims of spree killers, such as Marc Lepine.

We become the stories we tell, because in telling them, we invest them with belief and give them power over our lives.

As Sackville poet John Thompson wrote in one of his last poems, "I’m in touch with the gods I’ve invented; / Lord, save me from them.”

The man turns the stick in his hands, knotting a braid of dried sweetgrass around it like a bracelet. The braid holds an eagle feather. The story is almost finished.

We need stories of honesty and courage to counter the bland, smothering evils in which our culture has wrapped us. But, first we need storytellers brave enough to tell them.

Our best writers have known this for a long time. Think of Alden Nowlan, shaming himself and his audience with the stark, unguarded honesty of his poems – laying bare his weaknesses, his hopes and his fears, knowing that they are also ours.

Think of David Adams Richards and the strength of his characters – besieged by the greed, envy and spite of their neighbours, redeemed (if not always saved) by the simple act of bravery, of turning away from violence and hurtfulness.

Think of the biting humour of Dalton Camp and the cleansing power of the ridiculous, of how the best storytellers can transform tears to laughter, and of how well suited film and television are to comedy. There’s Something About Mary isn’t fine art, but it may be one of the best stories we have about the lunacy of stalking. It's surely gotten more young men to think about the subject than any earnest tract.

For my part, I decided some time ago to be what Thomas King refers to as a "hopeful pessimist.” Writing of himself and his late friend, Louis Owens, King observes, “we wrote knowing that none of the stories we told would change the world. But we wrote in the hope that they would.

“We both knew that stories were medicine, that a story told one way could cure, that the same story told another way could injure.”

We tell ourselves stories to create and convey meaning, to salve our hurts and open our lives to new possibilities. The storyteller’s responsibility is to share that healing with others, and not to sow the seeds of further harm.

The man hands the talking stick to his son. The sweetgrass and the eagle spirit will carry his words across the six worlds to the Creator.
The boy takes a breath, and his story begins.

Eric Marks is a newspaper editor living on the shores of the Gulf of Maine. Thomas King’s book The Truth About Stories (ISNB 0-88784-696-3) is published by Anansi and sells for $18.95.