David Campbell is a member of the Scottish Storytelling Group. He is also formerly a producer with BBC Radio Scotland and is an internationally renowned storyteller, poet and writer. His latest book ‘out of the mouth of the morning’ was published by Luath earlier this year. He has written the following article for the DGS.

Stories: The Politics of the Heart

“Without the story in which everyone unborn, living and dead participates we are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind.”  So says the great Orkney writer George Mackay Brown. 

Story is the lifeline of human consciousness it is the blood stream of our interconnectedness.  Stories carry the irrefutable proof that we are one family and the renewed sharing of them is the pathway to empathy and that is a step towards understanding, generosity and peace.

            The delight in hearing stories of diverse cultures is the realization that the dress, the trappings, the arrangement of colours are different but the chambers of the heart from which they spring are the same.

            There is a story told by the luminous Scottish traveller storyteller Duncan Williamson.  “Half a Blanket.”

Half a Blanket

A Cautionary Tale

An old man on sour and unforgiving land in Scotland worked hard all his days and with perseverance, working sunrise to sunset, he prospered turning the land into a fine and fertile farm.   As age began to come upon him he gave the farm to his son and he would take his ease with his friends, have a wee dram and a crack in the local pub and he loved nothing better than to take his wee granddaughter on his knees and tell her stories by the fire, stories of the old times, of fairies and elves and strange creatures.  The wee girl loved these stories. 

One day his son said to his wife,   “He needs to go.  He does nothing, puff, puff, puff on that pipe, blethering to his pals in the pub and putting daft fairy stories into the bairn’s head.  He has to go and he goes tonight. 

“But you can’t do that to your own father,” said his wife.

“No buts,” he said, “he goes tonight, now.”

“You’ll need to give him some money surely or something.”

“He gets nothing, he goes.”

“It’s a cold haar frost tonight, give him a blanket at least to keep him warm.”

“Very well, a blanket he gets and he goes.”

At this the wee girl came hugging her mother’s knees and said, “No, mummy, give granddaddy half a blanket.”

“Half a blanket!” said her mother.

“Yes,” said the little girl, “we’ll need the other half when it’s daddy’s turn to go.”

^^^

            American, African, Indian versions of the tale have the identical features, the same cautionary reminder of the nemesis consequent upon our failure of compassion.

            A story has, by the unique capacity of human imagination, the power of replicating life, vicariously conveying experience so that we feel we have been there.  The Scottish travellers say they will give you the song, story, eye to eye, mind to mind, heart to heart.  It is a direct transfusion given in this way and we, the recipients receive the gift as a child would, whole.  I have experienced telling a friend of a visit I had made and this friend subsequently believed so vividly and stated that she had been with me on that visit.   She had lived the story in her imagination.   In fact I could scarcely persuade her that she had not been there.

            If we return to the words of George Mackay Brown we hear his caution for the scraps of paper may well in our age be the proliferation of information blown on that cold wind of technology without human contact.

            Many believe today that we can let the machines teach our children but the stark truth is that between the machine and the child there is no real contact, no heart contact, no love contact.  Yes, the video game can respond and answer questions but the child could be hurt, lonely, sick or die and the images would flicker on relentlessly on the plasma screen.

            Compare the light of enchantment an engagement in the eye of a child listening to the live storyteller.  If it were measurable you could see the radiant connectedness.  Years after I have visited a school, children I had not seen for 3 or 4 years, not simply remember but recounted to me the stories I had told, for in this extraordinary treasure house of the imagination they had been there.

            I believe that in our age which consigns children and adults alike to the solitary confinement of the screen there is a growing hunger, a deep yearning for the human necessity of communication and connectedness.  This deep urge accounts in part for the dramatic growth of storytelling not simply in Scotland but internationally.

            The Scottish Storytelling Centre is architecturally admired but it is the architecture of connections that is its chief glory.  The sense of family and mutually generous helpfulness amongst the Scottish storytellers is wondered at and admired, igniting a desire to emulate from storytellers and visitors worldwide.  Its patron George Mackay Brown would be proud to agree that its emblem could well be that if the ancient Celtic hero Finn McCool of whom it was said “The door of Finn is the stranger’s home.”

            The excellence sought in such a place is not technical or performance expertise; it is the simple desire to contribute the gift of a story or song, throw a peat on the fire. It exemplifies the spirit of the Ceilidh house, the Ceilidh culture where the host would say according to the old Celtic rune.

“A stranger was at my door yestreen I put drink in the drinking place Food in the eating place Story music and song in the listening place And the stranger, he blessed my house My cattle and my dear ones For often, often, often sings the lark in her song Goes the Lord in the stranger’s guise.”

The blessing is in the spirit of giving.  Our Scottish government, doubtless to the surprise of sceptics, has realised, in the spirit of George Mackay Brown’s insight, that stories, our stories, bind past, present and future into one, give identity, carrying our culture and character.  Like language they tell who we are. 

            As Henry Lord Cockburn has said:

“Scotch cannot be obliterated without our losing an important key to the old literature.  Above all we lose ourselves.”

            The Scottish government has put it in place a policy to let every school child in Scotland experience a storyteller.

            Stories are marvellously the politics of the heart.  They break all barriers of colour, clime, class, religion, age and youth.  They carry the inalienable conviction, not that “man to man the world o’er shall brothers be for all that,” but that man to man, woman to woman, the world over are brothers and sisters.

            Stories do not argue, they talk to the heart.  They are emissaries and luminaries in which we find, from fairy tales to epics, from fantasies to fables, snatchers of our shared human journey.

            We cannot disagree with someone’s story but we can listen, walk in step and thereby make a little contribution to widening and deepening the understanding between our brother and sister homo-sapiens.