Storytelling

Sick, today, with a fever, and had to make a 4.5 hour run back from New England. Got a speeding ticket at the bottom of a hill at hour 4. Now, getting speeding tickets is a pretty phenomenal feeling. But you haven't lived until you've been pulled over with a fever.

Also, check this out. This is the race series that mattio and others have been busting ass to put together. It will be my coming out to the world of less-than-official bike racing.

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At the last get-together of the Hudson Valley Naturalist Society, we sat around over breakfast talking about the books we were read as kids. I don't know why, but after talking books with Leah and her family this weekend, I've started thinking about what it is to read aloud to another person. It definitely occupies a special place in social interaction... I can still remember many of the books my parents read to me, and the profound effects they had on me.

I can still remember lines like "How many trucks can a tow-truck tow? one, two, three, four, I don't know!". I still think that book is responsible for some of my Marxist tendencies.

There was a girl I had a thing for a while back, and it never came to be anything, but after a long night of talking she used to say "Read something to me."

When I was in the hospital for two weeks last year, L, even though we were separated, came to visit me day by day, and would sit by my bed and read to me. I don't remember exactly what she read (I was half-or-less-conscious. I'm pretty sure it was Millay) but I remember her cadence, her soft voice and her light drawl like it was yesterday. It was the singular most comforting thing I can recall from that time.

Leah makes fun of me that part of our flirtation was reading Bukowski to each other, passing Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit back and forth until we had thoroughly convinced one another of our neurosis.

I read a story once, ages and ages and ages ago. I remember precious little about it, just that there was a couple in it who would read to each other while they made love. I think they named a kid so conceived after one of the characters in what they read.

There's a whole 'nother thing to be said about reading socially in the sense of passing books around among friends, or reading something that you've written to someone you care about. But theres something here about telling other people's stories, wanting to hear what others have said in a voice that you can put a face to, from a face that you know.

I think that storytelling is among the few fundamental human activities. It's how we build our aspirations, our expectations, our measures of ourselves in relation to our ideals, its how we fall in love and its how we ease ourselves from pain. That we tell not only our own stories but those of others implicates the whole human society in our interactions and tribulations, in our project of being human. If stories help make us who we are, then when we read those same stories to others we not only tell them what we are, we show them what we are. Transmitting to them as we received.

Among the things that struck me the most working in New Orleans was the sense of oral tradition. It was a very similar shape to all this.