Why Telling Your Story Matters

A journey through Greek Myth, to arrive at modern day storytelling…

Pneuma: the breath bestowed by Athena to awaken humanity into consciousness, and the breath bestowed by an orator to speak the gods into existence. The storyteller and the story told, both are needed by the other.

I think about the Greek mythology on a daily basis, the stories fascinate me as they seem to have arisen from the very material of the world around us, as poetic personifications of the way we see and and make sense of the complex cycles of nature, and the events of our lives within those cycles. There are stories explaining an origin and meaning for almost everything, and we can see this wonderful tapestry of connections spread like a web all across the lexicon of our daily language, idioms and our entertainment.

It's the personalities and the distinctly flawed human-ness of the Greek gods that make them so memorable to me - they have interpersonal drama, messy love lives, petty revenges, and they all want the same thing: power in some form or another. Beauty, pleasure, control, fame and respect - to be seen, known, and to be remembered. Perhaps this is why the gods are eternal beings. We guarantee their immortality through our continued reference to them in our culture; without knowing, we speak their names every day. Echo, chaos, mentor, tantalise, music, martial, hypnotic, (I could go on.) How much of our language has sprung from the soil of these myths? How much of our understanding of ourselves comes from seeing ourselves cast up against the night sky in constellations?

I’d argue that the oral tradition of epic poetry is a prime example of something essential to our nature, something that we find in the haptic experiences of a well-told story, nowadays perhaps sat inside a cinema, a theatre, on a TV screen or within the pages of a book. It’s a transcendence of self, and an exploration of empathy. True empathy is precious, vital, and powerful.

There is a recent translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson that soars in simple yet lyrical English. This is a story which is meant to be read aloud, to be given breath by the air of a room, and the people around us. It's meant to be felt by the body. The language has been stripped back to its bones. The action, when you're reading, seems to flow and tumble from your mouth easily like a song, which is, if you translate the Homeric Greek literally, how it was originally scribed from its oral tradition. These are stories that are designed to be told again and again, to be memorised and integrated into oneself.

"We are now in a period of crisis not for a specific nation but for humanity, inhabiting a planet that is becoming less and less habitable. A new kind of heartbreak can be felt in The Iliad's representation of a city in its last days, of triumphs and defeats and struggles and speeches that take place in a city that will soon be burned to the ground, in a landscape that will soon be flooded by all the rivers, in a world where soon, no people will live at all, and there will be no more stories and no more names.

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bar-gain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time."

-Emily Wilson, The Iliad Preface

And yet despite knowing this bleak truth of The Iliad, we need to continue to tell it.

Orpheus turns to face Eurydice, and yet, would the Orpheus who didn’t turn still be Orpheus?

Alice Oswald's 'Memorial' begins with a preface explaining that her book is a translation of The Iliad's atmosphere, not it's story. Within the book of poems, she writes vivid and un-flinchingly direct descriptions of every death in the entire epic poem, all 200 of them. Their names are all listed in the front of the book, with the promise that each dies within the following pages. The feeling you get while reading is that of a merciless spotlight shining on each man in the snapshot of his final moment, a midday sun so bright that it obliterates the personal, the human, and leaves only the stark events of something unstoppable. Atropos, fate.

Oswald's writing draws from funeral rites of ancient Greece, and the poems that were spoken over the dead. However, her highest intension was to invoke a particular feeling, the one that was supposedly felt by those who originally heard The Iliad orated in the ancient tradition. It has a name you're probably unfamiliar with: Enargeia.

Aside from being my favourite word ever, and, as an artist and a poet, the north star of my creative endeavours, this word introduces an incredibly interesting element of magic to the telling of these myths. What the audiences of Homer's time were experiencing, that they called 'Enargeia', was ultimately something akin to immersion.

(On ‘The Iliad’) "...ancient critics praised it's 'enargeia', which means something like 'bright unbearable reality'. It's the word used when gods would come to Earth not in disguise but as themselves. This version, trying to retrieve the poem's enargeia, takes away it's narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church to remember what you're worshipping." - Alice Oswald, Memorial Preface

These myths hold power and potency in part because of the fact that they have no author. The gods, at the time of Homer, approximately 750-650 BCE, were already ancient legends that would have been well-known to audiences long before they were ever written down.

"The spell of poetry can can make the hearer forget both himself and the real world about him... The story in Homer seems almost to tell itself. The words which transport us to the world of the heroes come from a source so submerged from view that the heroic life seems to move of its own vitality." - Rutger Allan

How does this circle back to you, and your life, and your story?