Epiphany

I have annoying epiphanies. It’s not the epiphanies themselves that are annoying; it’s what I do with them. I file them away in my journal or in the inner reaches of my consciousness, and when the same epiphany presents itself to me a while later, I shout “Eureka!” (figuratively, at any rate) and then go and confide it to someone who will (usually with a bit of annoyance) remind me that I’ve had that same revelation at least once if not three times within recent memory. I’ll then thumb through my journal and there it is. I’d put it down to creeping age, but the same damn thing was happening to me when I was twenty. (It’s cold comfort, but I’ll take what I can get.)

So I had a recurring epiphany a few days ago as I was posting a comment on Abby’s Course in Miracles blog. The revelation was hammered home, when a bit later she honored me by writing a post about my comment. (Mind you, I’m still new to this blogging thing, and being mentioned and quoted in a post is about as thrilling as opening on Broadway. My friend Gillian_y just gave me a stellar review and I’m thrilled.)* The comment in question contained a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar”:

The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine [wo]man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his[/her] statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.

My epiphany is attached to the second sentence: “The poet chanting was felt to be a divine [wo]man…”

Several years ago I was part of a Zen Sangha in Pasadena, California. We’d sit in the basement of a metaphysical bookstore on Monday evenings and meditate. It being a Zen sit, founded in the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, there would be no chanting; we’d listen to ourselves breathe.

Of course, I had terminal monkey-mind. During one meditation the Jamaican bobsled team came into my consciousness and refused to leave until they’d instilled in me a desire to watch Cool Runnings and cook up a batch of jerk pork.

At the end of one meditation, when we compared notes, a young Australian man related how an altar had fallen down at his home and how after an initial bit of annoyance he and his life partner had set about repairing and reconsecrating it. The incident had been foremost on his mind before he had meditated, and now he was able to step back and review it. His last remark was, “It’s odd, but this whole thing didn’t have any meaning to me before I talked about it here.”

The epiphany came like a brick to the back of my head. This was the poet chanting. This was the “why” of all literature – and “illiterature” too: written and oral tradition. I went back to “The American Scholar” and found that Emerson had had the same realization:

The scholar…received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thought. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Nothing has meaning – not unless we talk about it. That is the purpose of the playwright, the poet, the journalist, the diarist, the historian, the singer, the blogger, and the storyteller.

The ubiquitous bumper sticker was right: shit happens. Both physically and mentally. But the act of a human being reflecting upon and relating the occurrence transforms it into matter of meaning. The act of a human being taking random motifs of action and image and forming and shaping them into a narrative or lyric is the creation of literature.

It’s all just a lot of stuff until we shape it into a story, a poem, a white paper, a song, a letter, an essay, a prospectus, or a joke.

So that’s just one of the many epiphanies that come around every so often to visit. But yesterday, at the storytelling stage at the Taste of Encino festival in Encino, California, her sister epiphany sat down next to me and gave me such a nudge with her elbow that she nearly broke a rib. My friend True Thomas took the stage and told the “Lay of Thym” with such boisterous humor and detail that I was indeed hearing it for the first time. He was the poet chanting. Through True’s voice, gesture, and detail, Thor, Loki, Freyja, Thyrm, and the rest all took life for the space of twenty minutes.

Storytelling, as True practices it (and as I pursue the practice of it) is like verbal jazz: the words are not memorized, but the story is a part of the teller. The teller sees the story in his/her mind’s eye and tells the audience what that mind’s eye sees. The dialogue comes straight from the teller’s ear. When the teller is in that transported state of mind s/he and the audience share an experience that is both auditory and visual – and it is spontaneous and extemporaneous. It is life on a higher level of consciousness.

Is it any wonder that the griot, the bard, the skald, the scop, the shanachie, were considered treasures?

Every so often, I have to get reintroduced to this and my other epiphanies. Every so often we need to remember just why it is we do what we do and love what we love.

*I had more than one professor in college who complained that I used too many parenthetical statements. What can I say? I’ve got ADD.