Dan Yashinsky

“With myths, one should not be in a hurry.” Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the New
Millennium
“Go on listening, carefully, respectfully. After a while, the earth feels free to speak.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller

The last chapter of that book is titled Dreaming a New Myth,and considers the possibility that a new body of oral narrative is indeed emerging in contemporary society, and that its central theme has to do with the act and moral dimensions of listening to voices that are beyond our customary bandwidth of perception and understanding. Listening, in this context, is about being able to attend to voices that speak from beyond the borders of what we typically allow ourselves to hear. In
traditional stories, for example, this understanding of the importance of listening is shown by the way the heroes stop on their quests to gather necessary wisdom from
unlikely sources: a dusty mouse on a fairytale road, or a beggar, or a voice heard in a dream; that is, to voices that are all-too-easily disregarded.
What is the nature of such story-listening? For stories to live by word-of-mouth, oral cultures throughout the world evolved sophisticated understandings of the importance of listening. As well, in the contemporary storytelling renaissance, there has been a rediscovery of this quality of listening, a re-education of ourselves as story-listeners.
Whether found in established oral cultures or coming back into focus through modern
artistic experimentation, an understanding of listening as both philosophy and practice frames and sustains the exchange of oral narrative. “What the ear does not hear,”claims a Cape Breton proverb, “cannot move the heart.”
I’m doing this work because I believe that the world is in need of a new myth, a new set of stories to remember and tell. A new understanding of how to listen to hard-to-hear voices – including to the voice of myth itself - may, as I hope to show in The Listener’s Tale, lie at the heart of this new narrative. In The Lord of The Rings, Tolkien (a great modern myth-teller himself) has a wise old tree-creature recall the way the ancient earthpeople gained their extraordinary power: “They always wanted to talk to everything, the old Elves did.” Our greatest hope for survival today may be to take a lesson from these elven conversational skills. If we only ever hear and repeat our own story, if we fail to open our ears to new and different voices, the consequences will be both dangerous and extreme. Perhaps we need a new story to remind us that we must keep listening, even to the voices that are most difficult to hear, including to the earth, to our children, to our dreams, and, most challenging of all, to each other.