Translator: María Concepción Pomar Rosselló Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good evening, I am Fernanda de Teresa
and I am here to talk about myths, tales, and legends.
So, are we interested in myths, tales, and legends?
Maybe today, we feel more attracted
to football, Facebook, or TV.
That is why I want to talk today about the power of words.
Words are what differentiates us from the rest of the animals.
There is a myth that reads that everything we know
was created from the verb, the spoken word.
We have this gift of the word
because we can construct our reality with it.
Now, I want to talk about time
so I can go deeper into the differences among short stories.
I would like to illustrate this idea of time
with a concept from my cousin Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa.
He always said each human being experiences two types of time:
a circular, spiritual time and a linear, earthly one.
If we consider myths, they refer back to an eternal time:
they narrate the adventures of the gods,
and they expose their footprints
ever since the beginning of the times up to today in the history of humanity.
Myths are always alive in any human being.
Everyone can identify among friends or acquaintances
a Narcissus or an Oedipus.
The time in myths is cyclical
or, as Guillermo Tovar rightly said,
it is a circular time, a spiritual one, with no beginning and no end.
In exchange, tales and short stories refer back to an earthly time.
And that is a linear time; they have a beginning and an end.
For example, we have Pedro Páramo.
It could also be a personal experience: a journey, a love story.
Tales and short stories
must always have a beginning and an end.
They can be fictional or true.
The way to tell a tale is what sets its tone.
There are the comedies that make us laugh,
there are the tragedies, tragicomedies and farces as well.
Legends, on the other hand, are made of cyclical, spiritual time
and/or linear time as well.
Because of that, both of those types are interwoven into legends.
All legends are lined with dreamlike atmospheres
as well as practical realities,
while others are dreamlike or more of an ethereal type.
Here is, for instance, the Afghan legend on the Fountain of Youth.
Alexander the Great, after having been looking for
the Fountain of Life throughout Asia Minor,
decided to follow the footsteps of ancient legends that led him to Afghanistan.
There, he walked to a mountain together with his companions,
where he saw a cave.
They lit their torches
and entered this very deep cave.
Alexander's companions, after having been walking for a while,
realized the walls were shining.
And they felt attracted by it.
Then, with their torches, they discovered
that the walls were lined with precious gemstones.
They stopped to fill their pockets,
and so they ended up losing their way.
Alexander, all alone, kept on walking
until he made it to the other side of the cave.
There, on a prairie, he saw a fountain whose waterfall was running into a pond.
He got by the pond where he found a pitcher.
He filled the pitcher with water, and he was about to take a sip
when an old man appeared and advised him not to drink it.
Alexander asked, "But isn't this the Fountain of Immortality?"
The old man nodded,
and told h'd drunk from it hundreds of years ago.
And that he regrets it.
He wished he never had tried it.
Alexander understood the sadness in that old man's eyes,
so he threw the water on the ground.
The legend says that right there, where the water was spilled,
this couch grass grew tall
and no one has ever been able to weed it out until today.
Now, again, if we go back to Guillermo Tovar's concept,
each of us knows a cyclical, spiritual time and a linear one.
therefore, we can infer that each one of us lives in a myth
and, at the same time, lives his own days and nights,
and writes tales that have a beginning and an end.
The human being is a storyteller by nature.
And we have the tendency to adapt our stories to our listener.
For example, you go to the cinema and have an affair.
Let's say that, aftwewards, you have to tell it to your best friend,
and you call her on the phone.
You go straight into details.
After that, you go back home; your partner asks you,
"How was it at the movies?"
You answer that the movie was either very good or very bad.
But in any case, it will be a very different version of a movie
than the one you told about to your best friend.
It is important to take into consideration the different viewpoints present
in tales and in any kind of short stories.
They are these different points of view, these different experiences
of different people that would enrich so much the literary world,
the arts and life, in general.
We are talking about millions of versions that can exist.
But we can also choose to live in a myth,
and by talking a lot about this myth,
somehow we are creating it,
and we can push its existence into reality.
Let's take for example, the case of Michoacán, here,
where we have the tendency
to talk a lot about drug traffick-related issues.
If we constantly talk about it, we are getting nowhere.
And, well, we all know this problem is real
but, do we really want to live in this reality?
If we put all our attention onto something,
we cannot perceive nor see anything else.
If, on the other hand, we focus on other things,
we realize that in Mexico, as in life,
there are many other things out there apart from these issues.
There where one focus on,
there is where his energy is
and where your energy is then there is where you yourself will be.
Now I want to talk about doors as well;
words and imagination are doors.
We can cross a door to the past,
and visit tales and teachings of our ancestors;
thus knowing more about our roots.
We also can, as I said before, project ourselves into the future,
and create the myth we want to live in, every day.
the one we want to pass on to our next generations.
But, in fact, we only own our present,
and it is from this present we can build the future.
If we fill our present moments with negative stories,
these are going to be the foundations of our future days.
But if we fill our present moments with myths, tales, and legends instead,
we are setting positive foundations for our future.
Myths, tales, and legends will also help us break away
from the collective consciousness,
the collective consciousness that invades our mental space and destroys our dreams.
The collective consciousness fills us up with dread through the news,
and places us in a frequency of fear.
The collective consciousness dictates our wishes as well
through advertisements:
it inspires us to become filled up with fake needs.
But, in fact, what are we?
Each person is a unique individual on this planet,
and together, we form a community,
which ultimately ends up spreading to the whole of humanity.
Now, are we going to allow the collective consciousness
to be the master of our lives?
Language is a magic key that grants us freedom,
if we know how to use appropriately.
Through language, we can identify our own experiences.
We can, as well, discover our deepest wishes,
and we can cultivate, through language, our dreams into realities.
I want to invite you all
to save the myths, tales, and legendsof Michoacán;
to save their different versions
known to our elders, and grandparents,
and the shamans from the mountains.
I want to invite you to create new myths as well,
and share them with relatives and friends.
For there are these myths which can help you change your reality.
Myths, tales, and legends are what allow us
to discover new worlds and gain access to other realities.
Thank you.
(Applause)