Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Storytellers down in the Caribbean,
they often start a story -
especially late at night when people tend to fall asleep,
they want to make sure there are some people in the audience still awake -
and so they have this call and response device:
The storyteller will say, "Crick,"
and if anybody in the audience is awake and wants to hear a story,
they yell back, "Crack."
So, is anybody awake? Crick. (Audience) Crack.
A bit louder.
Crick. (Audience) Crack.
Good.
Not so long ago, the mythologist Joseph Campbell,
he said something along the lines of:
A myth is a story that's not true,
that tells a truth better than the truth could tell.
And if that's not confusing enough, I'll give you another definition of a myth
from an equally profound thinker,
a fifth-grade boy.
I was teaching his class mythology,
and after the week, I asked the class,
I said, "So, can anybody tell me now what is a myth?"
And the boy raised his hand, and he said, "Mr. Hornyak,
that's one of those stories that's not true
that keeps happening again and again and again.
(Laughter)
So here's one of those stories that's not true
that keeps happening again and again and again.
Long ago, there lived a powerful Sultan,
and this Sultan ruled wisely and well for a long time,
and because of that, his people were at peace;
they knew prosperity.
Some people say the earth itself
responded to his benevolence and to his goodness,
and it gave forth great, great abundance.
The fields were filled with grain,
the orchards gave forth fine fruit,
and the flocks and the herds multiplied.
And all was well.
And, you can probably imagine,
it was so much peace and abundance and prosperity,
that trouble is not far away
because every story needs trouble.
And trouble arrived when the Sultan discovered that his wife,
whom he loved dearly,
had been betraying him for a number of years
with a number of lovers.
And that broke his heart,
but then it enraged the Sultan,
and he went to his minister, his Chief Vizier as he was known,
and he said to him,
"Tomorrow, take that faithless woman who was my wife to the dungeon
and make sure that the executioner's sword
finds that place between her shoulders and her head,
known as her neck.
And she was beheaded.
But the Sultan's rage grew,
and he said, "Now send out every advisor we have,
find every man who was lover or consort to my wife, and have them beheaded.
And then that was done.
But the Sultan's rage, it grew and it became madness.
And in his madness,
he determined he would never, ever be betrayed by a woman again.
And he began a strange and a terrible custom:
Every day, he would marry a woman, a maiden,
and every night he would sleep with her,
and then every dawn, he would have her beheaded.
Have you ever worked for anybody like this?
(Laughter)
Have you ever been anybody like this?
Bruno Bettelheim, a great psychologist and a student of fairy tales,
once said that fairy tales exist, in part, to instruct us
about all the characters we are bound to meet out there in the world
but also the characters we are bound to meet inside here,
right inside of ourselves.
Because although this is an extreme case,
crisis and grief and rage can make tyrants of us all, to some degree.
And this particular tyrant, this Sultan, continued this practice for three years.
Every day a women wed, crowned Queen,
and then the next dawn, beheaded.
But the power of the Sultan was absolute;
nothing could be done.
There were cries of grief and cries of rage.
Now it so happened that the Vizier, the Chief Minister -
he carried out the beheadings -
he didn't actually swing the sword, but he saw that the deeds were done.
He had two daughters,
two young women, and their lives had been spared,
and they had been kept ignorant of these beheadings.
And the youngest one was named Dunyazad,
and the oldest one was named Scheherazade.
And Scheherazade was a well-educated woman;
she had been educated widely in the arts and the sciences,
but she was also a keeper of stories; she was a gatherer of stories,
and she, as well, was an artist in her own right.
She was a fine teller of these tales.
It's a way of saying Scheherazade was a woman
who, because she knew so many tales,
she knew many, many ways that people got into predicaments,
and the many strategies and techniques and devices
they could use to get out of predicaments.
And it's good to tell her story here,
in this room at Marylhurst which is known as "The Old Library,"
because that's what Scheherazade was:
she was an old library;
she was a living library.
But she was also a woman of incredible courage and vision,
and she was willing to risk her life to serve her people.
So, it's also fitting to tell her story here at Marylhurst
because this university was founded by women of a similar spirit.
Many of us here tonight know that in 1859,
12 nuns, the Sisters of the Holy Names,
they traveled 7,000 miles - all the way to Portland, Oregon -
to plant the seeds
of what would later grow into Marylhurst University.
And they were no doubt quite different
in custom and language and tradition and ...
and dress
than Scheherazade here,
but they also were women of incredible courage and vision,
willing to risk their lives to serve other people.
And as well, like Scheherazade, they were well-educated woman.
Among those 12, there were women who were artists and musicians,
and all of them were keepers of story, to an extent;
they too were teachers of language and teachers of literature.
Now, Dunyazad and Scheherazade
had been kept ignorant of these beheadings,
but at last, when Scheherazade discovered what was happening,
she went to her father, immediately,
and she said, "Father, please,
make me the next bride of the Sultan
because I have an idea, I have a plan,
a way in which I might live.
And if I can survive,
I will stop the executioner's sword,
and I will gladly be the ransom for my sisters' lives.
And her father forbid it.
But Scheherazade was relentless; she came again and again and again.
Finally she said, "Father, if you don't allow me to marry him,
I will send a message to him, saying, 'I long to be your bride,
but my father said that to do so would be to marry beneath me.'"
And he said, "You would not."
She said, "I would and I will."
She was a woman of great, great heart.
And finally she was allowed to marry the Sultan.
But a day before she wed,
Scheherazade went to her sister Dunyazad, in secret,
and she told her of this plan.
And then she wed the Sultan,
and that night she went to his chamber,
and she slept with him,
but in the deep of the night,
there was a knock at the door of the chamber.
It was Dunyazad.
She said, "Scheherazade, please, Sister,
I know the hour of your death grows near.
Please, Sister, allow me to see your face one last time."
Scheherazade appealed to the Sultan, who permitted Dunyazad to enter,
and now you could see them:
There was Dunyazad at the foot of the bed,
in which lay the Sultan and Scheherazade beside him.
And then Dunyazad said, "Scheherazade, please,
so that my last memory of you is sweet,
would you please tell me one of your wonderful stories?"
And Scheherazade said, "I will do that, Sister,
but only if it is the wish of this great and just and pious Sultan."
Now, the Sultan had not heard any stories in a long, long time,
except the story of his own pain and his own grief.
And of course, any crisis or pain or betrayal
can inspire us to hunker down into one story,
and that's what had happened to the Sultan.
But Scheherazade was a disciple of many, many stories,
and there's an old saying,
"A zealot has only one story; a wise person has many."
And fortunately, the Sultan said to Scheherazade,
he said, "Indeed, Scheherazade, you may entertain us with a little tale."
But he had no idea Scheherazade was a master of her craft.
And she began slowly,
spinning beautiful words,
beautiful language
from the depth of her heart.
And she spun and wove and twined and knotted these words together
until she had created something like a great carpet of story.
And upon that, she carried the Sultan away
from this room of trouble and travail and woe,
out into a timeless realm of imagination and wonder.
And all night long, Scheherazade carried the Sultan upon these stories
which she had gathered carefully over time -
the way an herbalist will pluck roots and barks and berries,
Scheherazade had plucked myth and fable and folktale
from Arabia and China and India,
and in that way, she concocted a libation of a sort,
an elixir, a tonic, for the broken spirit.
And the Sultan, he drank of that tonic;
he drank in those stories,
and in doing that, he remembered some of the sweetness of life -
he remembered the beauty of it.
And as they traveled through time,
from wondrous place to exotic place,
he remembered the colors the world wears,
the faces of it, the garments of it.
And he met many people,
characters: noble and wise and wicked and ruthless
and cunning and deceitful
and compassionate,
but the Sultan saw the world through their eyes.
And their joys and their pains and their struggles,
he felt in his own heart.
And as the night wore on, it was almost like a window had opened
into the shuttered room of the Sultan's heart,
and a fresh breeze blew in.
It was like rain had fallen upon the parched desert of his own soul
and stirred these seeds beneath to life;
he was mesmerized.
But late in the night,
Scheherazade was telling him a tale of a beloved Merchant
who was returning home after having been away many months,
and his family loved him, his villagers loved him,
and they so looked forward to seeing him,
but Scheherazade said,
"He stopped at an oasis only a day's ride from home,
and there he stopped to water his horse and to refresh himself.
He ate a handful of dates, and then,
without thinking anything of it,
he took the date pits and he cast them into the reeds of the oasis.
But of course, the littlest things of this world
can have a great impact upon those in the other world.
And the date pits, they struck ...
the head of the invisible and sleeping son of a Genie
and killed him instantly.
The Merchant had no idea what he had done,
but suddenly a huge cloud arose from the oasis,
and out of it there emerged an enormous Genie, a powerful Genie,
enraged with a razor-sharp scimitar in his hand,
and he cried out, "Mortal,
you have murdered my son,
and for taking his life, I shall now take yours."
And the Merchant said, "Please, Lord of the Jinn,
I would never harm a child; I have children of my own.
Please tell me, what have I done?"
"You have murdered,
and it will be now as it has always been:
a life for a life."
The Merchant, he got down on his knees; he wept, he pleaded,
but the Genie was unmoved.
He raised the scimitar high in the air,
and the sun gleamed upon the terrible blade,
and the sun was gleaming on the blade,
and the sun,
and ...
"Oh," Scheherazade said, "look, My Lord,
just as the sun gleams upon the blade,
it also gleams in the sky for the dawn has come,
and with it the hour of my death,
and so I will not be able to finish this story.
(Laughter)
Which I'm sure you would agree has a most surprising conclusion.
The Sultan stirred, as if he had been wakened from a dream.
He did not want to trust this woman;
he did not want to risk having his heart broken being betrayed,
but he did want to hear the end of the story.
And of course, much more than that,
he wanted to travel again with Scheherazade
from this room of trouble and woe
into the endless realms of imagination.
And he said, "Scheherazade, I will grant you one more day of life
so you may finish this little tale.
But mark my words, tomorrow will be your last."
And Scheherazade bowed and she said,
"You're good and kind, My Lord, and I thank you for one more day of life."
She lived another night, and she finished that story.
But then she started another story,
and strange as it may seem,
she was also unable to finish that story at dawn, as well.
She was granted another night of life,
but by the next dawn, she was also unable to finish another story.
She was an artist, you know,
and they have trouble with closure at times.
(Laughter)
But so it was that Scheherazade,
every night when darkness fell,
every night when the outer eyes of the Sultan were not distracted
and his inner eyes were opened,
she would go to the chamber.
She would go in that time of day when most people are dreaming,
but the Sultan had lost his capacity to dream;
he had forgotten how to envision a future any different
from a constant repetition of the present.
And so night upon night, she reseeded his imagination
with constant possibilities.
But each night when she went, of course,
she had to face the terror
of the Executioner's sword,
poised and waiting for her at dawn.
And so she met that terror.
She met it with ancient tales.
She wove fable upon myth upon folktale.
She told stories that were bawdy and raucous and wise
and earthy and gritty
and lovely and sweet and profound,
night upon night.
And night upon night,
she had to face the cold face of that terrorist
whom she had married.
For sometimes to solve the problem, you have to marry the problem.
And she knew that the Sultan
had been wounded in love, wounded in the marital bed
and would have to be healed in that place.
So night upon night she came,
and she was able to disarm him, night upon night,
disarm him with artistry and with beauty.
Night upon night, somehow she was able to arrest him.
She spoke to his love of awe and wonder,
like all of us have.
She arrested him with ageless and old wisdoms and ideas and truths
from many peoples and tribes and cultures,
but all was wrapped in the beautiful garb of story.
Night upon night, Scheherazade told stories
until 1,001 nights had passed.
Until at last,
the imagination of the Sultan
had opened to countless ways
of thinking and being and seeing and feeling
in this world,
and his mind opened
to countless possibilities and dreams and visions.
And at last, even his heart,
with the threads of those many stories,
his heart was at last threaded together,
woven together,
and in time, he did return.
He became a Sultan of nobility and compassion.
He became a Sultan of power and benevolence.
In time, the Kingdom healed,
and in time, the people prospered and were at peace,
and finally, the land did give forth in great abundance.
It may surprise you to know that in the end,
in time, of course,
in ti ...
oh my gosh,
you know, I don't have the time to finish this story,
and I'm sure you would agree it has a surprising conclusion,
(Laughter)
but I only have time to say that there's a saying:
A story is nothing more than a seed,
but when it finds good ground and the heart and mind of a listener,
it will root and shoot and flower and fruit
right before our eyes.
And it is all of you that have been the good ground to this story,
to all of these presentations tonight.
Thank you.
(Applause)