The Piano Has Been Drinking

We human beings tell stories. We scratch them on cave walls, drip them on canvas, speak them, write them, film them, sing them, and dance them. We use stories to entertain, educate, illustrate, instill, to remember and to share. What a wonderful things they are. Children will pile up more books than they can carry and struggle to stay awake for the pure pleasure of hearing just one more. When command for specific facts and figures fall away, stories are the things that stick.

I’ve been thinking about the power of stories since a lunch earlier this month with four people, only one of whom I’d met before. Griff owns an art gallery. Blair works for a museum; Chris for a university. And Pat teaches back home in the state he served for nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. We talked about lots of things while trying not to stare at Tom Waits sitting nearby, but a theme that wove itself through our conversation was some notion of how illustration brings ideas, events, even people to life so much more than the mere sum of the recounted theory, history, or biographical data.

Stories breed curiosity. A student can memorize the year in which William Jennings Bryan first spoke at the Democratic National Convention and how many times he ran – and lost – for President of the United States. Given that it’s such a good prose, the student might even remember some phrases from the stirring “Cross of Gold” speech. But the game changes when you mention that the Wizard of Oz, published the year of his second nomination, is a parable of the monetary reform movement led by Bryan (the lion with a big roar but no bite). All of a sudden history wakes up and starts taking numbers. See, you’re doing the puzzle in your head now aren’t you?

Yellow brick road (gold standard); Wicked Witch of the East (bankers) ; Dorothy (regular folk), the tin woodsman (industrial worker); scarecrow (farmer); Emerald City (Washington); the Wizard (President)….don’t you want to reread the story and learn a bit more about the man who inspired it?

Is there enough of this in today’s schools, where standardized testing is the grade by which institutions and individuals are largely judged – and funded?

I know that there are many in education circles grappling with this quandary. Our new President is asking the right questions. So what about the rest of us? Who’s up for a grassroots Curiosity Campaign?

Let’s start with you. What are the tales that illustrate who you are in ways no resume can capture? Put yourself on a beach with a stick in your hand and start composing. Shout. Celebrate. Take off some layers. Have lunch with people you barely know and go hungry for more. Sing us your story. Come on, bring it. We really are curious.

From Song of Myself
by Walt Whitman

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.