"Instead, the ancient Pueblo people depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a worldview complete with proven strategies for survival. The oral narrative, or story, became the medium through which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained. Whatever the event or the subject, the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as pan of an ancient, continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories. p.
233 In this quote Leslie Silko describes the value of storytelling in Pueblo people everyday life, she equals storytelling to collective memory of the people. I find it very interesting because just the other day I heard Dr. Richard Leo Enos from TCU proclaim that the Iliad was written as a means of mnemonics, a mere technique of information retention.I find it amazing that storytelling can be viewed at the same time as both collective memory, the memory of a group of people and a at the same time as a memory aid technique tailored for one particular individual.
For Pueblo people story telling was the verbal chronicle of their existence, some stories were so sophisticated and detailed they could be used as map to trace up the herds of bulls or places to graze for sheep.And yet stories were so intertwined and layered that it could also contain the story of one's grandparents death or their own birth. It is note worthy that Silko named this part of her essay "Through Stories We Hear Who We Are" and indeed in stories we revel with our ancestors we understand their values, their priorities, their challenges and struggles, we relate to them so much more and it does clear up for us where we are coming from and maybe even "Quo Vadis"A psychologist asked about short term memory or working memory as they also call it, will tell you that a human adults brain can only hold seven plus minus two pieces of information. In order for large chunks of information to be properly retained one either needs to have an efficient mnemonics technique or that information needs to be accessed, revisited very often.
We all know how unreliable our memories can be and our ancestors knew by storytelling telling they were throwing us a life rope, a rope that connects us.And what a wonderful way to connect. In our fast pace world things change so quickly, our children, who grew up without knowing what the world was like before cell-phone, computers, TV these children will connect with us in a different way not through the spoken word they will do it through some technological way and unless you yourself are completely and entirely corrupted by technology you will feel the sting of the missing part - the spoken word.In the little eastern European country i come from these get together-s when we could hear stories were called "shezatoare", it was only women and mostly in winter, they would pick a house bring their work with them, it was mostly spinning wool and crocheting. And as the wind will knock on windows and holler down the chimney, they women sit in a circle, working, listening sometimes singing.
I feel sorry for my daughters they will never know this kind of togetherness. Consider how storytelling has evolved through the centuries in art and literature: oral storytellers, epic poems, myths, legends, parables, fables, fairy tales, tall tales, campfire stories, ballads, sonnets, tragedies, comedies, mysteries, biographies, novels, short stories, free verse, comic books, operas, soap operas, animated cartoons, situation comedies, TV commercials, and on and on.Storytelling is still evolving, it is still changing, it is still alive and it still serves its purposes to inform, to teach, to connect. But just like it did in the past it tells the story of the teller it maybe new and unique and different and yet it is old.
What would we become without storytelling? In human brain the temporal lobe is responsible for the storage of memory. It is here that our brain stores those things that we remember.The hippocampus is also part of memory. It processes new memories into long term storage, without our hippocampus we would not be able to remember what is happening in the present, only what has happened in the past. It is the hippocampus that is affected in Alzheimer’s disease.
Without storytelling we would be pretty much like an Alzheimer's patient always struggling to understand who we are.
