The Most Human Art

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According to Eudora Welty, herself a deeply rooted storyteller, 'the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood.' So we return to the epic of Gilgamesh, with its brooding on the forests and rivers of Babylonia; we return to the ancient Hebrew accounts of a land flowing with milk and honey; we follow the Aboriginal songs of journeys over the continent of Australia -- because they all convey a passionate knowledge of place.

Native American tribes ground their stories in nearby fields and rivers and mountains, and thus carry their places in mind. As the Pueblo travel in their homeland, according to Leslie Marmon Silko, they recall the stories that belong to each mesa and arroyo, and 'thus the continuity and accuracy of the oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape -- and the Pueblo interpretation of that landscape is maintained.'

Stories of place help us recognize that we belong to the earth, blood and brain and bone, and that we are kin to other creatures. Life has never been easy, yet in every continent we find tales of a primordial garden, an era of harmony and bounty. In A God Within, René Dubos suggests that these old tales might be recollections ' of a very distant past when certain groups of people had achieved biological fitness to their environment.' Whether or not our ancestors ever lived in ecological balance, if we aspire to do so in the future, we must nourish the affectionate, imaginative bond between person and place.

Mention of past and future brings us to the seventh power of stories, which is to help us dwell in time. I am thinking here not so much of the mechanical time parceled out by clocks as of historical and psychological time. History is public, a tale of influences and events that have shaped the present; the mind's time is private, a flow of memory and anticipation that continues, in eddies and rapids, for as long as we are conscious. Narrative orients us in both kinds of time, private and public, by linking before and after within the lives of characters and communities, by showing action leading on to action, moment to moment, beginning to middle to end.

Once again we come upon the tacit morality of stories, for moral judgment relies, as narrative does, on a belief in cause and effect. Stories teach us that every gesture, every act, every choice we make sends ripples of influence into the future. Thus we hear that the caribou will only keep giving themselves to the hunter if the hunter kills them humbly and respectfully. We hear that all our deeds are recorded in some heavenly book, in the grain of the universe, in the mind of God, and that everything we sow we shall reap.

Stories gather experience into shapes we can hold and pass on through time, much the way DNA molecules in our cells record genetic discoveries and pass them on. Until the invention of writing, the discoveries of the tribe were preserved and transmitted by storytellers, above all by elders. 'Under hunter-gatherer conditions,' Jared Diamond observes, 'the knowledge possessed by even one person over the age of 70 could spell the difference between survival and starvation for a whole clan.'

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