Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Giving Shape and Structure to Story in London


It was fitting to end our trip around the world in London--the home of so many his-stories and the greatest storyteller of the English language, Shakespeare.  Among the many professional and personal lessons I have learned over this journey, this sabbatical, this adventure is the power of patience.  The world is always right, the world always tells us where we need to stand to participate in the organic flow of all things.  Since we are just humans who have been taught that knowing is everything, it seems we have handicapped ourselves into actually believing this by rushing to knowing at every possible moment, experience and event.  Since I am human I feel the tug to know frequently--my brain feeds me the psychological propaganda: Come on, Hurry, know it, possess it, figure it out so we can rush on to know the next thing that comes in our path and put it away in our overflowing library of knowledge--there, we did it again.  Following this auto-learned path has led me to miss multiple moments and, most importantly and to-the-post, shuts down my ability to listen to the world.  My solution:  Shhhh the propaganda, stop, breathe and patiently listen.  The benefit:  the answers always come and the world communicates clearly where, why and how I should be at a particular place and time in my life.  The problem:  the answers rarely match the fantasies I created in my mind about why I was at a particular place and time in my life.  After all of the spiritual locations we have visited over the past 4 months who would have thought the cosmos would shake hands with the Zen in the UK?  The more I live the less I know...this has become increasingly obvious.

So what was the primal truth that came to me amongst the hustle of crowds, fish 'n chips and pints of beer of London?  The power of structure in story.  The immense and intense experiences from our journeys are often difficult to quantify, difficult to summarize, difficult to hold on to, difficult to process. Great plays and great stories are great because they are about huge events theatrically distilled through the art of storytelling.  The giant ideas of stories must go through the magical process of storytelling...how can we squeeze the essence of the experience out of the entire experience?  We can't keep the audience in the theater for Anne Frank's over 2 years of hiding in terror.  We can't expect the audience to have 100 days available to be told the story of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.  So, through the magic and skill of storytelling we dance, we sing, we paint, we trick, we condense, we theatricalize, we imagine...we provide Structure.  The most beautiful, inventive home an architect can imagine  won't be livable without a foundation, walls and a roof.  So too with great storytelling--no structure, no story. This is why we remember the Disney classics (Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King) and forget those that strayed from the proven structure (Black Cauldron, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear)--Don't mess with our structure!  Structure is the discipline we crave as story receivers--it comes to us at the subconscious level and most of us don't articulate our displeasure of its absence with talk about structure--we say we were "bored" or we "just didn't like it...can't quite put my finger on why."  I can--you missed the love, care and guidance of structure.  Like a teenager who complains about parental rules, he may say he doesn't want structure but take it away and see what happens--broken windows, no homework, hanging with the wrong crowds are all pleas for structure.  My students who are reading this have already repeated my (our) favorite quote as it is the foundation of our work together:  "There can be no freedom without discipline."  Discipline is structure, it smacked me in the face during our short stay in London.

I now gather the pieces of our 4 month story and search for the structures that will hold this impossible, unreal, expansive, crazy, exhilarating, thrilling, challenging, rejuvenating, exhausting, eye-opening, heart-breaking, heart-expanding, life-changing, life-affirming story together.  I look forward to crafting this story to share with my family, friends, students, the Anne Frank Project and SUNY Buffalo State. How will I do this?  I don't know, but I have some ideas....thank you structure, thank you London.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
I saw the Globe's Titus Andronicus.
Wonderful production--a real treat!
Nate getting a Shakespeare lesson.  He's a terrific actor, staying interested for Dad:)

The structures that "hit" me and reminded me of my next storytelling step












And if the metaphoric structure of structures wasn't enough, some of London's finest made it perfectly clear as we watched the Changing of the Guard parade at Buckingham Palace...


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