Tell Me a Story…

We can readily recognise how stories nurture all the life processes, without us ever noticing. How the phrase, ‘Once upon a time…’ opens up an inner space, in which anticipation, and its quickened breathing, expands, contracts, expands… How children, warming to the prospect of the tale, and wanting the tones of their Mum’s or Dad’s voice to warm them through, long to relate to what’s coming: Yes! Tell me a story… How the story is so nourishing, and how its essential truth is distilled and secreted into the child’s personality.

The celebrated children’s writer Margaret Mahy has written a fine essay on imagination, in which she refers to the way in which stories help shape our experience:

I am going to propose that there is a code in our lives, something we automatically recognise when we encounter it in the outside world, something personal, but possibly primeval too, something which gives form to our political responses, to our art, our religious feeling, sometimes to our science and even to the way the weather forecast may be presented as a little drama…

I am referring to story, something we encounter in childhood and live with all our lives. Without the ability to tell stories, or live prescribed stories, we lose the ability to make sense of our lives.

This is the basis for story-telling in the Steiner curriculum. We recognise the value of stories as cultural heritage, as imaginative truth, as inwardly-lived experience. I often refer to a particular story to illustrate this — ‘The Goose Girl’. It is a macabre story of usurped power that ends like this:

The old king asked the false bride — who only was a serving girl — what punishment a person deserved who had behaved in such and such a way… And while he related the whole story, he asked what sentence such a person merited.

Then the false bride said, “She deserves no better than to be stripped naked, and put into a barrel which is studded inside with sharp nails; and then two white horses should be harnessed to it, and she should be dragged along through one street after another, until she is dead”.

“Ah, it is you,” said the aged king. “You have pronounced your own sentence, and thus shall it be done unto you.”

If you have ever tossed and turned in bed at night, dragged ‘naked’ through the by-ways of your inner world, tumbled by your deeds, pierced through by conscience until your egotistical pride dies in you, then you may recognise the truth of this story. The Grimm’s Tales can be grim — but in our conscience we are relentless with ourselves. We do not explain the story — and we do not turn it into some kind of Disney syrup — but simply present it to the seven-year-old. This is true ‘soul-food’ for the nourishment of the conscience. This is its language.

Through repetition and memory, maintaining the life of the story, it sinks in; children will ask repeatedly for the same story. The story is growing in them. In fact I would suggest the story grows them downward into life. Through what marvellous changes and inner transformations does it make life meaningful? When experiences can be seen against the narrative of fairy tales, legends and myths — Odysseus finding his way home, Parzival’s quest for the Grail, Hamlet’s absorption with personal consciousness — we discern our way. And it becomes purposeful. We make our own story into a creative act. We are generating our life.