What do we have to remember?
I love books. I mean, it is kind of a problem. You know, the kind of problem that if I think about buying a book now, I have to think of which one (or two) I’m going to give away or sell. We are working through it. Physical books do a few things for me. They serve as physical reminders of the experience of reading them – where I was, why I did, and when it happened. They serve as reminders of what I read, and how I may have changed on account of my interaction with the content. They are resources that I can go back to for review of the material. This last one in particular is quite the miracle. To think that there are times, eras even, of human history during which such resources weren’t available or at least easily accessible is to encounter a completely different way of life. That way of life, and the different kinds of responsibilities that come with it, may be experienced today in the practice of oral traditions.
One of the first responsibilities that you encounter within an oral tradition is the idea that you have to remember stuff. I mean, really remember. There's no guarantee that you can come back to what you are learning. The sources are people, and one person might move, your access to another person might change, and you don't know when those changes might occur. You also don’t know if that person has told anybody else what they've told you. So, there is a very high level of responsibility for whatever you have been given. The assumption in my experience has always been this:
This is yours, assume no one else has it, and do what you’ve been taught is right with it.
That’s a thing.
As I grew up as a tap dancer, I was struck with the idea that there is too much to remember. Too many routines. Too many songs. Too many stories. With practices that are physical, one way to help with this is making the practice itself serve as a kind of reminder. If you teach your body to do a thing in a particular way then that thing is embedded in your body. Your body remembers. There is a physical memory that can remind you about the why, the purposes of the movement, your teacher, even their personality, and the larger community.
We do things this way, because we are these kinds of people.
But there is no book or other resource that can hold the information and work intergenerationally in the ways documents can. The resources are people. If you are in the position of being a resource in an oral tradition, you will have to find ways to remember. You might have to choose what to remember and what not to. You might have to find ways to give yourself reminders. What I'm thinking through this week is a way of navigating this. We are all parts of oral traditions in a sense. We are formed in part by the way “our people” have seen the world. This way may be supported by written documents, but still operates as an oral tradition, centering the life of the people. People have made decisions around what to share with us and what not to. They have helped us learn how to think. There comes a time when we must make our own decisions. How do we think about what's important to remember? Out of all the things that we could remember, what do we think is important to hold on to? What do we want to pay attention to? What do we want to remember, even on a daily basis, in the midst of everything else that might be going on?
There are two driving questions that I’m using to guide my thinking here. They read the same, but have very different meanings.
What do we have to remember?
When I was in seventh grade I had a full-fledged doctor, as in PhD, as my teacher for social studies. Dr. Evans had us center around the American Civil War for almost the entire year. He had five blackboards in the classroom. Class after class he would fill the blackboards with facts – names and dates of battles, casualty numbers for both sides, names of important characters, and more. I still have some of the notebooks. The workload was intense, but his theory was that if we could survive or even thrive in his class, having to remember all of that information, high school and college would be a breeze. He wasn’t wrong.
In high school I encountered a completely different teaching theory. Most of my classes in high school operated on the idea that remembering actual things wasn’t important, remembering where to find them was. For example, in physics class, most high school kids would be memorizing the necessary equations for a test. Meanwhile, our physics tests featured the necessary equations prominently printed at the top of the first page. We didn’t have the remember the equations, just how to use them. This was all pre-internet age, so the access to information was still fundamentally limited. We had the library, text books, and our teachers, but little more. Today access to information has increased exponentially. Why remember something, when you can bookmark it?
To make little mention of our daily tasks, weekly responsibilities, or monthly and yearly goals, people, places, and events, if remembered well, become the characters, settings, and pivotal moments in the stories of our lives. The related details provide the frame and connecting dots though which all the other pieces relate. Separate descriptions, unrelated to the narrative of the story, explaining the way things might work perhaps, can affect how we see the world. Someone modeling a particular kind of life, can inspire us to change our course. There is opportunity to engage with the story, descriptions, and the models of life floating around us always. The question is whether they are affecting and inspiring or not. Do they initially move us enough for us to want to remember them? Or deeper still, do they move us to a position that we can’t help but remember them?
What do we have to remember?
Oral traditions like tap dancing have a formative quality to them. They have stood the test of time, and kept their own form, on account of how they shape the people that practice them. There is a particular kind of person – temperament, ways of thinking, disposition, ability of action, and more – that comes out of years of such practices. Think about those who participate in traditional ritual dances, certain kinds of craft making, or even music making (both composition and playing). There is a depth of pursuit, even immersion, through which a person can’t but be changed at a deep level. In many societies these oral traditions are consciously used to form subsequent generations. Younger learns from older. Important rules and structures are passed on alongside areas marked for play and ways of creativity. Somethings are forgotten over time. Others are learned. The important things remain.
Generation after generation, practitioners of oral traditions work out what they know of their craft in their craft making, and with the other practitioners. It is an entire ecosystem of formation. People, places, events, activities, personalities, histories, actions, meaning – all of it is there, in the practice. The person then takes their formation – who they have become – beyond the practice, into the shared life with the world around them. And that is what is achieved through all of this – the kind of shared life.
Every oral tradition has a set of underlying ideas of what that shared life should look like. The practices are meant to open people up to that possibility. They open eyes and ears, enliven people, and set folks in motion toward this vision of a shared life. Maybe it is towards a transcendent kind of goodness, truth, and beauty – if that is indeed the kind of shared life that undergirds the practice. These underlying ideas are what we have to remember. If not the ideas themselves, at least how to get there. We need to remember the way. If that isn’t enough, maybe a model. Can we remember someone who we knew, or knew of, that had a life reflective of the vision we are pursuing, and remember them? These things might be a little different for each of us. The cultural context, time and place, in which we practice what we do will undoubtedly change. The people with whom we practice may change. However, the purpose of an oral tradition – that is doing something that we can do to engage in our own formation, with others, and towards a particular end – will not change until the fundamental nature of humanity changes. Having to make decisions of what we remember, what we embody for the sake of remembering, and what we then share, will be a consistent aspect of working towards the shared life as we engage in such pursuits personally and communally.
Those who subscribe to my new newsletter Asking the Questions will receive a complete series of guided questions, I’ll leave one here just for you:
In the midst of all the things you have to remember, what are the things you really have to remember?